Merry Christmas everyone!!
If you're reading this on Christmas Day, perhaps you're like me and finally have some time to watch those videos and read those blog posts that you don't usually have time for! So sit back, relax while I explain how to create epic content that you can use as a lead magnet.
I was chatting to one of our Mavericks Club members the other day about how to produce epic content to bring in organic leads. A piece of content that you can also use in your paid advertising strategies, and share with joint venture partners.
So I'm going to share the advice that I gave him.
First, I will help you decide on the piece of content that you're going to produce. Then in the second part, I will give you a framework to produce that piece of content.
You're going to end up with a super helpful piece of content that you can share with people that is not spammy at all. It will position you as an authority, other people are going to share it, and it's going to bring the right kind of clients into your business.
How to Decide What Piece of Content to Produce
The Three Biggest Outcomes
The first thing is we're going to do is decide which product or the service you want to promote. Every piece of content should tie back to a product or a service that you are promoting.
The following applies for any type of business, but I'm going to use SEO plans as an example of the product that we are trying to sell.
Our SEO plans might range from $1,000 to $4,000 a month. So the first thing you want to do is work out the three big outcomes that the client is going to get from you if you run their SEO.
You can apply this principle to your business by just asking yourself:
“What are the three biggest outcomes that our clients get from working with us?”
Whatever you do, all your services and deliverables, and the things that you do for your clients – chunk that into three kinds of big outcomes. If you don't know what they are, talk to your existing clients because they'll tell you. Peace of mind is probably a common thing that comes up.
The Stepping Stones
Within those three big outcomes, what are the three stepping stones that we need to do in order to reach each of those outcomes?
Once you map this out, you end up with nine stepping stones that help you achieve three big outcomes.
Next, choose the sexiest thing to teach in this content and that's going to be the piece of content that we're going to develop.
So let's make up some outcomes for the SEO client:
- Your website visitors are going to have an excellent user experience;
- Website visitors will spend a longer amount of time on your site because of the great user experience. And we all know that the longer they are on your site, the more likely they are to convert. Which leads us to outcome no. 3;
- An increased conversion rate. That's the biggest outcome we want.
Now let's break that down into the stepping stones:
How do we design an excellent user experience?
- Make sure that we're targeting the right keywords because we don't want to bring irrelevant traffic to your website that isn't interested in your product or service.
- Optimise every page on the website following SEO best practices
- Make your websites mobile-friendly because we know search engines prefer mobile-friendly sites
How do we increase the time spent on the site?
- Make sure that your site has super relevant content related to those keywords. There's no point bringing someone in for a particular keyword and then having content that's not relevant to that keyword.
- Make sure that your internal links are built out between your articles, your videos, your infographics, and your slide decks on your website to keep people on your site longer, so the breadcrumbs make sense.
- Make sure we've got great navigation on your website. That might seem super obvious, but you can do things like suggested posts and recommended posts underneath posts.
How do we increase the conversion rate?
- Make sure that your website is super fast loading because we know that really impacts your search rankings. So we use lazy loading images etc.
- Make sure that your calls to action across your website are super targeted. So every post and every page has a call to action that's relevant to that keyword and that particular content.
- Use exit popups to increase that conversion rate. Now, technically speaking, these things are not really SEO, but we're just going to offer that as part of our SEO plan.
Now, instantly, you can see, if you're considering buying SEO plans, you'll probably buy them from me because I've got a process here. I've got three big outcomes that are relevant for you as the customer, and you can see that we've got a process that we go through.
Now we have nine topics that we can talk about and nine pieces of content that we can develop that all lead to a product. So we're not posting rogue content or random content. This content is strategic for a particular product.
Choose The Sexiest Topic To Teach
Next, you need to choose the sexiest one thing to teach and in this case, I'm going to choose on-page optimisation as the topic because I know that gets the most search results and the most kind of sharing on social. This is the thing that people want to learn how to do themselves, so that's the topic that I'm going to choose to produce a piece of content.
Now that we have chosen our content, I'm going to show you the framework to turn that into a great piece of content that people will share and that will bring leads in for your business.
The Content Framework
This is the framework that I shared this recently in a content creation framework video, but there's one twist in this framework – so tune in!
The Promise
The first thing you want to do is outline the promise of this piece of content.
So in this case, you'd say:
“In this article (or video), you're going to learn how to use on-page optimisation to make sure that a page on your website is optimised for the right kind of keywords in search engines so that you can attract more high-qualified leads to your website.”
People want that, so they're more likely to pay attention.
The Problem
Then, you just outline the problem:
“The problem is search engine traffic is really competitive, so you don't want to waste time optimising your website for the wrong keyword.”
Or
“You haven't got enough lead because you can't be found on search engines, and there's a very simple fix for that.”
Bust a Myth
Then, you want to bust a myth. In this case, a myth might be:
“You might just think that you can install a free WordPress plugin and that's going to automatically optimise your website. It might do a little bit, but there are still some important things that you have to do manually.”
Then, what you'd want to do is just very quickly tell your story to position yourself as a person that they should listen to. So in this case, you might say:
“Look, I've been running SEO for clients for over three and a half years. Most of our clients have page one rankings. Below this article, you'll find a testimonial from James who's one of our SEO customers.”
Teach the Thing
Then, you want to teach just one thing.
In this case, we're teaching on-page optimisation and we want to give away absolutely everything we know about on-page optimisation in this one piece of content. You want to give away the farm, give the shirt off your back, and make it as epic as possible. So use this content in different modalities and different kinds of media formats.
In your blog, use screenshots, or screencasting using something like Camtasia, ScreenFlow, or Loom to show people how to do it on the screen. Then, create a checklist that they can download.
Make it as epic as possible and as easy as possible for the user, your reader, to read that content and go, “Wow, I can't believe you've given me that much information for free. You're clearly the authority and thank you for giving me that free information. That's super helpful.”
Do's and Don'ts
Then, just give them a couple of do's and don'ts like:
“If you've been doing this for a long time, here's an advanced tip you might not know about”
Or
“If you're new to this, here is a rookie mistake that most people do when starting out.”
The CTA
What you want to do now is you want to reveal that this is just one part of your process.
So at this point in the blog post or video, you might say:
“I hope you found this helpful. But this is just one part of a bigger process, and that bigger process is the nine bullet points that we mapped out in the previous blog/video.”
Then you give the call to action:
“You have a choice – you can figure this out yourself, and you can spend the next 12 months watching YouTube tutorials to figure it out yourself. Or if you're in a hurry, and you just want a result, you can book a call with me to see if we're a good fit and work with us”
So that's it!
It doesn't matter what business you're in, if you're selling services of any kind to other businesses, this is a fantastic framework to produce your cornerstone content that people will share.
If you're not already a member of the Digital Mavericks Facebook group, join thousands of other entrepreneurs here. There's a lot more training, checklists, templates, screenshots, infographics and PDFs in that group that you can download to help you.
I look forward to seeing you in the next video. Until then, I'm Troy Dean. Stay curious and make some noise.
