5 Advanced Forms of Content That Will Ensure You Stand Out

You’re reading blog posts and improving your content marketing skills, but the results aren’t coming quite as fast as you had hoped for.

Why?

There are many reasons, but one very likely possibility is that you’re learning the wrong things.

I see many marketing blogs preaching high quality content but producing low quality content of their own.

If you’re a reader of those, it’s easy to see how you might get confused as to what high quality content actually is.

You see, quality is relative.

Only a small portion of it is truly high quality. That’s the content that stands out among all the rest and actually makes an impact on the lives of readers:

Years ago, the standards for content quality were much lower.

If you created then the content you are creating now, it likely would have easily fallen in that upper tier.

But content marketing has become much more competitive: 91% of companies have some sort of content marketing strategy, and that’s not declining any time soon.

If you want to see real results, the kind that produce huge volumes of consistent sales, you need to up your game.

Now, you can create high quality content just by being a great writer, but there are alternatives.

I want to walk you through 5 forms of advanced content that virtually guarantee that your content will stand out and you’ll attract the traffic and subscribers you desire. 

1. Big data is HOT

Terms like big data and machine learning are thrown around a lot these days.

Technically, big data refers to collecting and analyzing ridiculously large sets of data.

But for the average person (or marketer), I think it’s fair to say that analyzing hundreds of thousands, or millions, of data points could fall under the “big data” umbrella.

The reason why analyzing large sets of data is so interesting is because it can reveal new and interesting findings.

Anyone can make simple connections.

Writing about SEO? Writers should include their target keywords in their content.

By now, that’s obvious to 99.9% of the SEO community.

Most of the simple observations have been made in any niche because anyone can make them.

But some observations and findings can only be made by analyzing a larger set of data. This means that you need some programming skills (or the budget to pay a developer).

In other words, very few marketers can produce these findings.

This, of course, makes them even more valuable.

An example: Let me show you a great example of using big data to create incredible content effectively.

In 2014, OkDork published a post that revealed the results of their analysis of 100 million articles.

They wanted to find out why content goes viral using data.

They were able to observe some really interesting correlations such as:

Needless to say, this was a breath of fresh air compared to all the other information on creating viral content that simply suggested that all you need is to create curiosity.

And the community response was as expected. After being published, it attracted hundreds of comments and thousands of social shares:

Analyzing such a large set of data lets you draw data-driven conclusions and use them to give advice.

This gives your content much more credibility than it would have otherwise.

How to use big data in your content: I understand that this type of content can be intimidating. Analyzing big data is something that is completely foreign to most marketers and business owners.

But everything is scary to most of us at one time or another.

Even basic link building was once thought of as something complicated and abstract. It’s those who are willing to put in the work to learn how to use what scares them that get a leg up on everyone else.

You can wait a few years when there’s a more accessible way to study big data, but that’s when everyone else will hop on the trend too.

Or you can get on it now and get huge results.

If you’re willing to put in a bit of extra effort and overcome a few obstacles, it will pay off.

Assuming you can’t do the analysis yourself, there are two ways you can put together content like this.

Way #1 – Hire a developer/programmer: You can’t analyze hundreds of thousands of data points by hand, no matter how smart or hardworking you are.

Instead, you need to create a program that can do the analysis for you.

Depending on the difficulty of the analysis you’re trying to do, as well as how easy it is to find the data you’re looking for, this can take anywhere from 5 hours to 100 in most cases for a typical programmer.

Where can you hire one for this type of job? Try any of the main freelancing boards:

• Elance
• Guru
• Upwork
• Toptal

You can typically create a job posting with all the details of the job, and then freelancers will apply (and give you a quote).

Alternatively, you can seek out a developer with previous big data experience on those platforms.

You should include the following details in your job posting:

• (optional) budget – if you specify your budget, the applications will come from programmers who charge around that amount
• the project goal – describe what data you want to analyze and what you’re trying to determine from it
• anything you have to help - if you’ve already located a data source, it’ll make their job a lot easier (no need to scrape sites for data)

If you don’t have a technical background, just do your best with the details. If you hire a good developer, they will work with you to figure out what needs to be done.

When I say a data source, I’m talking about an existing database of information.

In the OkDork example, they were able to get the data from BuzzSumo—they didn’t have to hunt for it themselves.

In most cases, search for something like “(content topic) + database api”.

An API provides an easy way to access the collected data, reducing the project time.

Way #2 – Partner up with someone who can: If you have no budget or you have a decent size audience, you may not have to pay a programmer.

Instead, you can find an existing company that collects the data you want to analyze and reach out to them to see if they’d be interested in creating an epic piece of content together.

That’s what Noah Kagan (founder of OkDork) did.

I’ll quote him to show you how simple it can be:

A few weeks ago someone sent me a link to the BuzzSumo website. It is a gold mine of data regarding what content is the most shared across any topic. Cha-Ching. So I reached out to the company to help understand what the main ingredients for insanely shareable content are.

The end result is that BuzzSumo helps create the content and provides the data (essentially a guest post), but you get to look amazing in front of a large audience.

It’s a win-win.

Companies that already use big sets of data are starting to recognize the potential of content marketing.

BuzzSumo is one business that I’ve seen really hop on it, collaborating to produce similar articles, like this one with Moz where they analyzed 1 million articles in different ways.

This is a perfect opportunity to start connecting with these companies in your industry before it becomes a more common tactic.

2. Become a scientist (at least for a little while…)

Science typically deals with complicated subjects, and there’s always an expectation of rigor—an expectation that quality comes first and that tests should be done as accurately as possible in order to ensure a useful result.

And this relates to great content.

Great content reveals new information that the creator discovered, hopefully while conducting valid tests that will help others do the same in the future.

While you don’t need to put on a white lab coat, consider doing your best impression of a scientist and conducting your own research.

Step #1 – Come up with a hypothesis: All studies start with a hypothesis, a guess about what will happen if you do something.

The general form for one is:

I think (action) will result in (what might happen).

Not every hypothesis turns out to be true, but when one does, you’ll have the data to back it up.

You’ll have to put some thought into this, but I’ll give you a few hypothetical examples of hypotheses to give you an idea of what you’re looking for:

• I think guest posting will grow our blog traffic by X%
• I think I can eat at McDonald’s and still lose weight (which actually happened!)
• I think doing push-ups every morning for a month will allow me to do 100 push-ups per day (by the end)
• I think you can grow a tomato plant in 60 days by using Procedure XYZ

There’s no “wrong” way of creating a hypothesis, but ideally it will be something that you can turn into a great piece of content if you find it to be true (e.g., “I conducted research to find the quickest way to do 100 push-ups per day. Here’s what I found…”).

Step #2 – Create a valid experimental setup: Let’s take our example of eating at McDonald’s every day.

You need to include a few things in your experimental setup:

• how you will track results (e.g., daily weigh-ins)
• specifically, what you will eat (the procedure)
• any other rules that will ensure that no other factors are influencing results (e.g., maintain your usual level of exercise)

I should also mention that in some cases, you might find that the data you are trying to gather from your own experiment already exists, just not put into consumable content. That’s fine as well, even though I think personal experiments are a bit more credible.

Step #3 – Run the experiment and analyze the results: There are no shortcuts here; you need to do the work. Sometimes, it will take months to perform the experiment.

Yes, it’s hard work.

But that’s the reason why very few people can create this kind of content and why it will always stand out from the rest.

Now, running the experiment itself doesn’t help your audience.

What does help them is when you analyze the results and make valuable conclusions that will affect their lives.

Even if your hypothesis is incorrect, you still may learn some useful lessons.

Your first step here is to collect all your data in one place (usually a spreadsheet) and calculate the values you are interested in.

Step #4 – Use those results to make something great for your community: Now that you have your data and can make a conclusion, it’s time to create your content.

Here’s an example of an analysis I did of the performance of my past infographics:

Instead of just saying “infographics have worked well for me,” I analyzed these results to get a specific number of visitors, backlinks, and social shares for each infographic.

I also had enough past infographics for a valid sample size (that took me two years to collect—that’s a long experiment!).

Sometimes, it’s enough to just state your results, but in most cases, you want to make a conclusion and then explain how your readers can apply those results.

In our push-up example, you could probably outline a simple routine that your readers could follow to develop the strength to do 100 per day as well.

3. Put together an e-book like no other

When e-books first hit the marketing scene, people put a ton of value on them.

A high perceived value means that readers will invest more into consuming and applying the content as well as sharing it.

But as you know, everyone has an e-book these days. They still hold a bit of extra perceived value over blog posts, but not too much.

However, some e-books are truly great, and those still get a lot of attention.

I’d like to show you how to create a special type of e-book that will automatically get thousands of visitors and shares.

The idea:

Create an e-book where one influencer in your niche writes one page. The final book will be a 20-page book written by 20 experts (just using 20 as an example).

Essentially, it’s an expanded expert roundup.

Instead of just contributing a couple of lines to answer a question (and all experts answer the same question), your experts will each be writing a chapter of the book.

Here’s an example: This is a great example that showcases the power of the technique.

Stoney deGeyter, from Pole Position Marketing, put together an e-book of “link building secrets” for 2014.

He was able to get 20 different industry professionals to contribute one secret each.

Some of these were also influencers.

Even though they weren’t all influencers, he got some solid results.

He saw that all influencers who contributed to the book shared his other posts (along with the book) with their followers.

On top of that, most of them also linked to the book, which is a nice bump in high quality backlinks for Stoney.

Stoney also mentioned that he saw a spike in traffic, although he didn’t say how big (but probably pretty considerable).

And one final benefit is that he now has relationships with 20 influencers/professionals, which could lead to some great opportunities in the future.

How to put together your own e-book: There are three main parts to producing an e-book like this:

1. Come up with a good topic
2. Find influencers willing to contribute
3. Organize, design, and format the content into a book before publishing

Obviously, not all of those steps are equally difficult.

Coming up with a good topic? That’s not too difficult if you’ve read any of my past posts on finding great content ideas.

Formatting content so that readers are blown away? I can help you with that too with some of my other posts:

• 9 Formatting Tactics That Will Double Your Readers’ Average Time on Page
• 5 Advanced Formatting Tips to Maximize Time on Site and Conversions
• The Complete Guide to Designing Visually Stunning Content (Even If You’re Not a Graphic Artist)

But the second step is tough.

It’s not difficult for me because I already have relationships with many influencers. I could send out a quick email and get an overwhelmingly positive response rate.

But what if you’re not in that position? What if you want someone to contribute who has never heard of you?

That is difficult.

But there are a few things you can do to increase your chances of success.

First, build as strong of a relationship with 3-5 influencers as possible.

How do you do this? There are many ways:

• leave comments on their blogs
• engage with them on social media
• send them emails (with questions or comments—get on their email lists first)

It may take a few weeks or months before you have a solid relationship, so be prepared to invest some time here (it will pay off in many ways).

During these first times when you interact with an influencer, your only goals are (1) not to be a pest and (2) to get them to remember your name. Ideally, you want to provide value so that they don’t mind helping you out in the future as well.

Once you have a somewhat strong relationship, you can then ask them to participate in the book. You’ll get at least 1 or 2 who will be happy to.

Wait, don’t you need 20 (or some other large number)?

Yes, but it’s these first few who really unlock your potential to bring other influencers on board.

Ideally, you’d build relationships with 40-50 people before asking them to help you, but that’s not typically possible.

So, you’ll be cold-emailing most influencers.

When you send a cold email pitch, it’s difficult to get a positive response because you don’t have any credibility.

That’s where those first few influencers come in. Here’s what the start of your email should look like…

Hi (name),

I wanted to quickly offer you an exclusive opportunity. I’ve already got (influencer #1) and (influencer #2) to agree to participate.

(book details here…)

That one line gives you instant credibility if those influencers are well known.

If they want to do the project, it’s probably worth at least reading a bit about.

Using their names will boost your response rate by an incredible amount.

Once you’ve done this and you’ve got your target number of participants (expect to email 50-100 of them initially), put together the e-book and publish it.

When you send your contributors a link to the book, most will help you promote it. You should still do your own basic promotional work—expect better than usual results in this case.

4. Take product reviews to the next level

Like I said in the beginning, we’re looking for “next level” content.

I mean content that is so much better than what everyone else is producing that it will be inevitably noticed.

One particular type of content that typically isn’t very impressive is product reviews.

Usually, they’re biased, lack credibility, and aren’t very convincing.

The reason why this is so is because it’s difficult to create a good one.

However, if you actually care about creating great content, that means there is an opportunity here.

Before I get into what an amazing product review is comprised of, I’ll give you a chance to look at an example.

The following video is a review of the best kitchen blenders:

This channel, “America’s test kitchen,” is one of the few that understand what an actual useful review looks like.

They’ve done a great job with the kitchen niche and have several high converting videos with hundreds of thousands of views.

There’s no reason why you can’t do the same (although it doesn’t necessarily have to be video content).

What’s in a great review? In order to create a review of this level, you’ll have to include things that aren’t normally included:

• actual product examples
• useful test results
• clear comparisons

Let’s break it down into steps.

Step #1 – Pick a specific type of product: This is the easiest step by far. All you need to do is observe which kinds of products in your niche your target audience buys the most.

Ideally, people would be wondering what the best product is, and you would be able to answer that question.

Some examples from different niches are:

• Link building tools
• Rank tracking tools
• Marketing courses
• Futons
• Dining room tables
• Lawn mowers
• Cat food

There are obviously thousands of types of products out there, so it shouldn’t be hard to think of a few.

If you’re really struggling, go to Amazon, and type in your niche into the search bar to see what comes up.

Step #2 (Important!) – Actually buy the product: One of the main reasons why most product reviews suck is because they’re obviously written by someone who hasn’t used the product.

People want (and love) genuine reviews.

This could get expensive, but in general, the more you spend on products, the more you will get out of the content later on (more traffic, sales, etc.).

It can also take a few weeks (or months in the case of courses) to thoroughly go through each product. Invest the time now to get the results later on.

Step #3 – Decide what tests would be useful: Once you know how a product works, you want to show your audience whether it does what they’re hoping it does.

To do that, you’ll need tests.

For example, with blenders, you’d want to see how well it blends frozen fruit into a smoothie. You could measure both the completeness of blending and the length of time it took to blend.

But in most cases, you’ll want more than one test.

Again, with the blender, you might want to see how well it handles things like nuts or yogurt (clearly I’m not a blender expert).

Step #4 – Quantify and compare the results: Another shortcoming of most product reviews is that the creator tends to finish the content with a seemingly random conclusion.

They’ll say, “Based on the product specifications, I think we can conclude Product X is the best.”

Even if a review actually tests each product, it’s not always easy to compare the results of each test.

That’s your job.

Put together an overall score that takes into account your test results:

That way it’s easy for your audience to compare the performance of each product.

And that’s all there is to the next level product review. It will take a lot of hard work, but it’s something that just about anyone can do if they’re determined.

5. One type of content that’s more practical than the rest

The final type of advanced form of content is one that I think every business should try (if applicable) at least once.

And that advanced form of content is a tool (yes, I consider them as content).

If you’ve ever been to the Quick Sprout homepage, you know that I have a tool that analyzes web pages. It gives you a quick SEO, speed, and social score:

I’ve written about the results in a full writeup before, so I won’t go over them again in detail.

But to sum things up, despite the tool costing much more than I expected, it still brought in a ton of backlinks and business, producing a very solid return on my investment.

You don’t need to create a tool as complex as my analyzer, but even a small tool that can accomplish one useful thing for your audience will get a lot of attention.

Step #1 – Come up with the idea: Tools solve problems, so that’s where you’ll have to start.

Make a list of as many problems or difficulties your readers face on a regular basis as you can.

For me, I noticed that SEOs had a hard time doing a few things:

• checking if a site was optimized for search engines
• making repeat SEO reports for clients
• combining evaluations of multiple areas of their marketing efforts (e.g., SEO, social, etc.)

And then I designed a tool that provided the solution. Now, people can just insert a website URL, give the tool a few seconds to do some work, and voila—a beautiful and simple result.

Step #2 – Create the tool: Creating the tool, of course, will be the hardest part unless you have experience as a developer.

If you don’t, you’ll have to hire one. Again, you’ll want to post a job offer on any of the main freelancing boards:

• Elance
• Guru
• Upwork
• Toptal

One aspect you will have to consider here is the cost.

Tools can cost anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a hundred thousand dollars, which is quite a big range.

You likely don’t know how much one would cost, which makes it difficult to set a budget.

What you can do is post the job ad without a budget, asking developers to submit a quote. That will tell you all you need to know about the affordability of your project.

If you can’t afford to create the tool you chose, move on to a problem that can be solved by a simpler tool.

Step #3 – Promote the tool: Promoting regular content is hard, but promoting a tool is really easy.

You can present it to most forums and online communities, and they will be thrilled with it as long as it’s actually useful.

Tools are rare, so they’re not met with the same cynicism as regular blog posts often are.

On top of that, you can now mention your tool in your content and whenever you get introduced to someone. It’s a great point of introduction that can lead to a lot of extra business opportunities.

Conclusion

It is absolutely necessary for your content to stand out if you want to succeed with content marketing.

But producing amazing content that stands out isn’t always easy.

That’s why I put together this list of 5 different advanced forms of content and showed you how to create them step by step.

I encourage you to try just one for now.

When you see the results from that, I’m sure you’ll have the motivation you need to try out other forms as well.

We looked at some fairly complicated concepts and steps, so it’s understandable if you have some questions. I’ll do my best to clear them up if you leave them below in a comment.

The $100,000 Challenge: November Update

We just wrapped up the eighth month of the Nutrition Secrets’ $100,000 challenge. Not only did we start generating revenue (kind of), but we also generated good traffic numbers because of the continual increase of our search traffic.

Traffic went up to 58,260 visitors, which is a nice increase from the 42,822 visitors in the previous month. That’s pretty good, considering that content production has slowed down. Mike currently blogs only two to three times a week instead of seven.

The main reason for this is to give him the chance to focus on promoting our fish oil supplement, which I’ll get into in a bit.

But first, let’s go over our traffic numbers.

November traffic stats

As I mentioned above, the traffic grew to 58,260 visitors. Of those visitors, 36,288 came from search engines (mainly Google).

Over time, that number should keep rising as the content continues to rank higher and we build more links. We have built a few EDU links and GOV links by just doing backlink checks on our competitors using Ahrefs and then begging those people to link to our site.

The model works, and over time, our search traffic should continually rise.

Overall, I am happy with our search traffic and growth, given the fact that Mike isn’t very creative when coming up with headlines. That really is the key to growing both your social and search traffic.

Just look at Quick Sprout. The reason it does so well is because I’m able to come up with headlines that hit hard. For example, when I blog on Quick Sprout or NeilPatel.com, I run a headline through an analyzer that estimates how well a headline will do…

One day, we’ll be releasing this free of charge to all the people who sign up to the Quick Sprout tool. But Mike didn’t have it, so it’s a bit harder for him to create headlines that do well.

Nonetheless, the numbers are good, and they keep rising (most months).

Revenue

We started selling fish oil supplements on Amazon like I discussed in my previous update.

As you can see from the screenshot above, we are starting to get more reviews and feedback from people. We collected most of the reviews by going to Amazon’s top reviewers and offering them the product at a discounted rate (break even) or free. When you do that, the reviewers will then place an honest review, which will help skyrocket your positioning on Amazon.

When you hit up the top reviewers, you’ll find that most will ignore you unless you give them the product for free. Our supplier provided a small batch that we were able to give away, but we can’t do that in quantity, or else we will lose money.

When you offer a discount, you’ll find that not as many top reviewers will accept your offer. So, you’ll have to go down the list and avoid hitting up anyone in the top 100. The lower you go on the list, the more likely you are to get people to accept your product at a discounted price.

When doing this, you’ll quickly learn that giving away your product or offering it at a discount doesn’t guarantee a review. But it’s a numbers game.

As you can see from the screenshot above, there is revenue, but the numbers are deceiving. Most of the sales are for the product at a discounted price, so you can’t really count that as “revenue.” Or at least I’m not counting that as revenue.

It’s a bit difficult to figure out whether a sale was at a full price, discounted, or a giveaway as Amazon’s backend is a bit archaic.

Over the next month or two, the number of discounted or free bottles will decrease as the product gets more popular and generates more organic sales.

Roadblock

Even though the product is doing well, we’ve encountered a few negative reviews.

Although we have a good deal with the company supplying us the fish oil, we need to make sure quality control is high. The current labels are arriving to customers a bit smeared, which has been hurting our reviews.

The design of the label isn’t very appealing either, which makes our product hard to stand out. Over the next month, I will be working on fixing this with the supplier.

Email list

The email list is continually growing, and we started to market the product to a small portion of the list. We are offering our fish oil to these subscribers at a reduced cost. So far, 61 people from the Nutrition Secrets blog redeemed the coupon for a discounted product.

This should help generate reviews, and in the long run, it should help boost the revenue numbers.

Fine-tuning

The other thing that will be adjusted as we generate more traction is our listing on Amazon. Making the headline more descriptive and answering more objections in the copy of the listing should help generate more sales.

One simple thing that we will be implementing over the next 30 days is answering general questions in the listing. For example, we will answer questions such as “Is the fish from Japan?” or “How is the oil being filtered?”

Answering these questions, as well as others, will help put our customers’ minds at ease and help increase sales.

Think of it as copywriting. If you can persuade people through text, which most people don’t do on Amazon, you should be able to increase your sales.

Conclusion

I’m happy with the progress so far. As we fine-tune the Amazon listing, we will be aggressively using the email list to generate more sales.

In addition to that, you’ll start seeing ads for the fish oil all over the blog. As the blog traffic grows, it should be easier to generate more and more sales.

Once the revenue starts kicking in, we will have more cash to spend on ads to grow the sales faster as we currently have a bit more than 40% margins.

How do you think the project is going so far?

7 Ways to Find Better Content Ideas

The simplest things are often the most difficult.

How hard should it be to come up with a single content idea?

Considering it’s a few words, you’d think it would only take a few seconds.

You and I both know that there’s a lot more that goes into a good content idea than the first few words that come to mind.

As content marketing becomes more popular and properly utilized, marketers will be producing more and more content.

Currently, 91% of B2B marketers have started using content marketing. In addition, 77% of marketers plan to increase their content production over the next year.

A single good idea every now and again is not enough…you need several.

And if you’re working efficiently (in batches), you should be coming up with at least 50 at a time, but then writing about only the best ones.

When you start a new content marketing campaign, ideas are relatively free flowing. You can write about just about anything in your niche.

But once those “easy” ideas are exhausted, most marketers struggle.

They spend hours only to come up with a handful of mediocre content ideas.

Not only is it a huge waste of time, but it is also mentally draining and frustrating. Most content creators struggle more with ideation than they do with the actual content creation.

I don’t want you to be one of them.

In this post, you will learn 7 highly effective ways to find great content ideas—quickly.

While there can be some abstract thinking behind idea generation (which is the hardest part), you can minimize it by sticking to any combination of these tactics.

Let’s dive in… 

1. Take good ideas and make them great

This method is by far the fastest way to come up with solid content ideas.

The basic idea here is to monitor your competitors.

When they publish a piece of content, you want to see if you could improve upon the idea or make it better.

Some might call this stealing, but no one owns an idea. I’m not telling you to copy that article, but you can certainly create content on a similar topic but do it from your own perspective.

If you get an idea to improve upon a Quick Sprout post, then by all means, go ahead and create it. This is innovation, and it’s how most things (including content and education) get better over time.

There is one big limitation to this tactic: you limit yourself on what you write about because you’re relying on competitors to give you ideas.

If they ignore important to your readers topics, you could easily end up missing out on some great content ideas.

That’s why I recommend you use at least a few other content idea generation tactics along with this one.

With that in mind, here’s the step-by-step breakdown of how to use this method.

Making monitoring competitors easy: If you like to do things the hard way, you can just visit all your competitors on a regular basis and see if they’ve published anything new.

But that seems like a big waste of time to me.

A better option is to use an RSS reader such as Feedly. You can check it once in a while and instantly have an easy to browse list of recently published posts by your competitors.

Create an account, and then click the “add content” button in the left sidebar:

You can search by a keyword, use a specific competitor’s URL, or choose from one of the starter kits (organized by category).

The goal is to find all of your top competitors as they’re the ones who are likely producing content around solid ideas already.

I searched for “marketing,” which brought up a list of marketing blogs.

If you’d like to add one to your RSS feed, just click the green “+” button:

It’s up to you how many you add, but around 5-10 will be sufficient for most.

Once you’ve done that, you can click the “all” label in the left side bar (or a category if you have multiple):

This will bring up all the articles published by those sites that you selected with the newest articles at the top.

After that, you can click a title to expand it so that you can see the text. 

For now, start by noting down interesting topic ideas.

For example:

• How to use “story-selling” and modular content to drive sales
• How to repurpose your content correctly

Then, you’ll need to figure out a way to improve upon the idea or look at it from a different angle.

In general, there are 3 common ways for you to add more value to your content…

Way #1 – Make it longer: If you’ve read many of my posts, you know how I feel about length.

In general, longer is better, which is why longer content ranks better in Google.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about:

Say you find an article such as “7 Tools to Level Up Your Content Promotion Game“.

How could you make it more valuable? Look at more than 7 content promotion tools that your readers could benefit from.

While I haven’t written about that exact topic yet, I’ve created list posts on similar topics, and they often contain a number of items much greater than 7:

If you match the detail provided in the original article about each tool, but double, triple, or quadruple the number of tools reviewed, your article automatically becomes much more valuable.

Way #2 – Make it more in-depth: Sometimes, you’ll find content that is already pretty lengthy. Maybe it’s a list of 30 tools.

However, those articles typically lack any real depth.

They mention the tool name, maybe include a picture, and that’s it.

But there’s no overview of important features, pricing information, or guidance on who would benefit from each tool.

By adding more depth on valuable aspects of each tool, you add a ton of value to the content idea.

Here’s an example:

Marketing Profs published an article “Five Quick Tips for Thinking Like a Marketing Revolutionary.”

And when they say “quick”, they aren’t kidding. Most of the sections have 100-200 words:

This is useful to a very small percentage of marketers.

Most would find the content much more valuable if it was more in-depth.

Adding examples, specific action steps, and even some explanatory pictures to each section would dramatically increase the value of this content.

Way #3 – Make it more practical or readable: Finally, you’ll come across some content that has a lot of value, but only to certain people.

For example, Seth Godin is one of the best known entrepreneurial and marketing writers. He is known for his extremely short, strategic blog posts:

They are often under a few hundred words.

They always contain a good message and something to think about.

But only some marketers want to think or have the background knowledge to make the message useful.

If you catered to a different type of marketer, a beginner marketer, you could write on similar topics as Seth does but make them more accessible.

Spell things out, give as many examples as possible, and make the content as actionable as possible for beginners.

Your content wouldn’t have as much value to his audience, but it would have much more to yours.

You can also make your content more readable by using pictures and formatting (see example in way #2).

2. Content ideas should serve as answers, so find the questions…

The basic purpose for all content is to solve problems for the audience.

People consume content because they’re trying to make their lives better.

What this means is that if you could identify the problems your audience has, you could create content around the solutions to those problems. Your content becomes the answer to their questions.

And you can do this by finding the questions that your audience asks.

There are many ways to find these questions, but I want to point you to two sources in particular.

Source #1 – blog comments: Probably the best source of content ideas is your readers themselves.

If they take the time to express a problem that they are having in a comment or email – listen!

That not only means that it’s a significant problem, but it also means that many other readers in your audience are also having it.

Here’s an example of one that I quickly pulled up from Joel on a Quick Sprout article:

Firstly, he’s expressing that he likes the header pictures I use on Quick Sprout (credit to my designer). This is something I’ve heard many times (but never too many times!).

The most interesting part of his comment is the next sentence/question:

Have you ever thought about doing an article on how to find just the right art?

Boom! Great content idea right there.

Just from that comment, I could easily come up with a few different angles to explore it from:

• The complete guide to creating featured images that WOW your readers
• 10 sources of mind blowing art that will capture your readers’ attention

There’s one potential problem with this source…what if you don’t get many comments?

It takes time to start getting multiple comments on each post on a regular basis, so it’s not your fault. I’d suggest starting by reading my guide to getting more comments on your posts, and then moving on to source #2 for now.

Source #2 – forums/Q&A sites: If you can’t find out what problems your readers are having using comments, the next best thing is to find your target audience on other sites.

You could look at the comments on a competitor’s site for content ideas. More reliably, find a niche forum to browse, which will enable you to come up with hundreds of content ideas quickly.

Start by searching for “(your niche) + forum”:

For 95+% of niches, the top few results will be active forums.

From there, just browse through the thread topics.

From the top garden forum result, I spotted 3 threads that were updated recently:

The content ideas are pretty simple to come up with from there. For example:

• “Do you really need to prune Ficus Lyrata?”
• “The complete guide to pruning: Which plants need and don’t need it”
• The definitive guide to fern identification

The tub one would depend on whether you specifically wrote about gardening or covered other “home” topics as well.

Regardless, you can easily find over 100 good content ideas in under an hour from a good forum.

3. Have just a single 20-minute talk with your target audience member

This tactic might scare you…

Most marketers don’t like talking on the phone, let alone to an actual member of their target audience.

But it’s the single most effective way to not only come up with great content ideas but to create better content as well.

Where do you find someone who will be willing to talk with you for 15-30 minutes?

Here are a few potential ways:

• find a friend who is in your target audience, and ask for a favor
• email your existing email list, and offer free coaching or a product discount in exchange for the talk
• go to a local meeting group (find through Meetup.com) of your target audience. Approach one of the members after, explain your goal/purpose, and offer to buy them lunch if they’ll talk with you

As long as you come off as someone who genuinely is trying to add to your community, you’ll find quite a few people who are willing to help.

This one short interview could make you thousands of dollars in the future.

Once you find someone to talk with, what do you do?

The main thing is to listen. If they’re passionately talking about your topic of interest, don’t stop them.

Ideally, record the interview (ask them if that’s okay) so you don’t miss anything.

Otherwise, write down every single problem they mention. Afterwards, create content ideas that would solve those problems.

If they’re not sure what to talk about, use questions like these to ignite conversation:

• why do you find (topic) interesting?
• what major problems have you faced when it comes to (topic)?
• what are you currently spending your time on when you have time for (topic)?

Anything that gets them talking about your topic or industry will start to reveal problems and frustrations that they’d like to see solved.

Some interviews will obviously be more fruitful than others, which is why I recommend doing these on a regular basis as frequently as possible.

4. Answer the questions that other posts leave readers with

This method picks up where #2 left off.

In case you didn’t read about that tactic, the idea behind it is that most of the best content ideas are the solutions to the problems that your target audience is having.

The tough part is finding those questions.

With this method, we’ll be finding those questions by using your competitors.

And there are 3 basic ways you can do this.

First, you can find strategic posts: In general, posts can either be tactical or strategic.

Strategic content focuses on overall best practices and goals, while tactical content focuses on specific ways to accomplish specific things.

Think of it this way:

You may have a content marketing strategy that encompasses how you’d like to approach content marketing. Inside that strategy, you will have many tactics that you will use to accomplish your strategic goals.

Big problems are typically solved strategically, while small problems can be solved tactically.

The point is to identify writers in your niche who write strategic posts.

These will typically be thought leaders. Seth Godin is the perfect example once again (note that some writers may write both kinds of posts):

His posts are very general and meant to provoke thought. They would help you create better business strategies.

I already showed you that you could simply take the same topic and make it more practical.

But in addition, you can easily pick out parts of a post that might leave readers with questions.

From that above post (read it here), I can quickly find a couple of areas that leave readers wondering:

• how do you make a non-salesy sales pitch?
• how do you come up with your product presentation strategy?
• how do you get your product in front of people in the first place? (the skeptics and customers)
• how do you create something that is above average?

Those are 4 questions (read: problems) that most readers of Seth’s article would be interested in having answered, which means they would make great content ideas.

Just make sure that your competitor’s readers are the same ones you want to attract.

Secondly, you can look at comments: Comments are powerful because they come from real readers. There’s no guesswork about what a reader is thinking.

We already looked at how you can get content ideas from your own content, but there’s no reason why you couldn’t look at your competitor’s comments.

For example, here’s a comment on one of Derek Halpern’s blog posts:

If you created content for entrepreneurs, you could turn that comment into a content idea like:

How you can leverage selling information products to sell more physical products

Thirdly, you can read any article from the reader’s point of view: In the first option, I noted that you could specifically target “strategic” content because it’ll always reveal multiple content ideas.

However, you can get ideas from any piece of content, whether it’s your own or a competitor’s.

Here’s how you do it:

Read through a piece of content from the perspective of your reader. What questions do they have while reading? Can you create content that answers these questions?

Below is part of an article published on the Content Marketing Institute site:

I put a box around an important line.

Some readers might be able to formulate a hypothesis, but I would bet that many  won’t.

For a reader, the question is:

How do I make a good hypothesis?” or “What does a good hypothesis look like?”

You could attempt to create content to answer this question from a few different angles:

• How to come up with a better test hypothesis to get more meaningful results
• 20 Examples of great test hypotheses (that result in more effective content)
• 15 Tools that will help you come up with more informed hypotheses

The better you can get into the head of your typical reader, the more of these questions you’ll spot.

Over time, you will improve, and you’ll be able to get 5-10 solid content ideas from a single post you come across.

5. No two niches are equal, you can learn a lot from others

All niches become their own echo chambers at times.

All the big blogs in your niche will, at  times, seem very similar to each other.

They all cover hot topics, and they market using the same tactics.

It’s hard to be different if all your input is from these sites in your niche. However, this is also easy to solve.

If you analyze how authoritative sites in other niches are doing their content marketing, you can often take ideas from them and adapt them to your own niche.

Let’s go through an example…

Say I really love how The Cat Site creates content. I see that they’re getting a ton of traction with their gift guides:

If you look at any of the top marketing blogs right now, none of them have any content related to gifts.

I could create my own content ideas by adapting this type of content for marketers:

• 10 Marketing themed gifts that will make your coworkers jealous
• 10 Great gifts to give to clients and customers to show your appreciation

These aren’t amazing content ideas, but they’re interesting. More importantly, they’re unique.

This is one way to stand out from all the other sites in your niche. And this technique pairs very well with the very first method of generating ideas that we looked at.

Doing it on your own: It’s very difficult to just pick a random niche and study the effectiveness of the top sites’ content marketing.

Instead, start observing sites in other areas that interest you.

Aside from marketing, you have other interests, right?

Whether it’s entrepreneurship, cooking, decorating, sports, etc., you can learn from the top sites in any niche. 

And since you’re interested in the subject (and are a reader), you have a better feel for which types of ideas those sites are using that are truly being effective.

Be aware that not every single tactic you see a site in another niche using will adapt well to your audience. So if you produce ideas (like the ones I came up with above) that just aren’t quite good enough, don’t hesitate to toss them away.

6. Find questions that no one wants to answer

This tactic won’t reveal a ton of content ideas, but it will reveal ideas of the highest quality.

In every niche, there are difficult questions to answer that many readers have.

These often get asked on forums (if there is one for a topic) but are typically ignored or danced around.

Because of this, no one really has a good answer to those types of questions. And yet, readers still want them answered.

If you can produce a great answer to any one of those questions, it will get a lot of attention and basically promote itself in the future after you’ve done your initial promotion.

There’s a catch: The reason why no other top bloggers answer these types of questions is because they are hard to answer.

You’ll have to create exceptional content to answer any of these questions. Why?

Because other bloggers have probably tried to answer the question but couldn’t do it. They end up with a mediocre post that, again, dances around the question and provides no concrete answer.

How much does a swimming pool cost? The best example I’ve heard of using this technique comes from Marcus Sheridan, a pool installer.

Years ago, if a homeowner wanted a pool, they’d have to get a quote to have any idea of what it would cost.

Typically, this would also come with aggressive sales tactics.

And it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that potential customers were not thrilled with this setup.

All they wanted to know was how much a pool would cost.

Marcus published the first of many articles to come that helped answer the questions of his existing customers and potential customers.

This content in particular focused on breaking down the cost of a swimming pool installation in as much detail as possible.

He gave the numbers that he would use when estimating the cost of a job and explained why things cost as much as they did.

Most homeowners looking for an initial estimate found this really helpful, and it wasn’t long before he started to rank for some impressive terms.

Back to you: It didn’t take long for Marcus to write the post that got him much attention, but it did take him years to gain the expertise to be able to answer the question.

Think about areas where you are an expert. Then start paying attention to questions that your readers want the answers to (on your site, competing sites, social media, etc.), but no one will answer.

These are the questions that will form the basis for extraordinary content ideas.

7. Use your expertise to predict the future

The goal for most content creators should be to become a thought leader in their industry.

You can’t do that if you’re always writing about the same topics that everyone else is writing about.

Thought leaders not only produce great content on those topics, but they also pave the way for innovation.

As you become one of the more knowledgeable experts in your niche, you will likely be able to guess how certain aspects of your industry are going to change in the future.

You can’t do these types of posts all the time, but they are another source of great content ideas that you can use to make up 5-20% of your posts.

What if you’re not an expert? That’s okay! You can still use this tactic. However, you’ll have to leverage the knowledge of the true experts in your niche.

For example, an SEO writer, Trond Lyngbø put together a great article on the future of SEO. He got in touch with several experts to get their predictions:

This is probably more valuable than any single expert’s predictions since you can compare them with each other.

I left this idea generation tactic for last because it’s the most difficult. You’ll need to either have an expert level of knowledge or be able to get responses from influencers in your niche.

Even then, you need to be able to know the areas of your niche that your readers are interested in knowing the future of.

For marketing, as an example, readers are interested in the future of:

• SEO
• Link building
• Email outreach
• Effective types of content
• Content marketing tactics
• Product creation
• etc.

I could create multiple articles for the future of every single one of those—spread out over time, of course.

Conclusion

Great content ideas give you the potential to produce great content.

But coming up with enough content ideas isn’t always easy.

That’s why I’ve given you these 7 highly effective tactics.

Start with just one or two of them for now and practice. When you get good with them, try out some of the others.

At first, you will probably struggle a bit. I hope the detail I’ve provided is enough to limit that struggle.

But over time, you will develop your “idea muscle”, and it will get easier and easier to come up with tons of great content topics. Persistence is key, and it will pay off.

If any of these tactics work well for you, or you have any questions at all, I’d love to hear about it in the comment section below.

10 Tips to Make Content Marketing Work for Small Budgets

It’s so easy. Just create amazing content consistently, and you’ll be rolling in traffic.

I’m just kidding.

Even if you know what you’re doing, content marketing takes a lot of work.

But it can pay off in a big way.

For example, Kraft’s ROI from content marketing is 4 times better than any other form of advertising.

Look around online, and you’ll quickly discover that they are not alone.

You don’t even have to go further than here.

I’ve used content marketing to grow KISSmetrics, Crazy Egg, and now Quick Sprout to well over 7-figure (annually) businesses.

I typically get around 100 comments on posts and over 1,000 social shares within days on just Twitter and Facebook alone:

Now, it’s taken me years to get here because content marketing takes patience and consistency.

But another thing it takes is a budget.

If you’re doing content marketing effectively, you’re creating some really valuable next-level content.

And if you’re creating content like that, it isn’t cheap.

Sure, you can do some of it yourself, but your time has value as well. Don’t forget that.

But like with all things, it’s possible to do content marketing both more effectively and cheaper than most businesses manage to do.

It still won’t be “cheap,” but it will be much more affordable for startups and small businesses than what they might be currently spending.

In the rest of this post, I’m going to share with you 10 tips that will help you bring down your content marketing spending significantly without sacrificing results. 

1. Focus on the most cost-efficient types of content

There are tons of different types of content you can produce.

Often, there are 4-5 or even more types of content that your target audience enjoys.

This means that you can use any combination of those types to grow your audience.

But here’s the thing…

Not all types of content give the same return.

They all cost different amounts and will generate different average numbers when it comes to traffic, subscribers, shares, etc.

Here’s a simple 3-step process you can use to find out which types of content are most cost-efficient in your niche.

Step #1 – Evaluate the cost of different types of content: The first thing you need to do is establish a baseline cost for every type of content you might be interested in producing:

• blog posts
• videos
• infographics
• slideshows
• animations
• tools
• e-books
• podcasts
• stock photo collections
• etc.

Obviously, the cost can vary based on the exact thing you’re looking for, but try to get a fairly accurate range.

There are 3 ways you can do this:

1. Get a quote from a freelancer who specializes in that type of content.
2. Determine how much time it would take to make it yourself, then multiply that by your hourly rate.
3. Use estimates from other public sources.

Technically, you could get a quote from an agency, but those are usually much more expensive than a freelancer. Since we’re trying to conserve your budget here, start with freelancers.

For the 3rd option, you can find rough estimates for most types of content online.

For example, I’ve previously written that you can get infographics made for $250 to $595 each.

When it comes to content, most good writers charge $0.10-0.20 per word (although you could negotiate a flat fee, e.g., $200 for a 2,000 word article).

And videos typically cost between $1,000 and $6,500 per finished minute of video.

One caveat: You might want to think about dividing each type of content into more specific types of content.

For example, you might be able to write a list post much faster than another type of post like a case study.

Step #2 – Research the performance of your competition’s content: If you already have a lot of content creation experience, this is an easy step for you. Just make a spreadsheet where you record the performance of each type of content.

When I say performance, I’m talking about metrics that you care about. For most, it will be a combination of:

• traffic
• social shares
• comments
• email subscribers
• backlinks

If you don’t have extensive experience, you’ll have to get this performance data from other sources—your competition.

Start by going to the biggest platform for each type of content and finding a few of the biggest channels/brands for that platform. For example:

• blog posts: blogs
• videos: YouTube
• slide shows: Slideshare
• infographics: Visual.ly

So, let’s say you were interested in making SEO videos.

You head to YouTube and search for a few major SEO terms such as:

• SEO
• SEO link building
• On page SEO

Make a list of the top creators:

We want to figure out their average result per video.

Click on the name, and then click on their Videos tab:

This will give you a list of videos they’ve uploaded.

Start by counting the number of videos the creator has made (you’ll need to click “load more” at the bottom).

In this case, Josh has made 123 videos at this point.

Next, add up the number of views that they’ve gotten.

Finally, divide the total number of views by the number of videos to get an average.

Josh gets approximately 1,000 views per video he uploads.

You want to repeat this for as many creators in your niche as possible. The more you consider, the more accurate your numbers will be.

Once you’re done, get a combined average by adding together the averages and dividing by the number of video creators.

Step #3 – Evaluate the performance of each type and choose the best: At this point, you have the cost of each type of content as well as the typical results for each.

Now, you want to divide the result metrics by the cost.

Here’s what a simple version might look like:

You’re looking to get a rough estimate of the cost per metric. Focus on the metrics you care about the most.

What you’ll probably find is that one or two types of content are much more cost effective than the rest.

Those are the types of content you should focus on producing in the future.

2. Focus on quality over quantity

One major source of wasted money is failure to maximize the results from each piece of content.

Marketers see successful bloggers posting 3-5 times a week and assume that they should too.

However, if you don’t have the budget to publish 3-5 great pieces of content, it’s pointless.

You’ll end up publishing 3-5 okay posts instead.

Growth from content marketing comes from quality, not quantity.

Each post should be as valuable as possible.

You’re better off publishing one absolutely amazing piece of content per month than publishing 30 mediocre posts.

If you can publish more than one great post—fantastic! But always start with quality.

A great example of this is Brian Dean at Backlinko.

As of now, he has about 30 articles in total on the site (seriously), and he’s been going for years now. On average, that works out to about one post a month.

He’s also built a 6-figure business from it.

How? Because every single post is amazing. Quality will always win.

But be smart, remember the 80/20 rule: When you’re dealing with a small budget, it’s always about getting the most bang for your buck.

In this case, it’s possible to take “high quality” too far.

What the 80/20 rule says is that 80% of your results will come from 20% of your efforts.

In this case, it means that 80% of the value of your content will come from 20% of the effort you put into creating it.

The main takeaway from this principle is that each extra bit of effort has diminishing results.

By the time you’ve put in a solid amount of effort (say 80-90%) of what you’re capable of, you’ve pretty much maxed out the level of quality that you can get from a piece of content.

Resist the urge to go overboard by doing things like:

• creating custom images that don’t add much value to the post
• messing around with the layout even though it’s already easy to read
• changing sentences over and over again so that they’re “perfect”

If you do those things, you’re spending time with no real return, which means you’re wasting part of your budget.

Aim for very high quality, but know when a piece of content is about as good as it’s going to get.

3. The absolute cheapest way to create great content consistently

Another way to lower your content creation costs is to get creative.

Instead of creating content from scratch, you can repurpose existing content.

If you’re not familiar with the term, repurposing means turning your existing content into a different form of content.

For example, you might turn a blog post into a video, slideshow, or podcast.

The main benefit is that all the research is already done. You can also often take images you created for the first piece of content and use them in the new pieces.

This can cut your content creation time reliably in half for each piece of repurposed content.

And it can also expose your content to a different audience, which is always a good thing.

Repurposing in action: Let’s go over a few quick examples of repurposing content.

Paul Gordon Brown creates content about reaching students with social media.

For example, he created this popular slideshow on the topic:

However, he also uses a lot of this information in his blog posts, and he’s even hosting talks on the subject:

I highly doubt he’s creating a new presentation from scratch every time.

For bloggers, there’s a common type of repurposing: turning a blog post into an infographic.

Brian Dean originally wrote a post about on-page SEO and then, he created an infographic and embedded it within the same page:

You could also do what I usually do and just post the infographic as its own post.

Brian chose to combine the two so that he could promote that post to an even bigger audience.

And here’s one final example of content repurposing.

The Crazy Egg blog publishes a new blog post every weekday. Some of these posts we turn into short podcast episodes:

We have a great podcaster, who essentially reads the post and records it.

Which types of content convert well into other types of content? Any type of content can be repurposed as any other type of content, but it’s easier to do with certain types than others.

The easiest types to repurpose, in most situations, are:

• blog posts into: infographics, podcasts, e-books
• infographics into: slideshows, videos
• videos into: animations (gifs), blog posts

For the most part, visual content translates well into other visual content, while written content translates well into other written (or spoken) content.

4. Spend time improving your efficiency

This tip is for you if you do a lot of content marketing work yourself.

If you are creating, planning, and/or promoting your own content, you can significantly reduce the amount of time you spend just by learning a few simple ways to work more efficiently.

I’ve seen marketers double the speed at which they do a particular task just by focusing on it for a short period. Here are a few in-depth posts I’ve written in the past:

• Don’t Waste Your Time: 6 Ways to Be More Efficient on Social Media
• 10 Efficient Ways to Save Time So You Can Follow Your Dreams
• How to Double Your Writing Speed Without Lowering Its Quality

And while the specific things you need to do to increase your efficiency depend on your current work habits, there are some general techniques that are almost always useful.

Technique #1 – Batching: Batching is a simple technique that involves doing as much of one task as you can at once.

For example, instead of trying to come up with a post idea every time you’re creating a new post, you could come up with 100 all at once.

This improves efficiency in a couple of ways:

• no transition time – it always takes a few minutes to get going on the next task. Instead of spending this transition time every time you come with an idea, you only spend it one time, at the start of your batch session.
• momentum - once you start doing something, it becomes easier to continue doing it, resulting in faster and better work.

Here are ways you could apply batching immediately:

• coming up with content ideas in batches
• outlining your posts in batches
• writing posts in batches (maybe during the first week of the month) and then scheduling them
• editing content in batches
• collecting names of people to reach out to (for promotion)
• sending out link or share request emails

And there are many more.

Technique #2 – Outsourcing (when it’s smart): There are two main reasons for outsourcing a part of your content marketing process.

It’s best done when you either don’t have the skill or the time.

In particular, the first reason is most important.

Why?

Because if you don’t have the skill, say to design an infographic well, it costs you because you will have a lower quality piece of content.

What most don’t realize is that it’s often more expensive to create it yourself as well.

You might value your time at $50/hour, but a freelancer will charge you $100/hour (hypothetically). So you think that you will save money by doing it yourself.

However, in the vast majority of cases, the freelancer has so much more experience than you that they can do the job in less than half the time it would take you.

This means that outsourcing would actually cost less than doing it yourself, plus you get a better product.

If you recognize that you’re not very good at a particular part of content marketing and don’t have the passion to become an expert, outsource it.

You can’t do everything yourself, so get help in the areas where it makes the most sense for the quality and budget.

5. Forget the parts of content marketing that aren’t necessary

Believe me, I understand when marketers, especially new ones, get overwhelmed by content marketing.

The content creation process alone takes a lot of time, expertise, and resources, but then you need to promote it as well.

Here’s the thing though:

You don’t need to be everywhere at once.

Remember the 80/20 rule? It applies here too.

Eighty percent of your success will come from 20% of your effort. So, find the parts that add little value to your marketing and cut them.

Where to start: The most and least efficient activities will depend on your niche and business.

But let’s look at an example.

When your primary goal is to drive traffic to your content to eventually make sales, what should you focus on?

In most cases, email marketing will give you the best return on investment (ROI – your time and spending) by far:

And yet, some marketers spend just as much of their time getting followers on social media, handing out business cards at conferences, and posting on forums, etc. as they do on getting more subscribers.

When you have a tight budget, the activities with smaller ROI don’t matter.

So, unless you’re in a niche that social media is crucial for (fitness, food, home decor, clothing, etc.), it’s likely something you can forget about.

All you need are the one or two channels that give you the best results.

6. Get extremely specific

This might be disheartening at first:

It’s very difficult to compete with bigger budgets.

Want to outrank a Quick Sprout post on Google for a term I’ve targeted? You’ll have to create something amazing and promote the heck out of it.

And that costs money.

The good news is that you don’t need to go head to head with larger budgets.

Consider SEO. You can target longer tail keywords at first and throw your entire budget at them.

These keywords typically have less competition and are much easier to rank highly for:

When you do this, you’re not going to get amazing traffic right away, and that’s what scares off most businesses.

But you’ll get more traffic by ranking #1 for searches that get a few hundred queries per month than you will ranking #10 for a search that gets a few thousand queries a month.

Guess what happens over time?

Your traffic continues to grow, and so does your subscriber list. Growth in content marketing happens exponentially, so those small initial results grow into big things a few years down the road.

Additionally, as you start to get results from your work, you can slowly add that extra revenue to your content marketing budget, accelerating growth further.

You can take this approach to your content marketing as a whole, not just SEO.

Instead of creating content for marketers (like I do), create content for a more specific audience, e.g., social media marketers or small business marketers, etc.

The more specific you get, the less competition you have—just make sure there’s enough demand. If you’re writing on somewhat obscure topics, even mediocre content would get some attention.

Once you capture that group, you can start creating content for related groups and expand.

7. Share valuable personal data

Something that a decent number of content marketers have picked up on recently is the effectiveness of transparency.

In short, transparency consists of revealing behind the scenes data and information (personal).

One amazing example of this is the Groove HQ blog. They write about marketing topics, but they support their points with personal data and experiments:

They pretty much reveal anything that adds value to a post.

For example, they shared how they determined which social networks to focus on:

There are two reasons why transparency can be great:

• It makes your content better – Using personal data means that you have something unique to offer (no one else could provide it). Having something new to say is a key part of creating value in your content.
• It can be cheaper to create – What’s easier: getting some data from your own Google Analytics or trying to get an expert to respond to you and to contribute to your content? You can save a lot of time using personal data, which means you can use your budget for other things.

8. It’s possible to get free content from amazing creators

If you’re hiring writers to create content for you, it probably costs you at least a few hundred dollars per post.

But there’s a way to get great content free.

And that’s by accepting guest posts.

Remember though, just because you accept guest posts doesn’t mean you have to approve every pitch.

You’ll end up rejecting 90% of them, but those 10% of good ones will be from quality writers who are willing to contribute in exchange for exposure (to promote their own site).

There are two ways to find these good guest-posters:

1. Create a guest-post page on your website - they will find it when they research potential targets
2. Manually reach out to good guest-posters – if you see a good guest post on a competitor’s site, you could email that creator and ask them to contribute to your site.

Right now, I want to focus on the first option because it’s much less work in the long run.

A good guest-post guidelines page has three essential elements.

Part #1 – Incentives for the guest writers: When a content creator finds your guest-post page, their first question is: “Is it worth contributing to this site?”

The bigger your site is, the more you can offer.

Regardless, make this one of your first sections, and frame the benefits in terms that guest posters will find appealing. They are looking for traffic, links, fame, etc.

Here’s a screen shot of Boost Blog Traffic’s guest post guidelines, which are some of the best I’ve ever seen.

Part #2 – What you are looking for: Once the creator is interested in your site, the attention shifts back to you.

You need to make it really clear that you’re only looking for exceptional content.

If you publish content in a certain way (a typical length, style, etc.), this is the time to establish your expectations.

Part #3 – How should they pitch to you? Finally, you need to let them know what you’re looking for in a pitch.

If you don’t, you’ll get tons of emails with unnecessary information, which will waste your time (and your time is money).

Outline the basics of what you’d like to see in a pitch.

You can add more to your guest-post page, but make sure you have at least these three parts.

Writers will start finding you and sending you pitches a few weeks after you publish it (or sooner if you have a popular site).

9. Updating can be as good as starting from scratch

Something that content creators in evolving niches always face is content becoming outdated.

For example, you might write about tax guidelines for 2015.

Well, come 2016 (after tax day), that post has lost 90% of its value.

The same goes for many other industries. SEO posts from 5 years ago are just about worthless now.

But instead of creating a new post from scratch, you can often use old content—for much cheaper.

Here are your two options.

Option #1 – Update time-sensitive content: Things typically change incrementally over time.

So, instead of creating a whole new piece of content, you can just update your original content to reflect that small change in your industry.

This is something Brian Dean does with a lot of his content at Backlinko. For example, he has updated his complete list of Google ranking factors many times now:

It was originally published at least a year ago, and the list has grown to more than 200.

Because Brian keeps the list updated, it remains the #1 resource on this topic.

Option #2 – Republish old evergreen content: While you can update old content to keep its value high, you can also simply republish old posts.

When you’re first starting out, you have a small audience. Once you grow your audience, the majority of it wouldn’t see a lot of your old good content. By republishing your old content, you’ll expose it to your new, bigger audience.

Although I wouldn’t do it very often, you can republish old evergreen content so that it shows up at the top of your blog.

Then, you essentially get a new post for nothing.

10. Learn to be extremely selective with your promotion

This final tip is again about trimming the fat.

You need to ensure that you’re getting a worthwhile return from all the promotional work you’re doing.

If you have limited time, focus on the most likely sources of traffic for your new content.

Start with your email list: Always begin new content promotion by emailing your email subscribers.

These are the people who already like your content and appreciate it enough to sign up for your list.

They are by far the most likely people to share your content with new audiences.

I email my subscribers after I publish a new post, using a simple template:

It works really well and takes next to no time to do.

Then, reach out to past sharers: Not all of your fans like to get email updates. Some would prefer just following you on social media.

But when you announce on social media that you’ve published a new piece of content, they might miss it.

Instead, you should look at who shared your content on social media in the past and then send them a personal message about your new content.

There are two ways to do this. Start with your own social posts, and click on the number of shares you got (on any network):

This will show you who shared your content.

Send them a direct message letting them know about the post, saying that you think they will enjoy it.

Secondly, you can also search for a topic (or even a past article title) using a tool such as Topsy.

For example, since this article is about content marketing, I could search for “content marketing” in the tool.

This brings up a list of the most popular articles on Twitter in the selected time range:

Clicking the “more” link beside the speech bubble will bring up all the people who shared that piece of content:

If you have really limited time, start with the “influential only” users, who have the highest number of followers. One share from them is worth more than from the average user.

Conclusion

Content marketing is all about quality, which typically isn’t cheap.

However, there are ways to make content marketing work even for small budgets.

Try to implement at least 2-3 of these tips, and you should be able to bring down the cost of your content marketing to a more reasonable level.

If you have any other ideas about using content marketing with a small budget, I’d love it if you shared them in the comments below.