Today I’m going to show you how I get millions of people to read my blog posts, and how you can do it too.
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Today we’re going to talk about content marketing because it’s an area that I’ve had success with for a number of years, and I’ve had multiple viral hits, so I thought it’d be cool to share my approach, so you don’t have to deal with writer’s block and you can create awesome content that drives LOTS of traffic to your website.
So today is all about blog posts, and how to generate fresh ideas for content that people will love to share. Because I know what it’s like when you’re waiting around for traffic to show up on your blog, or when you’re waiting for inspiration to strike and nothing happens, it can make you feel really unproductive, maybe it can make you feel like a failure and it’s also frustrating, right?
Sometimes it can feel easier to just call it a day and stop blogging, well I’m here to show you why you shouldn’t give up and to give you some motivation and new ideas that might help you to overcome those periods of doubt, which we all have and it’s perfectly normal.
So I’m going to show you how to make brilliant content that draws people to your website.
Now, you can get some awesome results with this, and I’ve been using this approach to create viral content for a long time. In fact, I’ll show you an example. Ok, before I show you this, remember that the niche doesn’t matter because you can use this for any kind of blog. Me personally, I’ve used this to drive traffic in a few different ways and I’m going to show you a couple of examples.
And the examples I’m going to show you are the most basic kind of blog posts too, there’s nothing special about these ones, not even any images are being used, no video, nothing fancy. So I’ll show you the most basic type of blog post and then I’ll give you some ideas to make your ones a lot more interesting.
Ok let’s start with this article, ok this is one which is about Google Profiles and how they can be useful to businesses. There’s nothing fancy about this, nothing particularly groundbreaking about it, it’s just a useful piece of content that gives help and advice.
And as you can see, we’ve got around a million views on this post, and hundreds of comments. We actually had to turn off the comments off on this because the amount of moderation was just crazy, and too much work. But that’s a great problem to have, right?
So as you can see, this is a pretty ordinary blog post that anyone can write. There’s really nothing special here.
Right, let’s have a look at another example, this blog post is different to the last one because it’s a completely different topic – so this stuff can work for almost any niche. Ok, and here we can see again that we’ve got around a million page views and almost a thousand comments. Again, we had to turn off the comments for a while until things settled down.
These results aren’t too shabby, right? Well, let me show you how this can work even with highly controversial topics, so look at this one.
Ok, this blog post is about conspiracies, it’s gained over two million views and over a thousand comments. As usual, we turn off the comments when they become too many to handle. And in fact, this post is less than a hundred words in length. So it’s not some piece of epic content that took hours to write.
So now you’ve seen what’s possible, even with run of the mill types of posts, let’s go ahead and see WHAT you need to do in order to create outstanding viral content for your blog, then I’ll show you HOW to do it. And I’ll give you some handy shortcuts so you don’t have spend hours writing.
Ok, I’m going to give you the 7 types of blog post that you can use to draw in viral traffic. And this is also great when you’re stuck for ideas and looking for something to write about because I know lots of people want to start blogging but they feel confused about the whole traffic thing, so don’t worry that’s perfectly normal. I know there’s probably a million questions running through your head right now, so let’s knuckle down see what kind of posts work best.
Right, the first type of post we’re going to look at is called the ‘reaction post’, these are really quick to make and usually do better than the stuff that you spend hours working on.
What you do is, you find a popular infographic, or find a popular video on Youtube from an authority figure, or an expert in your niche, so you’re looking for videos that have a lots of page views, lots of comments, very popular videos and infographics that will be of interest to your audience, and that are from an expert figure in your niche.
So you just embed this content on your blog, and you react to it. It’s so easy to do, and the content has already been proven. You already know it’s popular because of the high number of page views. And you already know the content is good because it’s popular.
So you just embed the video into your post and react to it. It doesn’t have to be video, you can use infographics, slide shares, audio, and the people who own these videos and other embedded content will be very happy to know you’re sharing their content. They specifically allow videos and other embedded content to be shared in this way, that’s why the creators allow it to be embedded.
So use content that has already gone viral. It’s a really easy post type, it’s a fast post type and it’s an effective post type. You’ll get lots of traffic from these types of blog posts.
And the creators want you to share their content, they actively encourage you to share it because it’s good for them, and it’s good for you.
Ok, so next we’ve got the ‘vital stats post’. And this is a curated list of stats ok. People love stats, it gives them confidence in things, it gives them reassurance and it lets them feel educated about something.
So what you do is curate a bunch of stats around a certain topic, pull stats from a range of sources and list them on a blog post. This is a great type of post to outsource to someone else because there’s a bit of research involved, so get them to find all the good stats and pull it together for you to present and frame in your unique voice.
And don’t forget to link to the source of the information too. You see, with this post type you’re likely to pick up a lot of links, and a lot of people will want to use your research.
Presenting the information in charts and graphs is also a great way to explain the research, it makes it easy for people to understand and share.
Ok next we have the ‘authority interview’ which is another type of blog post that can draw huge amounts of traffic to your site, and you can borrow the credibility, the celebrity, the authority of people through one of these. And you might be surprised by who’s willing to do an interview with you. I’ll give you an example, a few years ago I read a book which I absolutely loved and found really interesting, it had nothing to do with marketing it was actually about politics and I had questions about the book. There were things that I wanted to know, and I realized that because I have questions then other people reading this book might have the same questions too.
So I reached out to the author and I asked if I could interview him on one of my websites, and he agreed. Now chances are you’ve never heard of him, but you might have heard of one of his books – because it was actually made into a massive Hollywood movie. You’ve probably heard of a movie called ‘The Men Who Stare At Goats’, right? It was huge, it had George Clooney in it and it had Ewan McGregor in it too, and probably some other big A-list Hollywood stars. So the guy who wrote that agreed to do an interview on my blog and we got huge amounts of traffic from that.
Another example ok, have you heard of a movie called Fight Club? Well the guy who wrote that was very open to being interviewed by my site, now there’s a whole backstory about that and I won’t bore you with it here, but basically, I screwed things up and made a mess of it. But even through messing things up, I got some pretty cool results.
I mean, around once a month we have film studio people actually ASKING US to do interviews with their talent, to help promote their movies. They send us loads of free stuff, and recently we were invited to interview Jean-Claude Van Damme of all people, we didn’t actually follow that up because it would have required international travel and the numbers didn’t work for us. But it’s still nice to be asked, right? So the interview post type can lead to some interesting places.
Ok, the next post type is the ‘expert opinion post’, and this is another one that you can outsource. Again you’re borrowing the authority of other people, so you go out and find interesting quotes, compile them together and list them on the page as advice from industry experts.
So you take a problem, and then list solutions in the form of expert advice, just a sentence or two, a short quote from authority figures. You can also turn this into an infographic. Either way, you’re going to get a nice supply of traffic and promotion. And the experts you feature might mention it on social media too. It’s a great way to get traffic.
Next, we have the ‘roundup post’, so with this one you ask a single question to a small number of people. For example, you could go out and ask four gardeners ‘what’s the best way to grow awesome tomatoes?’, and then you pull their answers together and turn it into a blog post.
I’ll give you a good example of this with Ike Paz… on his blog ‘Internet Marketing Gym’ he did something similar. So look at this, and here you can see that he just asked nine experts how they get traffic to their websites. Simple question right, but awesome results for Ike because everybody gave a different answer. And then I think almost everybody he asked went out and shared this post with their audiences. It’s very powerful.
Now we have the ‘curated post’ type. So you go out and you curate lots of different content and pull it all into one single post. So you might want to go find some videos to embed, maybe infographics, images, and you pull it all into one post and summarize everything, and link back to the source. These are big long posts, and most of the content is curated. If you’re going to use images, make sure you have permission to use them.
Ok next up we have the ‘Video stills post’, So go on Youtube and find a very popular video, find a viral video in your niche, and then take a series of still images from the video and summarize all the steps in the video.
This works really well for how-to videos. So you find a VERY popular video in your niche, you play the video and take a snapshot of the video at each stage of the tutorial, and then you write about each of those stages. Don’t forget to link to the original video or embed it above or below the written part.
Ok, I said that I’d give you seven types of blog post to use, but I’m not, I’m actually going to give you one more bonus type, so in total, you’ve now got 8 types of blog post to drive viral traffic to your site.
Ok, so now for the last one, number 8, which is the ‘list post’ type. These are big posts and they increase your click through rates, they increase the scroll rate, they increase the amount of time someone spends on the page because they’re long lists of high quality, engaging content.
So let’s find out how to make one these posts. Ok, so you’re going to curate a bunch of great content together into a list on your blog. The content you choose to list has to be viral though, so its stuff that you already know is proven to work. So how do you find viral content? We use a website called Buzz Sumo, and that will find the viral stuff for us. Now Buzz Sumo does cost money to use it fully, but they do have a free version so you can get started with that and upgrade if you’re using it a lot.
So you can type in any keyword and then find a list of vital content that’s already working, so you can see what content is being shared on social media. So you want to include a lot of the content you find here and put it into your list post. You use Buzz Sumo to track down the most viral stuff and then curate that into your blog post.
I’ll give you an example here if we type in something like… grow tomatoes, you’ll see a list of the best performing stuff with those keywords – and this is the stuff you’ll take and curate into your post.
So you’re not doing any serious research, you’re not doing anything that requires a serious amount of time or investigation, you’re just looking for what works, and then sharing it.
You can also search by content type with this too, so if you just want to use infographics or videos, you can find them easily. Or you can create a hybrid, a mix of post types on these big lists, so you can throw in reaction posts, quote posts, you can really mix things up and have a unique style for each of these list posts.
Ok so, there we go. Now, remember at the start of this video I asked you to create a new folder on your desktop? Well, you’re going to use that right now. In addition to this video, I’ve also made this chart that we’ve been using, available to you. So you can keep this and use it as a permanent reminder in case you get stuck in the future or in case you forget what you’ve learned here today. So somewhere under this video, you’ll be able to download and keep this handy graphic that I made for you, in your new ‘Profit Copilot’ folder.
Ok, awesome, so that’s about it from me for today and if you give each one of these a try you might be surprised by the results you get. And they can all be outsourced too if you want to take that route. Right, I hope you’ve found this to be amazingly valuable to you and if you have, then you might want to get more videos from me like this one by going to profitcopilot.com/subscribe. Ok, thank you for watching and I’ll see you again very soon.