The Content Plan
- ARTICLES |
We need a content plan.
I never start a new site without a clear plan in place for how I want it to look and read when I’m done building it and how I want to test it over the course of the next 3 months.
Why only three months?
Because this is the Internet and in the course of three months, just about every aspect of your site can change significantly. Google can throw new algorithm changes at us, your site might get usurped by a bigger, better site with the same keywords or it might start getting syndicated on the Huffington Post and your traffic might dictate a more active plan to monetize it all.
Heck, if any of those things happens, my three month plan gets scrapped in a minute. The reason I do a three month plan at all is because it is enough that I can forget about the site for a while but not so much that when I do scrap it I wasted all that much time.
It’s flexible.
Let’s get started.
The Core Content
Every site has a set of core content on which it is built. This is the first batch of articles or pages that will be used as landing pages for your site.
For a 1-2 week gestating site, I’d say you only need 3-5 pages and that the majority of that content can be borrowed or repurposed from JV tools provided by the vendor as we discussed before.
If you decide to build out a larger site or want to compete in a much bigger niche or for an existing product, I recommend creating a larger, more robust content core – at least 10-20 pages to start and then adding 1-2 pages every week or so for the next three months.
The Three Month Plan
Once the initial content for you site is written, the next step is to create a three month plan for how it will be expanded, tested and tweaked in the next quarter.
Here is mine.
Month 1 – Launch Site and Perform Initial Backlinking to Build Early Traffic
Month 2 – Trickle Content to Build Position in Search
Month 3 – Check Position and Expand
The big trend now in IM training products is to try and teach people how to write viral content. This is not easy.
In fact, it is as close to impossible as you can get. There are very few situations in which you will be able to quickly and easily write a piece or record a video or screenshot that will go viral without any effort on your part.
But when you do generate viral content, it will feel effortless. That is the magic (and the curse) of the viral strategy.
What I can do for you and what will work best is to show you the tips that I have used and seen others use to generate content that has a higher chance of being shared and the tips I use to encourage other people to share it.
Here are 20 of the types of viral content I find to be most effective for a leveraged launch site:
Interview with Niche Expert - It may take time to develop the necessary credentials to land an interview with a top tier marketer in your niche, but this is a tremendously successful way to get a lot of attention very fast. If you do this, use contract labor to distribute links to the Interview via social media, bookmarking, blogs, and free downloads.
Live Blogging - Choose a major event in your niche and live blog it. With digital feeds to watch live events, this is easier than ever. The biggest issue is the amount of time it can consume, depending on the length of an event.
Review of Major Product Launch (long review) - When I say “major product launch” I mean “millions of buyers”. We’re talking iPhone 5, Windows 8, new Ferrari launch. Don’t expect your review of the hottest new lawnmower to go viral. A 3,000 word in-depth review of the newest gadget, however, will blow up.
Ultimate Guide to… - Choose a topic in your niche and write a massive guide to it. Make sure the topic is specific enough that you can create a detailed guide without spending a fortune to have it done. Think 5,000 or so words – what can you cover in absolute detail in that amount of text.
Gather Quotes on a Topic from Industry Insiders - Choose a hot topic and find quotes from top leaders in your niche. If you can reach them, ask these people for their insights on each topic.
Create a Master Resource List - Create a list of incredibly valuable resources in your niche. For example “101 tools to find free graphics” or “85 best games for the iPhone”. People look for these and other bloggers link to them ravenously.
Provide an “Ultimate Review” - Write a review that knocks every other review out of the water. In depth, detailed, filled with pictures and videos and covering every possible point they might have.
Creating Controversy - I don’t actually recommend you do this, but it works. My experience with controversial content was almost always accidental but it created tremendous volumes of traffic. If you can pull this off with pissing off your core audience, it can work quite well.
Provide Expert Insight on a Derisive Topic - Is there a topic in your niche that no one can agree on? Offer your expert insights. This creates conversation (and probably a fair volume of disagreement) which is all it takes to go viral.
Answer Multiple Reader Questions in a Single Article/Blog Post - Take a bunch of questions you’ve received from your customers and fellow marketers and answer them in a single blog post or article.
Predictions - Predict the future for your niche. Blog posts and articles pop up every January doing this and they are often quite popular. You can then revisit them in December and to determine if you were even remotely right.
Visualizations - Hire a designer to create an infographic for your niche. These go viral incredibly fast and are very useful for people who don’t like to read long blocks of text.
Free Content (High Quality) - We all know the old stand by – give away a freebie. Free eBook, report, video series, PLR content. Whatever you can think of (and afford to have written) is a good giveaway.
Integrate Famous People into Your Niche - A fun thing you can do to really draw attention to your content is to take on the persona of a famous thinker like Benjamin Franklin or Albert Einstein and give their perspective on your niche. It has to be a bit tongue in cheek to avoid coming off as pompous but it can be a great way to give a different perspective on hot topics in your niche.
Full Scale Beginner’s Guide - Start from 0 and take your readers through everything they need to know about an aspect of your niche. You’d be surprised how rarely this is done for free in any niche.
Must Read or Must Watch Resources - Create a list of top books, videos, movies and interviews in your niche that you or your colleagues like and recommend.
Reader Submissions - Post reader submitted articles, videos, and other content. People love to see their name attached to something and this can attract other blog authors to your site to take advantage of the situation.
Humor! - If you are funny, you can write some pretty killer posts. Parody videos, comic strips, humorous blog posts, fake conversations between famous people in your niche – the options are nearly endless here.
Hot Topics - When something big happens in your niche, be on the front line providing expert commentary on the event. It raises your profile and makes you look like a forward thinker.
Content Blitzing - Not sure what will work? Create a lot of content. This is tougher for those that don’t like writing and have a small budget, but for those that can afford it, just throw everything and the kitchen sink at your audience and see what sticks. Like everything else in this game, test your results and then refine your efforts.
This list represents almost every method I’ve used to get people on my site to take action. However, you want to know what has worked best. Here are my top five picks for content that will drive traffic, conversation and sharing ON YOUR SITE:
Controversy
If I were to give the twenty items above scores out of 100, this would score a solid 99. Controversy is immensely powerful, and like all powerful tools it needs to be wielded responsibly to be truly useful. If you get carried away, you risk a number of things, most notably alienating to large a percentage of your audience. More importantly, you need to be sure this is done with the context of your site. Just writing a controversial review isn’t effective if there is no reason to believe it.
This is the reason why the “is it a scam” reviews work so well. People see that phrase and jump on it, even if you relieve them of their concerns. One of the most successful blog posts I ever wrote was one where I called a popular writer a jackass. I got thousands of hits to that post because some people agreed and vociferously defended me while others were eager to call me names and say I was a jackass myself. I wouldn’t do this again (I was young), but it worked very well, driving 50% of my traffic to that website for three months.
Infographics and Galleries
If you want content that will be passed around in your niche, nothing beats graphics, specifically infographics. Infographics offer a clear picture of a complex topic and help people easily digest complex data. Plus they’re easy to make and can be passed around quickly on sites like twitter and Facebook.
If you want to create an infographic, I recommend hiring someone on the Warrior Forum who can do one for you for less than $50.
Ultimate Reviews
This is the strategy we’ve largely been using to date, but it can be ramped up even further into 20 minute review videos or 3,000+ word reviews. The longer and more in-depth a review, the more effective it becomes in driving traffic to your website when someone wants to know about that product. If someone is searching for a review on a new guide or product, Google will be hard pressed to recommend anything else above your 5,000 word in-depth coverage of that product.
Interviewing Experts
Interviews are interesting, easy to do and when presented for free, go viral quickly if your niche is a closed loop. How do you do them with a leveraged launch site? Easy, you interview the vendor that is launching a product. Now this isn’t an option right away, when no one knows who you are. You need to develop a name for yourself first, but once you do and you have a clear path to the inbox of those top vendors, you’ll be pleasantly surprised how easy it is to get them to answer your phone calls.
Resource Lists
A resource list is immensely valuable in any niche and these things go viral almost entirely through organic search. If you can find a high volume search term that can be answered with a list of 50 or more items and no one else has done something similar, you can get a boat load of traffic from it. Now translating this into a viable resource for your launch leveraged site is trickier. It needs to be related and not take away from the traffic on your site. You don’t want to send people to a site other than the one you are promoting. So steer clear of lists that provide actual links unless they are affiliate links.
These five are immensely valuable tools that will result in traffic to your site that you can then leverage into prospects being sent to the vendor site you are promoting.
The Free Bonus
One last viral tip I want to share is the free bonus step. For anyone out there who has used any kind of list marketing to date, you know this strategy well. The idea is to offer a free bonus for anyone that buys a product through your link.
I would offer a free report, interview with the author or email series to those people who bought this product through my affiliate link.
It’s a pretty slick promotion and it can boost your conversion rates by up to 20% from organic traffic – the boost is even higher when used as part of an email marketing campaign where the trust factor has a MUCH bigger impact.
This is a powerful viral tool because you can promote it to your social media lists, on forums like Warrior Forum or Digital Point and throughout other resources that provide Internet marketing tools.
You can even give away a free report that then links to the product you want to promote – a sort of primer that will get them interested enough to go to that vendor site.
Let’s get started. Let me show you how I get 100,000 unique targeted visitors to my website per day and earn as much at $48,333 in just one week - click here to check it out.
I never start a new site without a clear plan in place for how I want it to look and read when I’m done building it and how I want to test it over the course of the next 3 months.
Why only three months?
Because this is the Internet and in the course of three months, just about every aspect of your site can change significantly. Google can throw new algorithm changes at us, your site might get usurped by a bigger, better site with the same keywords or it might start getting syndicated on the Huffington Post and your traffic might dictate a more active plan to monetize it all.
Heck, if any of those things happens, my three month plan gets scrapped in a minute. The reason I do a three month plan at all is because it is enough that I can forget about the site for a while but not so much that when I do scrap it I wasted all that much time.
It’s flexible.
Let’s get started.
The Core Content
Every site has a set of core content on which it is built. This is the first batch of articles or pages that will be used as landing pages for your site.
For a 1-2 week gestating site, I’d say you only need 3-5 pages and that the majority of that content can be borrowed or repurposed from JV tools provided by the vendor as we discussed before.
If you decide to build out a larger site or want to compete in a much bigger niche or for an existing product, I recommend creating a larger, more robust content core – at least 10-20 pages to start and then adding 1-2 pages every week or so for the next three months.
The Three Month Plan
Once the initial content for you site is written, the next step is to create a three month plan for how it will be expanded, tested and tweaked in the next quarter.
Here is mine.
Month 1 – Launch Site and Perform Initial Backlinking to Build Early Traffic
- Main Review – 1,600 words
- Supplemental Articles – 1,500 words
- Video Review – 2-3 minutes
Month 2 – Trickle Content to Build Position in Search
- Weekly Articles – 4 articles of 400+ words
- Spun Content Submissions – 4-10 Per Week
- Press Release
Month 3 – Check Position and Expand
- Bi-Weekly Articles – 2 articles of 400+ words
- New Video – 1 New video of 2-3 minutes
- The Viral Bug
The big trend now in IM training products is to try and teach people how to write viral content. This is not easy.
In fact, it is as close to impossible as you can get. There are very few situations in which you will be able to quickly and easily write a piece or record a video or screenshot that will go viral without any effort on your part.
But when you do generate viral content, it will feel effortless. That is the magic (and the curse) of the viral strategy.
What I can do for you and what will work best is to show you the tips that I have used and seen others use to generate content that has a higher chance of being shared and the tips I use to encourage other people to share it.
Here are 20 of the types of viral content I find to be most effective for a leveraged launch site:
Interview with Niche Expert - It may take time to develop the necessary credentials to land an interview with a top tier marketer in your niche, but this is a tremendously successful way to get a lot of attention very fast. If you do this, use contract labor to distribute links to the Interview via social media, bookmarking, blogs, and free downloads.
Live Blogging - Choose a major event in your niche and live blog it. With digital feeds to watch live events, this is easier than ever. The biggest issue is the amount of time it can consume, depending on the length of an event.
Review of Major Product Launch (long review) - When I say “major product launch” I mean “millions of buyers”. We’re talking iPhone 5, Windows 8, new Ferrari launch. Don’t expect your review of the hottest new lawnmower to go viral. A 3,000 word in-depth review of the newest gadget, however, will blow up.
Ultimate Guide to… - Choose a topic in your niche and write a massive guide to it. Make sure the topic is specific enough that you can create a detailed guide without spending a fortune to have it done. Think 5,000 or so words – what can you cover in absolute detail in that amount of text.
Gather Quotes on a Topic from Industry Insiders - Choose a hot topic and find quotes from top leaders in your niche. If you can reach them, ask these people for their insights on each topic.
Create a Master Resource List - Create a list of incredibly valuable resources in your niche. For example “101 tools to find free graphics” or “85 best games for the iPhone”. People look for these and other bloggers link to them ravenously.
Provide an “Ultimate Review” - Write a review that knocks every other review out of the water. In depth, detailed, filled with pictures and videos and covering every possible point they might have.
Creating Controversy - I don’t actually recommend you do this, but it works. My experience with controversial content was almost always accidental but it created tremendous volumes of traffic. If you can pull this off with pissing off your core audience, it can work quite well.
Provide Expert Insight on a Derisive Topic - Is there a topic in your niche that no one can agree on? Offer your expert insights. This creates conversation (and probably a fair volume of disagreement) which is all it takes to go viral.
Answer Multiple Reader Questions in a Single Article/Blog Post - Take a bunch of questions you’ve received from your customers and fellow marketers and answer them in a single blog post or article.
Predictions - Predict the future for your niche. Blog posts and articles pop up every January doing this and they are often quite popular. You can then revisit them in December and to determine if you were even remotely right.
Visualizations - Hire a designer to create an infographic for your niche. These go viral incredibly fast and are very useful for people who don’t like to read long blocks of text.
Free Content (High Quality) - We all know the old stand by – give away a freebie. Free eBook, report, video series, PLR content. Whatever you can think of (and afford to have written) is a good giveaway.
Integrate Famous People into Your Niche - A fun thing you can do to really draw attention to your content is to take on the persona of a famous thinker like Benjamin Franklin or Albert Einstein and give their perspective on your niche. It has to be a bit tongue in cheek to avoid coming off as pompous but it can be a great way to give a different perspective on hot topics in your niche.
Full Scale Beginner’s Guide - Start from 0 and take your readers through everything they need to know about an aspect of your niche. You’d be surprised how rarely this is done for free in any niche.
Must Read or Must Watch Resources - Create a list of top books, videos, movies and interviews in your niche that you or your colleagues like and recommend.
Reader Submissions - Post reader submitted articles, videos, and other content. People love to see their name attached to something and this can attract other blog authors to your site to take advantage of the situation.
Humor! - If you are funny, you can write some pretty killer posts. Parody videos, comic strips, humorous blog posts, fake conversations between famous people in your niche – the options are nearly endless here.
Hot Topics - When something big happens in your niche, be on the front line providing expert commentary on the event. It raises your profile and makes you look like a forward thinker.
Content Blitzing - Not sure what will work? Create a lot of content. This is tougher for those that don’t like writing and have a small budget, but for those that can afford it, just throw everything and the kitchen sink at your audience and see what sticks. Like everything else in this game, test your results and then refine your efforts.
This list represents almost every method I’ve used to get people on my site to take action. However, you want to know what has worked best. Here are my top five picks for content that will drive traffic, conversation and sharing ON YOUR SITE:
Controversy
If I were to give the twenty items above scores out of 100, this would score a solid 99. Controversy is immensely powerful, and like all powerful tools it needs to be wielded responsibly to be truly useful. If you get carried away, you risk a number of things, most notably alienating to large a percentage of your audience. More importantly, you need to be sure this is done with the context of your site. Just writing a controversial review isn’t effective if there is no reason to believe it.
This is the reason why the “is it a scam” reviews work so well. People see that phrase and jump on it, even if you relieve them of their concerns. One of the most successful blog posts I ever wrote was one where I called a popular writer a jackass. I got thousands of hits to that post because some people agreed and vociferously defended me while others were eager to call me names and say I was a jackass myself. I wouldn’t do this again (I was young), but it worked very well, driving 50% of my traffic to that website for three months.
Infographics and Galleries
If you want content that will be passed around in your niche, nothing beats graphics, specifically infographics. Infographics offer a clear picture of a complex topic and help people easily digest complex data. Plus they’re easy to make and can be passed around quickly on sites like twitter and Facebook.
If you want to create an infographic, I recommend hiring someone on the Warrior Forum who can do one for you for less than $50.
Ultimate Reviews
This is the strategy we’ve largely been using to date, but it can be ramped up even further into 20 minute review videos or 3,000+ word reviews. The longer and more in-depth a review, the more effective it becomes in driving traffic to your website when someone wants to know about that product. If someone is searching for a review on a new guide or product, Google will be hard pressed to recommend anything else above your 5,000 word in-depth coverage of that product.
Interviewing Experts
Interviews are interesting, easy to do and when presented for free, go viral quickly if your niche is a closed loop. How do you do them with a leveraged launch site? Easy, you interview the vendor that is launching a product. Now this isn’t an option right away, when no one knows who you are. You need to develop a name for yourself first, but once you do and you have a clear path to the inbox of those top vendors, you’ll be pleasantly surprised how easy it is to get them to answer your phone calls.
Resource Lists
A resource list is immensely valuable in any niche and these things go viral almost entirely through organic search. If you can find a high volume search term that can be answered with a list of 50 or more items and no one else has done something similar, you can get a boat load of traffic from it. Now translating this into a viable resource for your launch leveraged site is trickier. It needs to be related and not take away from the traffic on your site. You don’t want to send people to a site other than the one you are promoting. So steer clear of lists that provide actual links unless they are affiliate links.
These five are immensely valuable tools that will result in traffic to your site that you can then leverage into prospects being sent to the vendor site you are promoting.
The Free Bonus
One last viral tip I want to share is the free bonus step. For anyone out there who has used any kind of list marketing to date, you know this strategy well. The idea is to offer a free bonus for anyone that buys a product through your link.
I would offer a free report, interview with the author or email series to those people who bought this product through my affiliate link.
It’s a pretty slick promotion and it can boost your conversion rates by up to 20% from organic traffic – the boost is even higher when used as part of an email marketing campaign where the trust factor has a MUCH bigger impact.
This is a powerful viral tool because you can promote it to your social media lists, on forums like Warrior Forum or Digital Point and throughout other resources that provide Internet marketing tools.
You can even give away a free report that then links to the product you want to promote – a sort of primer that will get them interested enough to go to that vendor site.
Let’s get started. Let me show you how I get 100,000 unique targeted visitors to my website per day and earn as much at $48,333 in just one week - click here to check it out.