Growth Framework: Developing a content strategy

How long do you reckon this guy would last?

Chief: Hey Dan. Did you catch the tribe any food with your bow and arrow?

Dan: Well Chief… I spent most of my day working on the bow so it was perfect. You should see this thing. It’s epic. Then I ran out of time so I broke off a few twigs from that tree over there to use as arrows and randomly fired them into the jungle.

Chief: So what are the spoils for the tribe from your amazing bow Dan?

Dan: Er… well I didn’t catch anything yet. Maybe I need to keep improving this bow.

 

Unfortunately most bloggers are the modern day equivalent Dan. Like Dan… their spoils are non-existent.

Everyone’s going hungry. 

They spend most of their time working on their site (bow), then take some crappy content (arrows) and randomly fire it into the internet (jungle) hoping to hit something.

Is it any wonder that everyone is complaining about getting no traffic and as a result no sales?

Let’s fix that.

The Growth Framework | Traffic | Pull

If you’ve been following along, I’ve been banging on about this magical (yes I’ve actually been calling it that) “Growth Framework” to help you grow your online business.

If you haven’t been following along, start here.

In this post, I’m going to zero in on one *area* of this growth framework – namely the “Pull” part of the traffic.

I’m starting here because it’s really the foundation that will lead to the success of your site and online business.

You’ll see within the framework a bunch of tactics like keyword research, on-page best practice, off-page best practice etc. I’ll cover that ground soon enough. However, we’ve got to get the strategy right in the first place.

Let’s look at that.

Developing a content strategy

A big goal of any content strategy that I develop relates to getting maximum impact for the least amount of time and effort.

Don’t get me wrong, it still requires a ton of time and effort, but it’s focused in the right places. It also helps you create very hard working content that has the most leverage in the short term and the long term.

Once again, a hat tip to the Pareto Principle I discussed in other posts.

So we’re going to want to focus in on producing two different types of content that serve two different objectives. Namely the “Drumbeat” content and the “Magnetic” content.

Let’s look at this content strategy through the lens of a fictional site about cycling training.

“Drumbeat” Content

This type of content has two key objectives only.

1. To create a steady drumbeat of activity so that we’re perceived to be on the pulse of our area of perceived expertise. So when someone visits the site, they see that it’s regularly updated, as well as provides fodder for our social media posting.
2. To jump on the bandwagon of fresh, trending content before it’s saturated and potentially get some wins on the SEO front. Not to mention sending freshness signals to Google that will help your site rank better overall.

 

The secret with this kind of content is to be able to produce it quickly.

It’s the sort of content you could outsource if you develop some procedures about the production. For example, you could set up a Google alert covering particular topics and then as it comes in, jump on it and cover the story and ask a few questions about what people think of it.

In our cycling training website example, we might join in on the debate of whether on not Ryder Hesjedal was cheating with people speculating that he had some sort of motor in his bike which would make his bike unnaturally spin forwards when it was on the ground.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xN_RbZN51oY

If you can find stuff that stirs up lots of opinions you can just pose questions and then get out of the way! If you can do this fast enough you can also be on the receiving end of a lot of incomming links.

You should be able to crank out a piece of content like this pretty quickly. Set a timer for 60 minutes and hit it hard.

“Magnetic” Content

The magnetic content has a very different objective. This is high quality, asset building content that should be for the most part evergreen in nature.

This is stuff that takes longer to produce, but is at the next level. It’s way better than a regular blog post and you might only create 4-8 of these a year. If you have the time and resources to produce more, then great. However, it’s definitely a quality over quantity play here.

This content will take some time to produce, however, will keep working hard for you for a long time if you do a good job with it.

The overall objective for this content is:

1. To create assets that people love and want to share. Of course this attracts more links which has an organic growth impact for all your content.
2. To use this valuable asset as reasons to engage the press to get high yield coverage in mainstream media.
3. To leverage in combination with other areas, like as part of your gated content, to build your email list. So put it behind a forced email opt-in squeeze page.
4. To create a talking point for your drumbeat content.

 

Some examples of the kind of content you could create include:

• Downloadable multi-page PDF solving some problem.
• A free software or downloadable tool like a calculator.
• A wordpress plugin (you can pay someone to create these cheaply).
• A wordpress theme (again, you can pay someone to create these cheaply)..
• A blog series that gets turned into an ebook.
• etc.

 

The key thing about the magnetic content is that you need to ensure that you spend time planning it out for maximum leverage. For example, what channels can you promote this content in for more exposure?

For example, the content could be magnetic in that it might be good enough to contact lots of other bloggers to get coverage. You could possibly even get traditional press coverage with it.

It also might be used to advertise on the Google Display Network (via AdWords) as a way to build your list for fairly low cost (provided it’s good enough).

So yeah… that’s it. How does what you’ve been doing stack up?

Have questions? Hit me below.