batontwirler
Newbie
- Feb 3, 2016
- 4
- 1
There?s something so sexy about automating or outsourcing something you used to spend countless hours doing yourself.
I?ve always been skeptical that?s it?s possible to automate the creation of epic content.
There are thousands of services that will create low quality (sometimes spun) blog posts for next to nothing.
But we both know that the last thing this world (and your business) needs is another crappy blog post.
Every year, more people are publishing online. Generating epic content has become fiercely competitive as digital marketers compete for the same audience. Google is now essentially a content curator.
Sure ? you could outsource content by hiring a professional content marketer. But good content marketers charge $100 ? $300 an hour, and for many this approach is not cost-effective.
Full disclosure: this method hinges heavily on using virtual assistants (VAs). If you?re unfamiliar with VAs, I recommend reading up on that first.
Developing A Content Creation Pipeline
What you need is a content creation pipeline.
First, you segment each aspect of the content creation process. This type of segmentation is to map out how to delegate tasks.
1. Keyword Research / Keyword Opportunities
This is arguably the easiest part to outsource. Keyword research has been discussed ad nauseum, so I?ll keep it brief.
What I look for is high-volume, low-competition, high-opportunity, long-tail keywords.
High-volume: self-explanatory.
Low competition: the top pages in the search results are low authority and under-optimized (keyword does not appear in title, H1, H2, etc)
High opportunity: e.g., ?download Skype? is low opportunity because >95% want to navigate to the Skype download page.
Long keyword length: long tail keywords have been beaten to death. Even so, I use =len(A1) to get the number of characters in a Google sheet cell. It?s so much easier to rank quickly for ?how long does Prozac stay in your system?? than just ?Prozac.? Having a column in sheets for this factor allows you to prioritize longer keywords.
2. Content Research
Research is by far the most overlooked aspect of truly creating epic content, although that?s changing.
I used to spend more time researching content than writing it.
And for good reason: posts that are based on data and citations are so much more compelling.
The goal is content that presents such a compelling value proposition that it becomes indispensable.
Even if you write your own content, you don?t need to do the research yourself.
I?m going to give an example in the health and nutrition space since that?s where I?m most experienced.
Let?s say I was writing about the health benefits of vitamin D.
I?d start off by giving my virtual assistant a keyword (or a list of keywords). I?ve trained my virtual assistant to perform Google searches using the site: operator on a few trusted domains.
For example, she might search ?site: pubmed.gov vitamin d health benefits.? If you?re unfamiliar, PubMed is where most biomedical research in the US is consolidated.
She?ll then find relevant papers and enter some information into a Google sheet. For example, my Google sheet is setup like this:
Screenshot 2016-05-08 at 10.41.43 PM
The first column, ?Keyword?, is just the search term I gave her to start researching for.
So my assistant will find some relevant articles on the topic I gave her, and for each article, she?ll copy and paste the content into a text file (last column in the Google sheet).
If you want to get really fancy, you can set your virtual assistant up with a text scraper so that she?s not wasting too much time with CTRL-C CTRL-V.
Why does she need to copy over the articles she identifies to a text file?
I personally use an article spinner as part of my content creation pipeline. Most spun content is terrible and virtually unreadable, but there are a few spinners that do produce pretty good results.
It?s nice to have a spun version of the article so that you can copy and paste a snippet of text if you need to, and not worry about duplicate content issues.
I?ve actually created a searchable library of text snippets to assist in the content creation process.
3. Content Creation
This is the hard part.
How can you hire a writer to create an epic piece of content without overpaying?
It?s tough because they don?t have skin in the game the way you do.
You can get the best value from your content creators by making everything easy and efficient for them.
Setting Your Writers Up For Success
When I hand off an article idea to a writer, my virtual assistant links them a Dropbox folder with relevant data, citations, and text snippets from authoritative sources.
Why? You want to make it as easy as possible for your writers to create data-driven, evidence-based content.
I?ve been a freelancer before, and there?s just no incentive to go the extra mile with research since you?re paid by the word. The workaround here is to segment and outsource the research to virtual assistants. Only then should you can hand it over to writers.
So here?s the overall strategy:
Hand off some general keywords and competitors to a virtual assistant.
They send back a Google sheet with 1,000 keywords, ranked by volume, competitiveness, opportunity, length, and conversion probability.
I pick my favorite keywords and have a second virtual assistant thoroughly research the topics. The net result is a Dropbox folder for each topic that has data, spun articles and original articles, citations, and other resources that will support an epic post.
A virtual assistant assigns the article topics to a writer and forwards them a link to the Dropbox folder.
It probably sounds like a lot of work and money to set up this kind of infrastructure.
So you?ll probably be surprised that I first set this content creation pipeline up when I was making less than $30,000 at my day job.
I started out with two virtual assistants and paid them $50 per week, which is only $400/month. A small price to pay for automation.
Source: automation fuel
I?ve always been skeptical that?s it?s possible to automate the creation of epic content.
There are thousands of services that will create low quality (sometimes spun) blog posts for next to nothing.
But we both know that the last thing this world (and your business) needs is another crappy blog post.
Every year, more people are publishing online. Generating epic content has become fiercely competitive as digital marketers compete for the same audience. Google is now essentially a content curator.
Sure ? you could outsource content by hiring a professional content marketer. But good content marketers charge $100 ? $300 an hour, and for many this approach is not cost-effective.
Full disclosure: this method hinges heavily on using virtual assistants (VAs). If you?re unfamiliar with VAs, I recommend reading up on that first.
Developing A Content Creation Pipeline
What you need is a content creation pipeline.
First, you segment each aspect of the content creation process. This type of segmentation is to map out how to delegate tasks.
1. Keyword Research / Keyword Opportunities
This is arguably the easiest part to outsource. Keyword research has been discussed ad nauseum, so I?ll keep it brief.
What I look for is high-volume, low-competition, high-opportunity, long-tail keywords.
High-volume: self-explanatory.
Low competition: the top pages in the search results are low authority and under-optimized (keyword does not appear in title, H1, H2, etc)
High opportunity: e.g., ?download Skype? is low opportunity because >95% want to navigate to the Skype download page.
Long keyword length: long tail keywords have been beaten to death. Even so, I use =len(A1) to get the number of characters in a Google sheet cell. It?s so much easier to rank quickly for ?how long does Prozac stay in your system?? than just ?Prozac.? Having a column in sheets for this factor allows you to prioritize longer keywords.
2. Content Research
Research is by far the most overlooked aspect of truly creating epic content, although that?s changing.
I used to spend more time researching content than writing it.
And for good reason: posts that are based on data and citations are so much more compelling.
The goal is content that presents such a compelling value proposition that it becomes indispensable.
Even if you write your own content, you don?t need to do the research yourself.
I?m going to give an example in the health and nutrition space since that?s where I?m most experienced.
Let?s say I was writing about the health benefits of vitamin D.
I?d start off by giving my virtual assistant a keyword (or a list of keywords). I?ve trained my virtual assistant to perform Google searches using the site: operator on a few trusted domains.
For example, she might search ?site: pubmed.gov vitamin d health benefits.? If you?re unfamiliar, PubMed is where most biomedical research in the US is consolidated.
She?ll then find relevant papers and enter some information into a Google sheet. For example, my Google sheet is setup like this:
Screenshot 2016-05-08 at 10.41.43 PM
The first column, ?Keyword?, is just the search term I gave her to start researching for.
So my assistant will find some relevant articles on the topic I gave her, and for each article, she?ll copy and paste the content into a text file (last column in the Google sheet).
If you want to get really fancy, you can set your virtual assistant up with a text scraper so that she?s not wasting too much time with CTRL-C CTRL-V.
Why does she need to copy over the articles she identifies to a text file?
I personally use an article spinner as part of my content creation pipeline. Most spun content is terrible and virtually unreadable, but there are a few spinners that do produce pretty good results.
It?s nice to have a spun version of the article so that you can copy and paste a snippet of text if you need to, and not worry about duplicate content issues.
I?ve actually created a searchable library of text snippets to assist in the content creation process.
3. Content Creation
This is the hard part.
How can you hire a writer to create an epic piece of content without overpaying?
It?s tough because they don?t have skin in the game the way you do.
You can get the best value from your content creators by making everything easy and efficient for them.
Setting Your Writers Up For Success
When I hand off an article idea to a writer, my virtual assistant links them a Dropbox folder with relevant data, citations, and text snippets from authoritative sources.
Why? You want to make it as easy as possible for your writers to create data-driven, evidence-based content.
I?ve been a freelancer before, and there?s just no incentive to go the extra mile with research since you?re paid by the word. The workaround here is to segment and outsource the research to virtual assistants. Only then should you can hand it over to writers.
So here?s the overall strategy:
Hand off some general keywords and competitors to a virtual assistant.
They send back a Google sheet with 1,000 keywords, ranked by volume, competitiveness, opportunity, length, and conversion probability.
I pick my favorite keywords and have a second virtual assistant thoroughly research the topics. The net result is a Dropbox folder for each topic that has data, spun articles and original articles, citations, and other resources that will support an epic post.
A virtual assistant assigns the article topics to a writer and forwards them a link to the Dropbox folder.
It probably sounds like a lot of work and money to set up this kind of infrastructure.
So you?ll probably be surprised that I first set this content creation pipeline up when I was making less than $30,000 at my day job.
I started out with two virtual assistants and paid them $50 per week, which is only $400/month. A small price to pay for automation.
Source: automation fuel
