More Traffic Less Content (playbook)
Overview
Page 2
Greatest Hits Content Survey
Page 8
AIDA Article Template
Page 18
Three Jabs Strategy
Page 30
Red Packet Partnerships
Page 40
$5 Hit Records
Page 68
Viral Content Upgrades
Page 75
900 Word Emails
Page 80
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Today I'm going to be talking about the Greatest Hits Content System I use to get
more traffic with less content.
I don't follow the normal approach that people take of trying to do two articles a
week or two podcasts a week, or one a week, or even one a month.
What I focus on is the flawless execution of five pieces of content to drive all the
traffic, email leads and sales for a business.
I'm going to show you guys step-by-step through everything I do, lots of
screenshots of exactly what I do. It starts off here on the left hand side, you can see
there are five discs there, these are the five Greatest Hits.
I'm going to go over the Greatest Hits Content survey that you run to find these
topics to write about, or to podcast about, or make videos about.
I'm going to go through an AIDA Article Template. Exactly how I structure the
headlines, intros, the body copy, everything like that.
Then I'm going to talk about email conversion.
This is called the Three Jabs Strategy. I developed this when I was over at AppSumo
and Sumo, and we had an aggressive goal to get to 10,000 email leads per month.
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And so that strategy is based on that.
Then I'm going to talk about something called Red Packet Partnerships.
This is where I'm doing partnerships with other people and I'm getting about 100 to
1,000 leads in one day without doing any SEO or any paid ads.
Then I'm going to talk about $5 Hit Records, small budget content distribution ads
that I run that don't need any ongoing management.
I just look at them once a week, but they're driving a small trickle of leads for the
business.
The little box at the very top is a Viral Content Upgrade.
I'm going to talk about once someone actually opts-in for an email, then what do I
do to drive people back to those five Greatest Hits.
Then I'm going to talk about something I call 900 Word Emails.
Basically, if you get the urge to try and go off to the toilet before the end, make sure
you stay all the way to the end…
Because if you already have an existing audience, which I know a lot of people in
here probably already do, you could easily get between $50,000 to $100,000 per
month from sending these 900 Word Emails.
I've tried lots of different emails: story-based emails, different indoctrination
sequences, and these are the most successful emails I've ever been sending.
I call this a McDonaldized content marketing system, because I've broken it down
step-by-step.
It doesn't matter what business or industry you're in.
If you follow this framework, you'll make sales.
I'd bet my left nut on it.
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I'm going to go over content creation first.
What is Greatest Hits Content? You're solving the five biggest pain points of your
target customer, and this is content you're promoting over and over again.
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So many people, they publish a blog post, they'll promote it for maybe a week or
two weeks, and then they hope:
“Oh, maybe it's going to rank on Google in six months to a year,” which maybe
sometimes it does, maybe sometimes it doesn't.
But they don't have this philosophy of trying to promote the content over and over
and over again.
If you have something that works, why don't you just keep promoting it?
That's what this whole philosophy of Greatest Hits Content is about.
I haven't always done this in the past… about two and a half years ago, Noah Kagan
flew me over to consult with him on Sumo and AppSumo, and work with him
together to grow the content marketing channel.
Sumo is a pretty big brand. Noah would give me really aggressive goals to try and
hit, like:
● Go from 100,000 visitors per month to 500,000 per month in 5 months, or
● Go from 3,000 email leads per month up to 10,000 email leads per month
over the next year.
We'd always work on different goals and sometimes we hit a milestone on a goal
and we'd figure out that's probably not the right goal to go after, maybe we should
go after this other goal instead.
So I have this experience of working with a bigger brand and then I quit doing Sumo
stuff and AppSumo stuff.
Then I came to do Content Mavericks, which is completely new.
I tried doing some of the same stuff that worked for Sumo and not everything
worked because I couldn't write a blog post and then rely on SEO to rank that in
three to four months after promoting it.
That would often work sometimes if we had an organic traffic goal at Sumo.
But that stuff wouldn't fly.
The other thing I’ve noticed is there's been research done that less than half of
Google searches now result in a click.
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When I search on Google now, a lot of the time I'm clicking on the instant search
boxes and stuff like that.
I'm not actually clicking into the organic listings and things like that.
The other thing is that a lot of content promotion work (if you've done this before),
and content repurposing and things like that, often, it can be busy work.
It's not actually driving a lot of results for the business.
It just depends.
If you have a really big audience on social media, sometimes doing a lot of
repurposing and things like that can really help, but sometimes it's just busy work.
So, I've come up with this solution of Greatest Hits Content.
It's a strategy that works without SEO.
Here's an example of a result from these five pieces of content.
Basically, at Content Mavericks, we have this Matchmaker program.
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If someone wants to create a piece of content like a blog post, a podcast, a video,
they can go to this site, contentmavericks.com/matchmaker and they can fill out a
10-question form.
They'll put in their budget, how many content pieces they want, what experience
level and everything like that.
Then they'll get matched with someone who's a student inside Content Mavericks.
I've been using the five pieces of content to drive about $80,000 per month worth
of work for the students inside Content Mavericks and connect cool companies with
them.
I've also been using it to get all the leads and all the sales for Content Mavericks'
course and membership as well.
This is to show you that it's not just email leads that this is driving.
This is driving people who are filling out 10 question questionnaires, so very
high-quality leads.
I'm going to go over an example of exactly what I've done at Content Mavericks,
because I can show you everything.
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I'm going to show you how I came up with these five topics and go through it all:
It starts off with a Greatest Hits Content survey.
You're pretty much going to be asking your email subscribers, what their biggest
challenges are.
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I'm going to go over the three questions that I ask in a second.
But this is the email that I'll send to get survey responses:
The subject will be: “I need your help”
I'll also send to unopens... people who don't open after 24 to 48 hours.
It'll say:
“Hey, can I have 60 seconds of your time?
I'm thinking about creating a cool new step-by-step playbook for businesses who
want to leverage content like we do... using my latest techniques.
But first, I just want to make sure I'm giving you the right stuff.
Will you give me your feedback here?
It'll take about 60 seconds, maybe 90.”
Then it goes on a little bit at the bottom.
It's all linking to the one survey. It's a Google form survey. Really simple.
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There's three questions. I'm going to go over an example that I've done. The
formulas are at the top.
You might see this guy Freddie, I teach this guy inside Content Mavericks, so you
see him come up a lot in the presentation.
The example is:
What's the single biggest challenge you have getting more leads and sales with
content marketing in your business (or your client's business)?
You're trying to find out what's the single biggest challenge with whatever it is that
you're doing.
Then the second one is:
What other products have they bought?
The example here is:
Who have you bought marketing training from in the past?
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Then the third one is:
What marketers do you let into your inbox?
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I'm using question one to inform my content creation. I'm using question two and
question three to inform when it comes to content distribution, like the distribution
of the content. I'll go over that later on.
Here's an example where a whole heap of people filled out the survey:
It has their single biggest challenge.
Some people go really in-depth. Some people just give a sentence.
Basically, I make a column titled "Topic" where I put in what the topic is going to be.
I'll go through and then I'll order it… I'll see which challenges are coming up the
most often.
I'll use that data to inform the top five pieces of content I'm going to write on.
I don't do a lot of SEO stuff with this because I'm not relying on SEO, but I'm doing a
little bit of background research to make sure the topic has traffic potential and
there is an opportunity for it to rank down the track.
Let’s say, for example, the topic is “content distribution.”
I'll go to the Google search results page.
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Then what I'll do is I'll look at what the top rank post is:
I'll go to Ahrefs or SEMrush, I'll put in the top URL there.
I'll go to the organic research section in the tool. I'll look how much traffic it got in
the last month:
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I find that's a lot better than looking at the search volume because it shows you the
actual traffic it's getting for all the keywords, not just the one.
Then what I'll do is I'll go into the actual search results page and I'll look for four
opportunity gaps: freshness, quality, authority and relevance. Here's some
examples. This one by Outbrain, it's dated February 15, 2017:
If I'm looking at that now, then there's obviously some freshness gap there. It's
been over three years since it's been updated.
Then other ones like quality gap, I'll look through the posts. If it doesn't look really
high quality and I think I could easily beat it, then I'll put quality gap.
Then other ones like authority. I'm looking at the domain name, how authoritative
is that domain, if there's an authority gap.
Then relevance is: how relevant is the content to the actual search term?
I found doing stuff with Sumo and AppSumo, when we're doing any sort of SEO
stuff, these are the biggest wins by looking for the opportunity gaps and the traffic
potential. So I bring that into the strategy here.
I'm going to go over an example of mine, five pieces of content, and they're five
different
types of posts.
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You can see here: extended list post, step-by-step guide, and these other ones here.
I'm going to go through each one and the five types of content that I write.
Some people ask me what to do if you don't have an email list.
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I'm pretty sure most people here have built an audience.
But if you haven’t, there's a really easy solution if you've never built an email list to
do the survey.
What you can do is you can post the same questions on social media.
Instead of posting all three at a time (because that's too overwhelming on social
media to post all three at one time), you post one at a time:
You might post one today, another one two days from now.
If you don't have a big audience on social media, you go into a group.
At the very start, I had no audience on social media, no email list, and I went into
groups that had the audience that I wanted to go after.
I asked these questions in the group (or other questions)...
When I wanted to try and find topics.
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If you have more money than time, you can go to SurveyMonkey audience and you
can buy responses.
For example:
This is U.S. males, 25 to 54, $100K+ income, people who do yoga and have a pet
turtle.
You can get really, really granular on what you get there.
It costs a fair bit of money, this is $9 per response.
But if you've got more money than time, this is a good option.
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I'm going to go over the AIDA Article Template now.
This is a template I use to write articles and how I train people to write them.
This is a writing template to write all the Greatest Hits Content and it's pretty much
guaranteed to get readers attention and convert leads.
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I'm not going to go over the whole entire template because it's pretty big and pretty
long, and it lays out exactly what you need to do, but I'm going to go over some of
the important parts.
First, I put in the topic at the top, I already went over that, how I find the topic.
The outline... basically I want to know how this post is going to be different and
what the unique angle is going to be.
Every single post needs to have some sort of unique angle.
It can't be the same as everything else. I want the writer (if someone else is writing
it), to put in what that unique angle is going to be.
One thing I’ll do if I’m not sure what the unique angle is going to be, is I'll go through
articles that are on the top page of Google and look at the comment section.
I'll look at what people are asking for in the comments, that weren't covered in the
post. That can help inform what the unique angle of the post could be.
Then I'll ask the writer to put all the main sections of the post that they're going to
be writing about under the outline section.
This is so that I can give feedback on the unique angle and all the sections in the
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(Because after the first draft it's too late, the person's doing the first draft and now
you're going to tell them to go back and redo the whole thing?)
It's a waste of their time and it's pretty much your fault for not doing this part…
answering these two questions. So these two I always do.
The next thing is the headline section.
I've copied and pasted this and I've put it on my social media, and I'm asking
people's feedback on which headline gets them most excited:
You can see here, it's a straight screenshot out of the Google doc where I've listed
the headline.
I've written 12 headlines here and people can give you really great feedback when
you do this sort of stuff.
One person is saying here that they don't think my prospects care about getting a
million visitors, but they're more interested in getting $0 to $100,000.
Then someone else confirms that as well and talks about putting seven things in
the post instead of eight.
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This gives me really great feedback when it comes to the headline, which is often
really important when it's getting shared on social media and things like that.
I use that to inform what the headline's going to be.
Also, this is a pre-promotion sort of thing, because you can go back and notify this
person. Once it's actually live, I can post this in the thread and people will get a
notification that the post is up now.
Next thing is Headline Formulas. I've put three here:
You saw on the last slide that I had 12 different headlines, right?
I'll often start with these three and then I'll come up with a whole list of other ones
that I think might be able to beat them.
The first one here is a [prop word], which stands for proprietary word, it's your own
word you come up with. The [topic] and then [without X].
For example:
The Ski Slope Strategy: How I Got 1.7 Million Traffic In 365 Days (Without Link
Building).
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The next one is a [number] + [power word] + [topic].
For example:
10 Unconventional Content Marketing Case Studies That Can 10X Your Traffic.
The other one here is you lead with the [result], then the [action] and then the
[weird fact].
Often, like I said, I'll start off with these three, if I'm drawing a blank.
Or sometimes it won’t make sense to do the proprietary word one, so I might just
start off with the other two and then I'll write some other ones that I think can beat
it.
Then I'll post that on social media, even though it's not statistically significant to do
a test on social media, it really helps inform it.
There are other things you can do through plugins. I'm not going to go over it, but
you can do headline tests...
So there's always an ongoing headline test running on the post.
It's a bit more advanced though.
If you do the social media part, you'll be a long way ahead of what other people do.
Now I'm going to go over the Intro Formulas.
It's really important to hook people at the very start of an article, so they go
through and read the rest.
Sumo used to have a tool that would measure how far people go down on a post,
and we'd look at this data and we'd see that most people are dropping off around
the 20% to 30% mark.
Imagine doing all this work to write a whole post and then people just drop off after
20%? It's usually because your intro isn't on point.
I have intro formulas that I use to make sure that doesn't happen.
The first one here is results-focused.
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It's called the RPT formula.
It stands for: result, proof and teaser.
For example:
“In 60 days, I used the content distribution strategy in this post to get 87,000 visitors
to one blog post.”
Then it shows a screenshot of proof.
It shows a before shot and an after shot of what the results were.
Then it has a tease:
"Today I'm going to show you exactly how I did it step-by-step."
That's just one of the intro formulas I use.
The other one is TRP.
It's similar to the other one, except the teaser is at the top, the result is second, and
then the proof.
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You can see here for the proof, it doesn't necessarily need to be something that's
quantitative. It can be more qualitative stuff here.
I've just taken a screenshot of someone that sent me something on LinkedIn and
used that here. Another one I'll use is customer-focused:
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I'll lead with the client. I want to really call out who the customer is, who this one
piece of content is perfect for.
For example:
"This strategy is not ideal for all businesses. It is designed for aggressive content
marketers who want consistent and scalable traffic.”
So I'm calling out "aggressive content marketers."
I know that's the perfect person I want to read this post, so I'm calling that out at
the very start.
Then I'll have the proof again.
I'll say:
"In fact, it's the exact strategy I used to generate over $100,000 per month revenue
from the content marketing channel for one small startup tracked using
ChartMogul first touch attribution."
And I'll show proof with a screenshot.
Then I'll talk about the result:
"If you want to get millions of traffic, hundreds of thousands of leads and
thousands of customers per year, then THIS is the content strategy to do it.”
Someone reading that who's a content marketer, is very prime to go in and read
that full post now, because at the very start, I've set up the hook with this intro.
They're all the intro formulas.
Now there's some body copy formulas.
I'm not going to go over these in-depth.
What I do is I usually look at the search engine results page (like I showed you
before), to inform what type of post it's going to be.
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Here I have an example of an extended list post:
Say for example, I'm looking at the search engine results page for the topic.
I see that most of the results on the page are all list posts.
In that case, I know that I'm probably going to use this extended list post format to
write the post. So what I'll do is I'll break up the post into different sections.
Here, this post is about content ideas, and so I lead with what the technique is.
Instead of a normal list post which is just a paragraph of text and maybe an image, I
make it more useful and actionable by saying:
1. Who It’s For
2. Difficulty
3. How To Do It
You come up with your own sections. It's like a list within a list.
That's just one example.
Then if the search results page is showing me something else…
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For example, if there's a lot of step-by-step guides and that's going to probably
perform better based on the search results page...
Then I'll do a step-by-step guide for the body copy.
In this format:
1. What
2. Why
3. How
That's how I'll cover it.
Sometimes it'll be a template, like a utility template.
This is pretty much going through section-by-section exactly what's in the template.
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Then there's a step-by-step strategy post.
What I find best with a step-by-step strategy post (when I'm doing one of these), I'll
always only use three steps to not overwhelm people.
But sometimes I'll put steps within steps to break it down.
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Then there's a Signature Strategy post.
This is where I'm coming up with my own Signature Strategy.
If anyone here is running an agency or you do any sort of coaching, there's
probably some sort of strategy that you have, maybe you haven't named it, but it
can be really good to name your own strategies.
That's how I do the signature strategy post:
I do an overview of what the strategy is.
I show a diagram of how it all works.
I mention what the results are.
Then I'll go into three steps of how to do the actual strategy, similar to the
step-by-step strategy format.
That's pretty much how I create all of the content.
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Now I want to go over exactly how I get email conversions from the content.
I call this the Three Jabs Strategy.
This is a system to convert content driven traffic into leads.
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A lot of people here probably know about content upgrades.
You're offering something of more value on the actual post.
The most successful form of content upgrade I've ever seen work is a utility content
upgrade.
I'm going to go over some examples of that in a second.
This is based on a strategy that I used for a company to take their email leads from
3,000 a month to 10,000 per month.
This wasn't creating any new content.
This particular company was getting 150,000 visits per month to their blog only.
I went into Google Analytics, looked at what all the top traffic posts were, the top
50. Then what I did was I implemented this Three Jabs Strategy on the top 50 posts.
The emails went from 3,000 to 10,000 a month (over five months) by doing this.
If you have a lot of existing traffic already on your blog, this is going to work really
well for you.
If
you don't, this strategy scales as your traffic scales.
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The Three Jabs Strategy is where you have your Greatest Hits Content.
You're driving traffic to that content, which I'm going to show you how to do in a
second.
Then you have what I call your WCU, CCU and ECU.
WCU stands for Welcome Content Upgrade.
CCU stands for Contextual Content Upgrade.
ECU stands for Exit Content Upgrade.
I'm going to show examples of these.
This is an overview of how it works:
For the actual content upgrades I'm using Utility Content Upgrades.
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Here's an example:
I have a post here that's about how to plan content and it's about going over an
editorial calendar.
So the perfect content upgrade here is an editorial calendar template because
someone downloads that and now they're using that every day... because...
It's something they can now use in their day-to-day for their own content.
Another one here is where I'm talking about how to write content using the website
content template I use. The perfect content upgrade here is the actual content
template I use, broken down by sections.
Now, people can use that to go write their content. Every time they have a new
piece of content they want to write, they go and use that.
Then this post on "how to promote content."
After people read through a really long post, like a strategy post, and they're
looking at step-by-step how I did this strategy to promote this piece of content...
They're probably going to want some sort of checklist they can give to their team
that they can use ongoing, like week-to-week.
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This is stuff that people are going to remember you for because they're going to
start using this in their business day-to-day.
It also converts really well because it has utility.
That's the utility content upgrade and now this is how I offer it.
I actually use the Sumo tools because we dog-fooded our own product a lot back
when I was at Sumo. So I know that well, but you can use any tool to do it.
This is a Welcome Content Upgrade:
This is a Welcome Mat that comes down on the post.
It’s a more aggressive form of lead capture. Some people don't like to do it.
It'll account for about 15% of the opt-ins that you get.
I don't always do it because it is very aggressive. People come to the post and they
see the Welcome Mat. They'll see this first before seeing your post
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This is the Contextual Content Upgrade:
This will account for about 65% of the email opt-ins on a blog post.
So if you do anything, of all three, you want to do the Contextual Content Upgrade.
This doesn't jump out at people, it's not annoying at all. It's just a link inside a post.
You can see here it says:
“Want my blueprint to get more traffic to your content using free traffic multipliers.
Download my content distribution checklist and with all the things.”
People can click the link, it's going to bring up this form that’s going to say:
“Almost there! Enter your email to get the Content Distribution Checklist I use.”
Then it's going to have people enter their email to get the checklist.
That's a Contextual Content Upgrade. I'll use these all throughout a post,
contextually wherever it makes sense within the post.
I won't randomly put them in just for the sake of putting them in.
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I'll actually tie it into the copy and that's how it works best. If you just throw them in
anywhere inside the post, that doesn't work well.
The next thing is the Exit Content Upgrade.
This is when people go and exit, they'll see this:
To make this, I duplicate the Contextual Content Upgrade.
The Contextual Content Upgrade says: "Almost there!" because the context is
they're clicking, and then it has a description.
For the Exit Content Upgrade, the context is they're just about to leave the page.
It says, “Before you go!”, and then it has the exact same description.
That's how that works.
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Here's a breakdown of how it looks at scale.
When I did this on the blog that had 150,000 per month visits, the conversion rate
was 6.7%.
The blog had about 300 posts in total, and I only did it on the top 50 posts.
What I'm seeing when I’m doing this, is the conversion rate is anywhere from 8% to
25%.
8% on the low end up to 25%.
Then the breakdown is:
● Contextual Content Upgrade leads to about 65% of the email opt-ins.
● Welcome Content Upgrade leads to about 25% of the email opt-ins.
● Exit Content Upgrade leads to about 10% of the email opt-ins.
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What I always make sure I do is track the performance.
Inside the Sumo tool, once you set up the opt-in form, you want to redirect users to
a URL after they opt-in. Right?
I'm taking people to an email confirmation page after they opt-in, and then inside
Google Analytics I'm setting up a goal.
It's a destination goal, and it's also matching what the URL is I have set up on the
opt-in form.
This helps me track the performance of all the traffic going to the blog post.
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This is a screenshot from inside Analytics:
If I go to the "Landing Page Report," under the Conversion section I can select the
"Email Sign up" Goal, and I can see what the conversion rate is of all my Greatest
Hits Content.
Now I have these five pieces of Greatest Hits Content to start promoting.
If you're already doing content, or you've been doing content for a long time and
you get this set up, you can start to see what the conversion rate is.
Then you can determine what your five Greatest Hits are that you can start
promoting over and over again.
What I'll do is, once I have this data, I'll try and beat myself.
I'll look at what's the fifth post, say it's a 9% conversion rate.
I want to try and beat that now. I want to try and beat myself and make that one of
my Greatest Hits.
That's how I think about this when it comes to the five pieces and trying to improve
on my own performance by measuring it this way.
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That's everything around the email conversion.
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Now, I'm going to talk about content distribution.
My buddy, Tiger Woods, once told me that content marketing is like getting a
pitching wedge and chipping the ball onto the green so sales can putt it in.
This is a depiction of this:
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What happens here is that a lot of people, they'll post something on their blog or
they'll make a podcast and do a transcription of it on their website...
They might wait for SEO, and it's like you're on the fairway and you're using a
putter, and you're slowly, just slowly going up and you might eventually get traffic.
Then all of a sudden, you go back a bit based on the algorithm, and then you go up.
I call this "Pants Down SEO", because you're pulling your pants down, you're
bending over and you're waiting for Google to send you traffic.
What I like to do is, I have that in the back of my head, I understand the value of
SEO but there's other better methods to get results faster.
I use things like Red Packet Partnerships, $5 Hit Records and Viral Content
Upgrades.
If you think of the golf ball as a prospect, these methods get people really close to
the hole, if you think of the hole as being the sale.
I believe this is a lot better quality traffic as well, and you'll see in a second from
responses and things like that, but this is how it works.
Red Packet Partnerships first, I want to go over that.
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I spend a lot of my time over in China. I got married last year.
What happens is when people come to your wedding, they give you a Red Packet
and it's full of money.
But what they don't tell you is that you're expected, when you go to that person's
wedding, you're expected to give them even more money.
That's where this name comes from, Red Packet Partnerships.
The idea here is that you're trying to put your content in front of other people's
email list.
This is also the strategy that I use when I say I get 100 to 1,000 leads in a day
without SEO or ads.
This is the strategy that I'm using.
If you ever promote content, you'll probably see that when you promote it in the
first week, the number one method that works to get traffic to your content is
usually your email list.
I don't know if you guys have seen that. But that's usually what it ends up being.
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If that's the case, then why don't you try and get that in front of other people's
email lists then? That's the idea behind this.
With a big dawg, big dawg says "Big dawg's gotta eat. Buy this." Big dawg sends out
an email and gets sales:
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You want to get your content in front of the big dawg's email audience and capture
some of their audience.
You're also helping them at the same time and I'll show you how I do that.
The funnel here is really simple:
I make a list of partners and I'll also use the survey that I did.
Question #2 is "Who do you buy marketing training from?" or “Who do you buy
other products from?”
That can help inform who I need to approach now as a partner, because I've done
that survey and I have the data.
I'll make a list of partners. I'll send a compliment on social media, and then I'll send
a love letter.
This is an example of how it's actually done.
I'm going to show you screenshots of how I actually landed a partnership. I've done
lots of these.
I'm scrolling through Facebook, I see this lady, Molly Mahoney.
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You can see here from where I've marked up the screenshot, there are 709
comments and so, this person looks like a "big dawg."
Basically, I want to hit up Molly and see if we can do some partnership here, and so
I see this and send her a message on Facebook Messenger:
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I was like:
“Hey Molly, saw we're content cousins. Love what you're doing at The Prepared
Performer. Let me know if you have any content you're trying to get more peeps to
see and I'll share it up.”
She says, “Hi! Love it ‘content cousins’.”
Then what I'll do is I'll add Molly and whoever I'm doing partnerships with to a
Google Sheet (a spreadsheet) to keep track of this.
Then later on, I'm going to go back and I'm going to contact these people again.
I keep track of:
●
●
●
●
What the opportunity is.
Whether I've sent a connection request.
Whether I've sent a pitch.
If they want to do something later in a future month.
So I track it all in this one sheet.
After that I'll say, “Hey Molly”… This might be a week or two weeks later. It just
depends on when I decide to do this, or I might do it straight after as well. It doesn't
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I'll say: “Hey Molly, was taking a look at y'alls blog today and saw you're doing some
dope content on getting more leads and sales with content.
We have pretty similar audiences, so I had an idea to run by you.
If you're up for it, we should do a content promo together. I can promote a cool
lead magnet you have at The Prepared Performer to the ContentMavericks.com
list."
Then I call out what it is (the exact lead magnet that I saw on her site).
And continue... "And if you think the lead magnet I have is a good fit for The
Prepared Performer audience, you could do similar.”
I'm leading with how I'll be able to help Molly, not just what I want.
Then I also mention something else about her video content plan.
She says, “Sure, send me what you've got.”
I send over one of my Greatest Hits that I think is going to be a very good fit for
Molly's audience.
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I say: “Yeah, sure on my side, I think this particular post would work really well.”
Or if she has more freelancers or agency owners, I have something else. I also
mention that.
She said she loves it. It'll go down really well with some of the other things that
she's doing in her business.
Then what I do is I go and I do all the work.
No one wants to worry about writing an email up to promote stuff, so I go and I
write the email and I say:
“I had the chance to write up these promo emails now. Here's what I plan to send to
promo your live video plan."
I link to the Google Doc (for the email I'm going to send).
Then I write up an email that Molly could send, but I tell her that she can feel free to
modify it however she wants to.
Then if it works, to let me know.
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She says, “Omg. You are the best EVER.”
These are the emails:
On the left is the email I send to my email list, and basically, the email is teaching
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It's not just like: “Oh, this is the thing Molly Mahoney has over at The Prepared
Performer. Click here to go get it.”
It's not just a link click like that and someone goes to get it.
I'm thinking about my audience at the same time.
I'm making sure the email is teaching something.
Even if someone doesn't click over and get whatever that thing is, they're still
learning something.
Then on my side, I'll usually send this email template most of the time.
It'll be "Quick share" for the subject.
Then... “Happy Wednesday! Quick share today. My friend Chris wrote a really cool
case study on how he got 80,000 visits to one piece of content. I thought it might
help you promote your video content"...
Because Molly was big on helping people with video, so I'm tailoring it to that.
Then I say, “Click the link below to grab the case study, and learn a new strategy.”
One critical part of this strategy is I'm using a One Click link, and so I'm putting:
"Note: Clicking the link above will subscribe you to Chris's email list at
ContentMavericks.com and open up the full case study on the site.”
I have a hard-coded link.
When people click the link, they'll be added to my email list. I'm telling people this.
I've actually done one of these at the very start when I was trying to figure this out...
I didn't put this note, and people really slammed me on social media for not doing
that.
You put the note here.
It's completely transparent.
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Then I'm using this tool called One Click, and I'm setting it up inside here:
It's got the partner's email service.
Molly's using ConvertKit.
I put the success page.
This is the page that people are actually going to go to when they click on the link.
Then the failure page, so if the link doesn't work, then where do they go?
Sometimes I'll just send them to the blog post anyway.
Sometimes I'll send people to an opt-in page.
Usually, I send them to the blog post anyway.
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You can see here (where it's got the link), I'm actually using that One Click link
where it says, “Get his case study.”
It's not linking to the actual blog post, it's linking to the One Click link.
Here's some examples. I've done a fair few of these now:
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That is a small sample, but you can see it ranges from 42 to 984 subscribers in one
day.
These are very high-quality email subscribers, because it's someone's audience
they have grown probably over the last 5 to 10 years, and they have a very good
reputation with those people.
Inside ActiveCampaign I'll add the people.
I'll export from One Click, I'll input into the Content Maverick's list, and I'll tag the
person with "PARTNER mollymahoney."
This is so I can track this back to sales down the track.
I'll import into the list, and then what I do is I have a main email sequence that
people would usually go on to.
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I'll have an extra email here if I've tagged them with, say for example, "PARTNER
mollymahoney".
I'll send a tailored email to those contacts, and I'll show you what that looks like.
Here on the left, is the normal first email people might get:
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It'll be subject: "More traffic. Less content."
“Hey, hope that free download made you go crazy face, heart face, in that order,
haha. As you might've noticed, at Content Mavericks we have a unique approach to
growing a business with content marketing: More Traffic With Less Content.”
Then on the other side, I changed the subject.
It says: “RE: The case study, Molly Mahoney sent you.”
So people know who it's coming from.
Then I say, “Hey, thanks for downloading the content distribution case study Molly
Mahoney sent you last week.”
Then I go on and I say exactly the same thing, but I'm tailoring that first sentence in
the subject line so it's not a surprise when people get the first email.
You can see here, people are actually replying to these emails, actually sending
really in-depth responses:
This doesn't always happen when you send a first email to someone and they've
just downloaded something.
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People reply back that they're ready to take their content to the next level with a lot
of my techniques and things like that.
This shows how good this strategy can work in terms of engagement.
Then what I'll do is I'll go and search tags.
This comes down to the tracking.
If I want to track it back to sales, I can go in here and I can look at all the people I've
partnered with that I've tagged.
I can go in here and I can have a look:
At the bottom it has an “AND” condition with the “PRODUCT cmm” tag.
This stands for Content Marketing Masters, a course at Content Mavericks.
I'm looking at all the people I've partnered with, and that I've sold the product that I
sell.
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Here's a sample of some of the people, so you can see how it ties back to sales.
All these people that are coming from the partnerships, you can see inside
whatever email service you're using.
I'm going to go over a bit about how to find the actual Red Packet Partnerships.
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I'm going to go over warm partner methods and cold partner methods.
It's actually pretty easy to land these partnerships.
You might think it's pretty hard or you don't want to do the outreach, but you just
need to be fearless and do it.
The first one is: email your list.
This is the easiest, if you have an audience already.
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Here's an example of one I sent to a personal email list:
It says: “Yo, I'm looking for 15 homies who want to partner with me. If you want to
be my homie and meet the following criteria, have a mailing list size of at least
1,000.”
You can set these criteria at whatever you want....
...“Have sky-high quality content in the online marketing space. Please reply to this
email with your top piece of content. If it's a good fit, I'll send you more details on
how I will help drive traffic and leads to your business.”
I don't actually talk about the details of the partnership and how it's going to work.
I don't want to go into that just yet.
This is more like a qualifier email to see if there's anyone on my email list that
matches these criteria, and then I'll do some sort of partnership with them.
Then other things you can do is post on social media.
I know a lot of people in the content marketing space, they go crazy over link
building.
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Here I talk about 80/20 link building and then people can hit me up about link
building.
But then I'll chat with them about the partnership that can work even more
effective than the link-building.
Other partnerships can come from people who reply to emails in an
autoresponder, or just day-to-day when you get emails from people.
I'll go and check out this people’s website and see what they're doing.
If it looks promising, I'll look to see if they're doing some of the stuff from the Three
Jab Strategy and how they are optimizing their content to convert.
If it looks like they've been doing content for a fair while... and...
They have a pretty good conversion on their site...
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Then I'll send a pitch to them in a reply to their email they sent to me:
That's another way I'll land them as well.
Other times it's listening to podcasts, and hitting the person up.
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Other times, it'll be reading a blog post.
I see a really cool blog post and I hit the person up.
I might watch a video somewhere and I think the video is really cool, then I'll hit the
person up.
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So anything in day-to-day that I'm coming across, if it's related to what I do and I
think it can be a good partnership, I'll hit that person up.
Message #1 is sending a genuine compliment.
I have a bit of a template here. I say:
“Hey, [whatever the person's name is], saw we're content cousins, really dope blog
post on whatever it is. Keep killin’ it. First heard you on [wherever I saw them]."
because I know people like to know where you first heard about them.
But you don't need to follow this template.
It should come natural.
Whatever the genuine compliment is you want to send to the person, you just send
that as the very first outreach.
I'm not going to go over this, because I already talked through it before, but I then
send a love letter.
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It's pretty in-depth and I have a template for it:
I'm going to go over one other example.
It's about four paragraphs down on this slide:
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It says:
“If you're up for it, let me know and I'll draft up some emails we can send.”
Then I say:
“Either way, everything you're doing at Content Bistro is dope and happy to
promote you to my email list to help you grow your business, even if you don't like
sending other stuff to your audience.”
I've tested hundreds of these outreach messages, and I found that this angle where
I go into it not expecting anything works best.
It's going to be really cool if they do want to promote it, but if not, i'll still help them
promote whatever they have...
Because I already came across their stuff and I really like it.
This is the format that I found that works the best when you're sending an outreach
message like this.
I have a few FAQs here:
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What if I don't have an email list?
I think you should just build one, if you don't have one.
Use the Three Jabs Strategy and promote your content using Free Traffic and Paid
Traffic Multipliers.
I haven't gone over that in this presentation, because that's more advanced content
distribution stuff, but if you type "Content Mavericks content distribution strategy"
in Google, you'll see it and how those traffic multipliers work.
Option #2 is to find other ways to add more value to your partner than you get.
You could promote content in different groups on social media, or you could run
ads to their content.
Just be creative with it.
A lot of people have a hang up on this:
"Won't this strategy fatigue my email list?"
I haven't actually seen any negative effects from it fatiguing an email list, because
the way I do it is that the email that I send to my email list is always value-packed.
It teaches something inside the email based on that person's content...
Then it links off to whatever the lead magnet is, or the piece of content that I'm
helping them promote.
They're getting value from the email no matter what.
That's why it's not fatiguing the email list.
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You can't really know how big someone's email list is unless they mentioned it
somewhere.
All you can do is really check on their website and see how long they've been doing
content marketing for.
If you want to get with mega-influencers, often people really care about the size of
a list.
I find that doesn't actually matter that much... the size of someone's email list.
What matters more is the relationship and the trust that person's built up.
If you see someone's been in the space for a lot longer, that's going to be a much
better partnership than someone who may just have a really big list.
Then the other thing here is about leveling up.
You can start off by... I call them C level big dawgs, B level big dawgs, A level big
dawgs. You start with C level, and then you move up as you do this.
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The next thing we're going to go over is the $5 Hit Record Method.
This is small budget content distribution ads to cold traffic and how you can get a
small trickle of new leads every day.
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This usually never happens...
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People actually hit me up on social media and tell me how much they liked the ad.
They've gone to my personal profile and they've hit me up, and they're telling me
how much they liked the ad, because I put my name at the bottom.
I don't link to myself or anything. But this really works. This is the structure:
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I'm going to go over it quickly. There's five Greatest Hits.
The structure is $5 per day and I'm using the interests from the survey.
I talk about "Who have you bought from?" and "Who do you let into your inbox?"
Those questions are on the survey that I talked about at the start.
I'm using that to inform who I'm going to target inside the ads for the $5 a day.
I'm using those interests, and I'm promoting these pieces of Greatest Hits content.
I have a goal of $5 cost per lead.
I do a bit of quick back-of-the-napkin math:
If I have a course for $1,000... I put a really conservative email to sales conversion
rate of 0.5%.
I figure out how many leads I need to make a sale, and then I figure out the cost per
lead I need to break-even.
This is going to be different for everyone, but I do this really quickly to try and get
an idea.
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You can see here this is from the survey I ran:
At the very start, I actually called my customers on the phone and spoke to them. I
have the list of all the people now I can target inside the ads.
This is the campaign level, so you can see the blog posts it has here:
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What I'm doing is I'm looking at the… (this is something Justin Brooke taught me...
he does a lot of paid ads)... blended CPA, not just the CPA for one campaign.
You want to look at it across all of them.
I'm making sure that it's below the target that I have of the $5 per lead.
If not, then I'll start thinking about pausing or canceling different campaigns.
Here's the ad set level:
It has all the interests there.
I have three example ads here.
I'm going to talk through one of them so you get an idea of how these ads actually
work.
Basically, the ad is teaching something inside the ad...
And then it's linking off to the blog post.
I call it using "golden nuggets" inside your social media posts.
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It says here: "Recently I was reviewing a blog post from a guy who got 40,000 leads
per month on a small site. I've hit 10,000 leads through blog content."
Basically, the ad gives three specific things that I learned from this person.
People can get a takeaway from reading the ad without actually clicking through to
the post if they want to.
This is why a lot of people actually hit me up on Facebook, they really like the ad
and it gets good engagement.
This is how I do all the ads.
I write them like this, I teach something inside the ad, and then I link off to whatever
the piece of content is.
I'm not going to go over the other ones, but I had some other examples here.
Some people are like "Why do you run the ads on Facebook?"
It's really because I'm targeting the followers of people I found in my Greatest Hits
Content survey.
It might be different for you.
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You might find that it's harder to do that on Facebook, so you might go and do that
on Twitter. I've done it on Twitter before as well.
You pick the ad platform where you can get the best ad targeting.
I spend $5 per day, because it's a small amount.
I can spend $100 a day.
I don't have to go check in on it daily.
I can just check in on it weekly and I'm not stressed about spending that money.
That's why I keep it a very small amount.
I'm not worrying about the ad fatigue when it's so small.
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I'm going to talk a bit about Viral Content Upgrades real quick.
This is bonus content you're offering after someone opts-in via email, and you're
asking for a social share to get access to the bonus, not an email, because
someone's already opted-in.
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This happens pretty much every day:
Someone's always tweeting the piece of content I have inside the Viral Content
Upgrade.
This is always driving traffic back to content that I already have...
From people sharing on their social media.
A Viral Content Upgrade is...
Let’s say, for example, the post is on the topic of “content distribution strategy.”
That's the topic.
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The bonus is about a content distribution checklist and the viral bonus would be a
content distribution video.
This is the best way to do it, but I like to simplify it and just do one site-wide Viral
Content Upgrade.
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If someone downloads any sort of content upgrade from the Three Jabs Strategy
that I'm running, I'll have a viral bonus.
Mine is about "1 Million Clicks Without SEO" and it's a video.
This is what it looks like:
I'll use a tool called GoViral or PayWithATweet.
In this case, the example I'm using is using GoViral.
It says: "Share a case study for an uncut video" and then it has the bonus there.
This is on the email confirmation page.
This is what people see.
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Then if they do send a tweet to unlock it, they'll get this video:
I say here "video with a big dawg", so someone that people are going to know.
I usually want to put a video so people get to know me a bit more, and it's someone
pretty well known in the industry.
In this case, it's Justin Brooke interviewing me about how I did traffic for Sumo and
grew their business with content.
That's the video people see from the Viral Content Upgrade.
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Now, I want to go over the part that most content marketers don't cover... sales
conversion.
Basically, we've got all the prospects on the green now (from the fairway onto the
green). Now we want to move these people into the hole, the sales hole.
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This is called the 900 Word Email.
This is a throwback to Dean Jackson, he came up with the 9-word email.
Basically, this is presell content you send to get five-star prospects to buy and how
you sell $500 to $5,000 products without a phone call.
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I could sell a course or a coaching product, or something, without doing any phone
call, no strategy session, all via email with these 900 Word Emails.
Basically, in Dean Jackson's book, Email Mastery, he talks about this:
He doesn't have this diagram, but he talks about this thing.
50% of people are never going to buy. That's just a fact.
Of the 50% that will buy, 85% are probably going to buy after 90 days.
About 15% are going to buy in less than 90 days.
The 9-word email is all about getting those people who are in that 85% to buy by
sending an email based on what they bought.
If they bought a yacht or if they inquired about buying a yacht, the 9-word email
might be:
“Are you still looking to buy a yacht?”
And then you get in a conversation with someone.
That's how the 9-word email works.
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The problem with the 9-word email is you can't keep sending 9-word emails every
day.
Basically Dean goes over five points:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
People are willing to engage in dialogue.
Friendly and cooperative.
Know what they want.
Going to buy in the next 90 days.
Want us to help them.
You can really only control number #1, "willing to engage in dialogue."
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Why the 9-word email works is because it seems like you're talking to one reader.
You want to try and replicate that.
But the problem is, like I said, you can't keep sending the 9-word emails every day
to your list.
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“Are you looking to buy a yacht? Are you still looking to buy a yacht? Are you still
going to buy a yacht?”
You can't keep doing that.
That's why I have this 900 Word Email.
Basically, it's a three-step process:
A hand raiser email, a qualifier email and an offer email.
The 900 Word Email is the hand raiser email.
I did one of these.
I wanted to get anyone who was getting less than 5,000 leads a month who are on
my email list, who are a SaaS company, to put their hand up and say, “Yeah, I want
you to help me.”
So I sent this subject line:
“Did your SaaS get less than 5,000 leads last month?”
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I had these people reply:
This person wasn't qualified for what I was doing (some pay-as-you-profit coaching).
He goes: “I'm sorry, I'm not the right fit, but your writing's so compelling and directly
to the point of my problem. I literally can not leave this unresponded.”
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When you're writing posts like this and you're calling out the exact person, and
you're talking about the present pain (not the future gain), that's when you really hit
on these points.
It's a 7-part email:
A symptom, you mention some sort of sorting question, like I showed you in that
example.
Then:
●
●
●
●
●
●
Character
Challenge
Wisdom
External outcome
Internal outcome
Hand raiser
I'm going to go over it really quickly.
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This is an exact one I sent:
The subject is:
"Did your SaaS get <5,000 leads last month?"
The character is:
"Last week a SaaS founder (Matt) signed up to coach with me."
The challenge is:
"His total email list size (from 5+ years in business) was 2,769. Last year, he grew his
audience by ONE lead per day."
The wisdom is:
"We took a look at his blog and I realized he was offering the wrong thing in his
articles to attract marketing qualified leads."
I don't give away what the actual strategy is, but I give people the wisdom that this
is what I did.
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Then I talk about the external outcome:
I say: "I sent him one quick content marketing win over Facebook Messenger", and
it says "Over a month = 1,000+ leads per month. The kicker: it was as simple as
making a one-page Google doc (no ad spend required)."
Then down the bottom it says:
"It's because I already figured this stuff out while working at an 8-figure business."
This guy, a really smart marketer by the name of Travis Sago, he taught me this
thing about “the child, the adult, and the parent.”
There's three tracks we always have going on in our head when we're considering
buying something (child/adult/parent).
The child brain is looking for the overt benefit that you're going to get.
So the line: "Over a month, 1,000+ leads per month", that's appealing to the child
brain.
The adult brain is thinking: “How does this work?”
So the line: "It was as simple as making a one-page Google doc (no ad spend
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Then the parent brain is thinking: “How will this work in my situation?”
So the line: “It's because I already figured this stuff out while working at an 8-figure
SaaS”, that's appealing to the parent brain.
There's a lot of psychology behind this email to why these work, and you can keep
sending them every day.
If I have a goal to get five coaching clients, I'll keep sending this email every day,
hitting on different present pain points until I hit my goal.
It keeps going here:
I'm not going to read through all of it, but I also talk about the internal outcome:
"No more late nights worrying about what the RIGHT thing is to focus on to grow
his software biz."
Then I put a hand raiser:
"Are you sitting on SaaS Gold Mine, but dunno it?"
Then "If you're interested, reply", and people reply to the email.
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Then I have a bit of price anchoring at the bottom to price anchor, because my
price is going to be a lot lower than that.
People reply:
And then I'll send qualifying questions:
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Usually I might just send one, but I was trying to dial in an offer here.
Here it says: "How much monthly blog traffic are you currently getting? And can you
link me up to your blog?"
That's the qualifier question.
I want to know that to see whether this person is going to be a good fit for one of
my products.
This person replies, he says, “Blog traffic is at zero.”
Talks about other stuff. He tells me a whole lot of stuff about his business.
Then basically, I send an offer email.
I don't have examples of this, but basically, if someone's getting greater than 5,000
per month traffic or more, I'll send them an offer about pay-as-you-profit coaching.
If the person has less than 5,000 per month visitors, I'll ask them if they'd like to get
details about a self-paced course that I have and then I'll send them a link to that.
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This is the whole process: hand raiser email > qualifier email > offer email to
actually get sales from all the leads you've generated from your content marketing.
This is the last slide:
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I hope I don't offend any SEO-focused content marketers.
But ever since I taught Freddie this system, now he's going around telling SEO
marketers that they're "Google's little bitch."
So... this whole system, it doesn't rely on SEO at all.
Every single step of this is all controllable, it's all within your control.
Thanks a lot.
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