content creation

Can’t Get Eyeballs On Your Content? Here’s The Fix

January 5, 2018 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Wondering how you can get more people to visit your blog, watch your video, or subscribe to your podcast? If so, you’re not alone. Even the most successful content creators want to get more eyeballs on their content.

Marketing nowadays is a race for everyone’s attention. Many brands capture people’s attention for several hours in a given day. Chances are you want to create a similar effect with your content in which some people will spend hours each day consuming your content.

If you’re struggling to get eyeballs on your content, then use this game plan to drive meaningful attention to your content.

Focus On One Traffic Source First

The biggest reason people struggle to generate more blog traffic is because they diversify their traffic sources. While this is a great long-term strategy, the short-term results in you spreading yourself too thin.

It’s difficult to master traffic generation when you’re trying to master 10 different methods for generating traffic. You’ll have a much easier time trying to master one traffic source and then expanding from there.

To speed up the process, you can hire a coach or an expert who is great at driving traffic via a specific traffic source. This will significantly help with your learning curve for one traffic source.

You can then master another traffic source as one traffic source is either completely delegated or a coach guides you step by step on mastering the other traffic source.

Direct Everyone To Your Email List

email marketing

No matter how much traffic you get, that traffic won’t do you any good if you can’t direct people to your email list. You may get short-term attention, but that attention won’t materialize into long-term revenue if you don’t get people on your email list.

There are plenty of methods to grow your email list, but you must pick a few that work best for you. My personal favorites are the following:

Promoting my landing page on social media many times each day
Getting partners to grow my email list (this usually means providing your partners with affiliate links)
Optimizing my blog with welcome mats, pop-ups, and other tools that boost my blog’s overall conversion rate

All of your efforts need to direct people to your email list. No exceptions.

Get Into Partnerships

As mentioned before, getting partners to grow an email list is one of my favorite methods. This is free and you build a lot of great relationships.

When I hosted the Content Marketing Success Summit, I had dozens of partners help me promote the summit. This resulted in thousands of new subscribers that I wouldn’t have gotten on my own. As an added bonuses, these were highly targeted subscribers since they went through the some of the summit’s 50+ interviews all about my niche.

To get involved with partnerships, you need a good reputation and have a funnel with high conversion rates. The higher the conversion rates and overall commissions received, the more likely you’ll get someone as your partner. As you get more success stories, you’ll recruit more partners and some partners will even come to you.

For the affiliate program, I recommend using SamCart. They offer a variety of integrations to email lists, Optimize Press, and more. In addition, SamCart will help you create sleek order pages with 1-click order bumps that can significantly add to your bottom line.

You’ll get a 14 day free trial to SamCart if you join with this link.

Activate Your Network

expanding network

Most of the advice you’ll hear about networks is how important it is to build your network. Get to know some influencers because they’ll help later on, and then the advice stops.

Building your network is easy. Just reach out to a bunch of influencers asking questions, praising them, or presenting them with an opportunity (i.e. appear as a guest on my podcast).

Activating your network is the harder part. In activating your network, you get people to promote your content, leave testimonials for your products, and advise you when you ask for advice. The best way to activate your network is to stay in constant touch.

If you haven’t contacted people in your network for more than three months, you need to contact those people this month. Whether it’s a “Hello” or “I found your latest content interesting,” you need to keep yourself in these people’s frames of mind. That way, they remember you when an opportunity comes up, or if you ask them to do something for you, they are more likely to do it.

Get Great At Creating Content

You spend all of this time attracting the eyeballs to your content, but you need to get people to stick around as well. Part of that is creating content that spreads, but also extending the experience visitors have on your blog.

In my blog posts, I intentionally link to some of my past content to enhance the experience people have on my blog. The more often you write content, the better you’ll get at crafting impactful content.

I recommend writing one blog post every day. This will force you to keep the chain going and provide your visitors with an intense amount of value.

In Conclusion

Every content creator wants to drive as much meaningful attention to their content as possible. Even the most successful content creators, or perhaps, especially the most successful content creators want more eyeballs on your content. You should (and probably do) too.

However, with time at a premium and a ton of content getting created each day, the growing gap between time and available content makes this goal more challenging to accomplish.

But with every challenge lies an opportunity. Getting eyeballs on your content is a game of patience, smart work, and persistence, but once you get thousands and eventually millions of people to flock to your content, you’ll know that the effort was worth it.

What are your thoughts on these tactics? How do you get more eyeballs on your content? Do you have any questions for me? Sound off in the comments section below.

7 Effective Content Creation Strategies

January 4, 2018 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

content creation strategies

Content brands live and die based on the amount of content their creators produce. Without the content you can’t promote your content brand and get people to stick around. However, the content creation process can get difficult, especially if you set high standards. Using effective content creation strategies will help you achieve victory.

But which of the content creation strategies works best for you. I’ve personally tried all seven of these strategies, but you’ll only know which one is the best for you by giving some of them a try. I only say some of them because if you find yourself in a groove, don’t take yourself out of that groove to experiment with something that can result in a setback.

Without any further adieu, these are the seven effective content creation strategies that you can utilize to produce more content.

#1: Create New Content Every Day

This blog has seen a variety of content publishing frequencies. From twice a day to an inconsistent once every 1-2 weeks, I’ve tried a variety of content creation strategies. Some of those strategies paid off while others put me in a deep hole that I had to claw my way out of.

The best strategy for maintaining this blog is for me to create new content every day. Creating new content every day forces the habit to develop. Since this habit has developed, I have found myself writing blog posts in situations where I normally wouldn’t write blog posts.

As I found myself writing more daily blog posts, I became more obsessed with the chain. If you miss one day, the chain is over, but you can talk about the chain all you want as you build it and continue putting in the work.

You’re not taking a day off because if you take a single day off, one day becomes two, and then content creation becomes inconsistent. I almost never write more than one blog post per day anymore because if I write two blog posts on one day, that theoretically gives me a day to slack off.

Instead of writing a second blog post, I’ll outline two blog posts so I’m ready to write them when the time comes.

#2: Batch The Content Creation Process

Content batching is when you choose one day of the week and create all of that content on that one day of the week. I used to implement this content batching process for my blog after John Lee Dumas told me about content batching on Breakthrough Success.

I gave it a shot. It wasn’t great for my blogging, but it was phenomenal for my podcast. I only interview people for the show for two days each week. This gives me the other five days to delegate my efforts elsewhere.

It’s easier for me to stay accountable with content batching for my podcast because the guests keeps me accountable. I don’t want to leave a guest waiting until that guest leaves the call because I’m missing out on a great interview, and hosts feel very guilty after leaving their guests waiting.

You can apply one of these content creation strategies for one form of content and another strategy for another form of content.

#3: Reuse Your Old Content

reused blog posts

I don’t advise making this your main strategy, but as you create more content and attract more visitors, you’ll have many visitors who haven’t read many of your older blog posts. Even your most loyal visitors may have forgotten what they learned from the blog post you wrote two years ago.

In some cases, it’s better to reintroduce an old piece of evergreen content than it is to create a new piece of content. You can enhance the old content by conducting further research, linking to some of your newer blog posts, and optimizing it for SEO.

#4: Give Each Step Its Own Day

When you create any type of content, there are several steps. For any one of my blog posts, here are the steps that take it from idea to published content:

Think of the idea
Write the outline
Write the intro
Write the body
Add links to the body
Write the conclusion

What if you think of five blog post ideas and write their outlines on Day 1, write the intros and conclusions for those blog posts on Day 2, and write the bodies and add links for Day 3? If you can stick with this approach, you would have 5 blog posts in 3 days.

The idea behind this content creation strategy is that you can complete the same task several times straight without having to mentally transition across different tasks within the blog post such as going from the intro to the body.

#5: Delegate Content Creation

Who says you have to create all of the content that you publish? Many bloggers hire ghostwriters to help with their content, and other blogs allow contributors to write some of the content as well.

I prefer to hire contributors since I prefer to not hire ghostwriters. Other content creators prefer to hire a ghostwriter, but it’s all based on your preference.

You can also delegate certain stages of the content creation such as idea generation, writing the intros, conclusions, or any other part of the content. This also applies to videos and podcast episodes in which you can hire someone to edit the file and help out in other ways.

#6: Use A Themed Content Creation Calendar

Content creation calendars allow you to map out your content creation process over several months. I write down what type of content I need to publish for each day of the month based on the month’s theme.

When you theme your content creation, theme your content with any products you plan on promoting. As the first ever Content Marketing Success Summit approached, I wrote more content marketing based blog posts. This warmed my audience up to my summit and resulted in more engagement throughout the virtual event.

#7: Keep Yourself Accountable

content creator accountable

All of the content creation strategies can incorporate this ideology, but the advice of keeping yourself accountable needs to stand out. Finding an accountability partner or setting up your content creation in a way that forces you to stay accountable will help you create more content. You can also publicly state your content creation goals to your friends and your entire audience (i.e. I want to write one blog post every day).

There are plenty of ways to keep yourself accountable. The more reasons you have to stay accountable, the better.

In Conclusion

These content creation strategies are all proven, but just because they work for some content creators doesn’t mean they will automatically work for you. Pick a strategy to stick with, and keep transitioning from strategy to strategy until you discover the one that works best for you.

Once you find a strategy that works, ride with it and don’t let any other strategy get in the way.

What are your thoughts about these content creation strategies? Do you have a question for me? Sound off in the comments section below.

Hack Your Mindset To Publish 1 New Blog Post Every Day

January 1, 2018 by Marc Guberti 8 Comments

arrows-1574173_1920

Publishing new content is hard. You have to think of an idea, write out the content, do research, optimize the post, and schedule it. What about if you publish 1 new blog post every day? That’s a completely different ballgame.

At one point, I published 1 blog post every 12 hours. The blog posts were much shorter, and I didn’t prepare nearly as much as I have been. There are many steps that I take even after I’ve written the content.

I didn’t take those extra steps before, and those extra steps hurt my publishing frequency. I went from two blog posts per day to daily blog posts. Daily blog posts became weekly blog posts and then inconsistency followed.

I thought to myself, “This is okay. It’s just a growing process. I need to focus on other revenue generating opportunities and not spend as much time writing blog posts.”

The Awakening

After I took a long look at my content brand and read Flip The Funnel by Joseph Jaffe, I realized I over-prioritized customer acquisition. If you focus too much on customer acquisition, you forget to continue providing a better experience for current customers.

I realized that I needed a customer-centric brand, and writing daily blog posts allows me to create a better experience. The experience you provide also happens to be one of the seven pillars of customer centricity. With this new knowledge and my dream to turn Breakthrough Success into a daily podcast, I returned to daily blog posts.

The Big Flaw

blogging mistake

At the beginning of 2017, I set the goal of publishing one new YouTube video every day. There were far more steps to go from idea to published video than from idea to published blog post. I embarked on this challenge, and stayed consistent for almost two months. I then dropped back down to weekly videos and eventually become inconsistent.

There is a fatal flaw that prevents content creators from reaching the status where they can publish 1 new blog post every day. A lack of time isn’t that fatal flaw.

The fatal flaw is this: You need to be writing new content every day.

Yann Girad wrote a fascinating article on Medium about how he wrote a blog post every day for two years. In that article, he explained the mindset that leads to disaster:

“Maybe because if you say you want to do it on Monday and Thursday you still have five excuses left. You’d still have Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday as an excuse. So if you still have Tuesday, why do it on Monday? And if you still have Wednesday why do it on Tuesday?”

If you don’t write every day, you risk falling into this mindset where you backlog the work. You then say that you’ll write this week’s blog posts on Sunday because you’re loaded with work for the other six days. Sunday comes around and you get busy. None of the blog posts get written.

What About Content Batching?

With that said, I’ve been a big advocate for content batching, a process in which you consistently choose a certain day of the week to create all of your content. John Lee Dumas blew me away with this concept when he said he does all of the EOFire interviews in two days.

EOFire is a daily podcast, so he’s interviewing 28-31 people over the span of two days. He can dedicate the rest of his month to other areas of his brand.

At first glance, content batching seems to lead people towards the fatal flaw. I’ll get all of my content done on this day of the week so I can do other things for the rest of the week.

The moment I attempt to content batch blog posts and videos, I find myself on the path towards inconsistency. I miss a day, and since each day carries much more weight in a content batching strategy, my consistency falls apart.

However, you can batch other parts of your brand and even content creation itself. While batching doesn’t work for my blog posts and videos, content batching works just fine for my podcast interviews. I only interview people on Tuesdays and Wednesdays unless I need to make a special exception.

That means for the other five days of the week, I can focus on other areas of my content brand. It’s also easier for me to write blog posts during these five days. On Monday, I can write a blog post and do some extra planning so it’s easier for me to squeeze in the blog post on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

You can use this approach to theme your days to boost your productivity. This method will allow you to accomplish your goals and stay in a constant state of flow. Jack Dorsey uses this method to run both Twitter and Square.

Write Blog Posts With THIS

When people think about daily blog posts, they think, “Well, that’s great, but I don’t have enough time.”

I can refute that excuse in so many ways, but I’ll share a powerful hack that works wonders. You can write blog posts on your smartphone.

When you’re waiting for anything or anyone (public transportation, watching advertisements before the movie starts, etc.), you can write some more content for an upcoming blog post. I’ve written dozens of blog posts with this one method.

I didn’t make any changes to my schedule. I just utilized time that was normally wasted. I don’t want to even think about how many extra hours it would have taken me to write those blog posts if I didn’t write them on my smartphone.

Don’t Make Them Perfect

I don’t spend much time in the editing process. At the most, I’m looking for places to insert more links to past blog posts and valuable articles on the web.

It’s okay if your blog has a typo. As long as your blog post is valuable, people will overlook the typo. As you write more blog posts, the value will come natural. You’ll think of the ideas and sentences much faster.

If you find yourself analyzing the same sentence over and over again, you need to move on. The marketplace only rewards the ideas that get implemented, and to write a blog post every day, you need to do a lot of implementing.

I’d rather publish an imperfect blog post every day than never publish a perfect blog post. Even if you think it’s perfect, it’s not. Perfection is a myth, and the quicker you realize this, the easier it will be for you to write daily blog posts.

Delegate, Delegate, Delegate

delegation

Publish 1 new blog post every day…it sounds easy. The goal gets difficult when you factor in the other tasks within your business, and let’s not forget about life as a whole. Writing a blog post takes less than an hour, but so many things compete for our attention.

The best time hack I’ve come across is delegating various tasks within your brand. There are a plethora of necessary tasks for my brand that I don’t perform. If I still had those obligations, I wouldn’t be writing a blog post every day.

Create a list of all of the necessary tasks you perform for your brand. Any task that you don’t enjoy performing is subject to delegation. I recommend you start by delegating the most time consuming task first and then go from there.

You can make the revenue back by optimizing your blog to gather more email subscribers and then optimizing the autoresponders to generate more sales.

Establish A Routine

Yann’s Medium article from before inspired this one, so I don’t want too much overlap. The final tactic I’ll mention is that you need to establish a routine. I’ve tried a variety of writing methods. Here’s the method I’m currently sticking with:

#1: Outline The Blog Post The Night Before. My outline looks very simple but gets the job done. I just identify the blog post’s title and the tactics I’ll cover.

#2: Research Some Relevant Articles The Night Before. This research is based on the outline.

#3: Write The Blog Post In The Morning. I do some research as I am writing the blog post when an idea floats in my mind. Some bloggers prefer to wait to do this extra research after writing the blog post (the internet can distract you from your work). I prefer to get the research over with so I’m not thinking about it as I’m writing the blog post.

#4: Schedule The Blog Post In The Afternoon Or Evening. I prefer scheduling blog posts on the same day I write them. I always have a buffer of blog posts scheduled in advance in case I can’t schedule a blog post on a particular day. I’m okay with batching this method, but I am no longer okay with batching the writing process.

I no longer write more than one blog post each day. If I have a burning desire, I’ll craft the outline and intentionally ignore the burning desire. Surprise, surprise, the burning desire only builds, and I have no problem writing tomorrow’s blog post.

Consider your schedule as you write and plan out blog posts. Since I batch my podcast interviews on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, I’ll use Mondays to write more detailed outlines for the Tuesday and Wednesday blog posts.

For a more detailed outline, I do everything in the simple outline but also write the introduction and conclusion.

In Conclusion

Publishing a new blog post every day isn’t easy. However, there are many content creators proving that it’s possible every day.

Writing blog posts doesn’t just help with acquiring more leads, but daily blog posts will also strengthen the relationship between you and the audience you’ve already built.

What were your thoughts on this content creation approach? Do you have any questions for me? Sound off in the comments section below.

How To Find More Time In Your Day To Create Epic Content

November 7, 2017 by Marc Guberti 10 Comments

When school is back in session, I always make adjustments my work flow. The long summer hours are getting shorter and I have less time to craft content for my business.

Whether you’re a student, 9-to-5 worker, or even an entrepreneur, it seems there’s never enough time in the day to get everything done.

You may write blog post, promote your content, or respond to an email, but you’ll likely find yourself struggling to accomplish several things in one day.

Some people use this reality as a crutch: “I simply don’t have the time,” they say, but that’s a classic excuse for not getting more done.

The truth is, making excuses allows you to believe that you have more important things to do with your time.

But finding more time isn’t always a solution. There comes a point in which working longer hours results in a decrease in overall productivity, rather than an increase.

So it’s not about the number of hours you spend working. It’s about the quality of those hours, which is another way of saying “work smarter, not harder.”

I no doubtedly work on my brand for far less time than most people each day, but the time I do spend working is far more intense.

Some people can only manage to squeeze in brand-building activities for 15-30 minutes a day, while others can handle much more. But anyone should be able to find short bursts of time for creating content each day, working smarter with the time they have.

Now you might be thinking that without knowing your schedule I can’t possibly be sure that you can find more time for content creation.

But even the time people spend rambling about their schedules to friends, family, and themselves is better spent more productively – creating epic content.

If you believe this doesn’t apply to you because your schedule is just too tight, prepare to have your mind blown.

Batch Individual Parts Of The Process

Every blog post contains an introduction, body, and conclusion. For a long time, I wrote entire blog posts from start to finish exactly in that order.

I was surprised to learn that this is an inefficient approach to writing blog posts. Instead of writing one post at a time in a traditional format, it’s better to come up with ideas for several blog posts at once.

After that, write the introductions for all of them. And after you’ve written the introductions, move on to the conclusions. Finally, wrap them all up with research and body copy.

This is definitely something that is rarely taught in the blogging world. The traditional format resembles essay writing, but blog posts are different, and require an altogether different approach.

Choose one day to write all of the introductions and conclusions. And another day to conduct research and write the bodies. Repeating the same bite-sized tasks over and over enables you to maintain a higher level of focus.

Without this batching process, you’re forced to make transitions each time you move from introduction to body, from body to conclusion, and from one blog post to the next.

Each of these transitions takes time that you can save by staying in the introduction mindset as you write the intros for several blog posts. Once you’re in the right frame of mind, you simply extend it to cover more ground.

How Much Time Do You Really Need?

It usually takes me around 30-60 minutes to write a 1,000-word blog post – likely because I’ve written dozens of books and thousands of blog posts. But I’ve been able to reduce this further simply by eliminating those nasty transitions.

At some point, your fingers either fall off or you become a fast typer. Not only will the batching process help you type faster, you’ll also think faster as you write each post. The result is a higher-value blog post in a shorter period of time.

If writing a 1,000-word blog posts intimidates you, there’s nothing stopping you from writing 250-500 word blog posts. Make it as easy as possible for yourself to write and publish content on your blog.

But the next time you write a blog post, keep track of how much time it took. That’s the amount of time you’ll need to make available each day or week, depending on your publishing schedule.

Use Opportune Moments To Write Your Posts

People most often write blog posts on a computer. Nowadays, you have a computer in your pocket. It’s called a smartphone, and while I’m not saying anything new for now, just read the next line.

Use your smartphone to write blog posts.

Anytime you’re waiting for an Uber, sitting on a train, suffering through tv commercials (or any other moment in which you’re waiting in line or for something to happen), add more content to a future blog post.

I’ve written dozens of blog posts from start to finish on my iPhone. That’s several months of additional content without any extra time investment. I wrote these posts during commercials, while waiting for class to begin (college life), or any other moment in which I found myself not doing much of anything.

You can also write blog posts while driving. No, I’m not advocating texting and driving. I’m taking about speaking and driving. Just install an app that transcribes your voice into text and speak out your blog post.

When you are in front of a computer with the transcription, you can then make edits and schedule the blog post for release.

It amazes me how many hours people spend commuting in a given year but how few of people turn those hours into opportunities.

Dictating blog posts is one option, but you can also turn your car into a university on wheels by listening to as many audiobooks and podcasts as possible (if you’re looking for a podcast recommendation, I recommend my Breakthrough Success Podcast with full, complete, and utter bias).

In Conclusion

We all have the same 24-hours in a given day. Your success is determined by how you utilize every one of them. I once heard that the average American spends at least four hours a day watching TV.

With those same four hours, I can write 10,000 words for my latest book, create an entire training course, or read several books.

And that’s just four hours repeated 24/7/365. Maybe you don’t watch TV for four hours a day, but chances are you do something similar that you can adjust.

For instance, I used to play a lot of video games. Then, I went cold turkey after a two week vacation (the vacation helped ease me into it). Now, I only let myself play video games when I’m visiting friends.

Your desire to create epic content must be greater than your desire to do other things.

What are your thoughts on these tactics for finding more time in your day to create epic content? Do you have any other tactics for us? Do you have a question for me? Sound off in the comments section below.

The Best Content Creation Calendar Strategy…PERIOD

November 4, 2017 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

Consistent bloggers often decide between writing all of their content at once, shortly before their due dates, or writing several blog posts in advance.

The problem with writing all of your content just before their due dates is rushing or missing the mark. The problem with writing all of your content in advance is missing out on new trends.

I admit that for the first time in my blogging journey, these problems caused me to be inconsistent.

And not because I was slacking off – I was in the middle of organizing my first virtual summit. In fact, since I’m quite good at planning ahead, I had scheduled the summit’s launch one month before final exams (basically preparing for the summit while studying for my finals).

And now that I am back to blogging — and getting more contributors at the same time — my publishing schedule has become more complicated (when do I post? when do my contributors post?)

Mark Asquith to the rescue!

Mark was one of more than 50 speakers at my Content Marketing Success Summit. And he spoke about consistently creating epic content.

One of the questions I asked Mark was what he considers the best approach to creating a content calendar, addressing the two problems I mentioned above—cramming versus planning ahead.

His response blew my mind. In October of 2016, Mark had identified all of the blog posts he would write for 2017. And by the end of the year, he had written all of them.

Mark began 2017 with all 24 blog posts he’s publishing this year. He publishes one every other week.

But let’s say I pre-wrote all of my content for 2018, and then something significant happens in the industry: SnapChat comes out with another revolutionary feature. Facebook advertising comes out with even more targeting.

How can I write about these major updates if I have all of 2018’s content waiting in the queue? Here’s the answer…

If, like Mark, you schedule all of your new blog posts for every other week, you can simply write new blog posts in between.

For instance, if you’ve scheduled blog posts for October 1st and October 15th many months in advance, you can publish a new blog post about a recent trend on October 8th.

This way, you can incorporate new content while having the bulk of your content scheduled in advance. And if all of the blog posts you write in advance are evergreen, then it doesn’t matter whether you publish them in 2017 or 2027.

For example, a blog post about productivity will be relevant every year because productivity tips do not rely on trends.

So, why is this such a great strategy? Let’s capture the scope of its impact:

#1: You Can Write About Trends Without Content Calendar Conflicts

As mentioned before, you can publish trend related articles in between the content you schedule in advance. You don’t have to tinker around with rescheduling content; you schedule in advance intentionally leaving room for gaps.

#2: You Can Warm Up Your Audience To Launches

I promote several products in any given year. Yet my 2018 calendar remains fairly open apart from a February launch that I’m participating in. I can prepare for that launch now by writing relevant content.

But let’ say Chandler Bolt asks me to promote Self-Publishing School in April, and my pre-written blog posts have NOTHING to do with writing a book (or even writing content)?

I can still write relevant content ahead of time and insert it into my content creation calendar. In fact, writing about content creation, and how to become a successful author, will warm up my audience up to this promotion.

#3: You Can Enjoy More Freedom

I wrote this entire blog post off the cuff without an outline. Of course, I still sent it to my editor, but the post remains a case of “just cuz.”

Not only will you have your content scheduled far in advance, but you will also have the freedom to write and publish additional content anytime you feel like it. Win-win!

I believe too many people miss out on this part of blogging. They are so focused on planning and writing their next blog post that they don’t truly feel free when writing.

This feeling of freedom is based on the fact that you can write about a topic that interests you while not feeling pressured to schedule the post you’re working on.

It’s more of a choice and less of “I need to publish this piece of content so my blog gets new content.”

In Conclusion

Mark’s concept got me thinking about my 2018 publishing schedule …even though we were in May of 2017 when we pre-recorded the interview.

The ability to have all of my content scheduled in advance removes most of the stress associated with being a blogger. And it’s easier to write from the heart because I’ll have so much more time.

Another concept that came up during our interview was batching. This is something also used by John Lee Dumas (discussed in Episode 38 of the Breakthrough Success Podcast).

All Mark needed to do was write all of the blog posts he’d planned for 2017 from October 2016 to December 2016 (with the exception of additional content).

Similarly, John Lee Dumas chooses two days a month to interview the 28-31 guests he has on his podcast every month.

You can choose one week to write blog posts for two months. And if you follow Mark’s posting strategy, you only have to publish one blog post every other week (or two blog posts per month). Then you’re covered for two months!

You can take this concept even further and write 12 blog posts in one week — it’s very possible if you believe in yourself — and that would give you a total of six month’s worth of content!

You can fill in the gaps by writing content about trends, inviting contributors, or by not filling them at all. Only fill in the gaps when it’s relevant to do so.

What are your thoughts on Mark’s strategy? Have any advice on carrying this strategy even further? Sound off in the comments section below.

How To Choose The Best Blog Post Topics

October 10, 2017 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

Each blog post you write involves a time investment. And as you continue along your journey, the time investment you put towards each blog post will most likely grow. To make your time worthwhile, you must choose the best blog post topics.

That way, your visitors love your blog and you love writing the content. To discover the best blog post topics, we’ll start with the basics and then expand upon that concept.

The Basics

First and foremost, choosing the best blog post topics come down to asking yourself this question:

“What do I enjoy?”

I have a strong passion for digital marketing which is why I can effortlessly write about the topic. I once allocated 15 minutes to write about digital marketing for the day but then became frustrated because I wanted to spend more than 15 minutes writing about digital marketing.

I was like the child who didn’t want recess to come to an end. That’s the mentality you must have when you’re writing your content and know that you’re running out of time to do so.

Obviously, we have a range of answers for that question, “What do I enjoy?” We need to narrow our focus on the few things that we can write about for many years to come and that will continue to provide value.

At one point, I enjoyed writing about LEGO Sets. I haven’t written about LEGOs for a very long time because I prefer writing about digital marketing and embracing that topic. It’s also a niche I can provide massive value for given my experience (years of experience means nothing to me. Results determine the quality of those years and if I should care. This is just a teen’s rant 🙂 ).

To determine if your content will thrive, you must finally ask the question, “Is this something people want?” I know people want this blog post because several of my subscribers asked me to specifically write a blog post on this topic.

I like coming up with my own ideas, but if my audience gives me some ideas, I’m more than happy to write about those topics as well.

Pay Attention To Your Audience

As your content attracts more visitors, your visitors will suggest more ideas. Some of them will be direct…“Write about THIS.” These visitors are rare.

The majority of your visitors will indirectly suggest new content ideas. Here are some of the signs you should pay attention to…

What questions do they ask you in the comments? I always invite my visitors to ask questions in the comments. That way, I can answer these questions and write out future blog posts (I copy and paste some comments together to form the skeleton of blog posts). If I see a lot of questions about, let’s say Pinterest, I know my audience wants a blog post about Pinterest.

What’s getting the most engagement. When I first started this blog, I wrote as many Twitter related blog posts as I could. These blog posts by far got the most engagement and each Twitter blog post worked like magic. Now I’ve slowed down on Twitter related blog posts due to the immense library of them on this blog and the over-saturation of “10 Ways To Get More Twitter Followers” type of blog posts. Engagement is like votes, and engagement can take the form of social signals, traffic, clicks, comments, and any other indicator.

Which of your posts are the top performers. Keep providing these types of posts and internally link them together so they each become top performers. You never know how long a post will retain its popularity, so you want to take action as quickly as possible. For instance, one of my most popular blog posts was a blog post about getting Vine followers. Now it’s not doing so well since Vine isn’t a social network anymore. When you’re content is popular, ride that wave. Hope to never see the shore but write as if that shore is coming and you want to capitalize on all of the growth you can get from the final part of the wave.

See What Your Audience Says Off Your Blog

Your visitors spread their time across multiple blogs and social networks. This is valuable knowledge for discovering what your audience wants. During this stage, we observe others and chime in.

Let me tell you a quick story.

One of the policies I adopted is that I will respond to the comments I get from my blog. I knew it would be a tedious process, but I do so anyway. In these comments, my visitors ask questions, share suggestions, and weigh in on the blog post.

I got inspired to respond to every comment because Neil Patel does it. It’s commonplace for Neil to get dozens or even hundreds of comments for each blog post he publishes. He goes through all of those comments to gather more content ideas and discover what his readers want.

If you’re a digital marketer, especially if SEO is your speciality, then why aren’t YOU going through the comments Neil gets? After you leave a comment (yes, you definitely should), look at all of the Qs and suggestions Neil gets. Each of his blog posts (comments alone) offers a treasure trove of ideas, but you’ll only access that treasure trove if you read each one.

I know. It’s tedious, and I don’t read all of the comments for each of his blog posts. However, when I do, I get many ideas from it.

You can take a similar approach via Quora, a social networking site which allows users to ask and answer questions. When people ask questions about social media and blogging, I make it a point to be one of the first people to answer the question.

Not only does the first answer tend to get the most views, but I can also use my answers as the starting points for future blog posts. Quora’s additional advantage is that as a big social network, it’s commonplace for me to find dozens of questions that I could answer in the form of high-demand blog posts.

Sites like Quora, Yahoo! Answers, and Wiki Answers are great for discovering more topics that your visitors want. I prefer Quora because I believe it’s the easiest to use, but the decision is up to you.

In Conclusion

When you choose a blog post topic and start writing, it involves a considerable amount of your time. Not only do you write the blog post from start to finish, but you also need to promote it so that blog post gains traction.

With so much of your time hinging on each idea, it’s important to choose the blog post topics that will resonate the most with your audience.

You can discover which topics work by observing your audience on and off your blog.

What are your thoughts on choosing the best blog post topic? Do you have any suggestions for discovering the best content ideas? Have a question for me? Sound off in the comments section below.