The Ultimate Content Creation Guide

In this post we will show you exactly how we execute high quality content creation at scale! (including sharing all of our standard operating procedures and article briefs for free!)

I have been a long time fan of Spencers and the NichePursuits audience, and up until recently (~6months) I had a demanding day job and had to focus on building systems to be able to operate my online business. Leveraging systems for creating great content I have built up my portfolio of websites to earn over $14k/month and I have left the day job to pursue my online ventures full time.

This is a giant guide but I will try and make it as actionable as possible!

Quick Reference:

• Get 7 standard operating procedures and article writing briefs (FREE) – HERE
• Get an exclusive and limited discount for done for you content marketing at ContentRefined (10% off!) – HERE (use coupon code “spencer” to save 10%)

In this post I am happy to reveal here many of the article briefs and SOPs we created as part of launching ContentRefined into a leading done for you content marketing service.

This post is a MONSTER and I hope it doesn’t overwhelm you as everything that we do gets shared.

If you are a website owner like me, you understand how difficult and time consuming it can be to maintain your sites, producing and publishing consistent content is tough!

Over time, I have accumulated over 60 active money websites, most of which are affiliate sites, blogs or FBA businesses. Although this portfolio of sites is still really fun to build out and make money off of, other aspects of my online business have really become a large focal point and I have less and less time to spend on my site portfolio.

With the number of projects I have (fellow willing sufferer of the bright shiny object syndrome like Spencer), in order to achieve sustainable I have to be crazy focused on systems!

Although all of my sites are a little bit different, a major commonality they share is that they all require great content marketing to sustain/grow. As you know, the quality of your content is something that is becoming more and more crucial to any site as Google keeps raising the quality bar and finessing their algorithms.

Because of my many projects I hired a new team member to help me run my money site portfolio and specifically focus on creating the systems to publish great quality content. I wanted more than just help maintaining my sites, I wanted my portfolio to have solid processes in place to ensure systematic quality without feeling like I had to do much myself.

It originally took a few months of really hard work, messing with different content marketing tools, and making a ton of mistakes to figure it out, but we have been able to create and execute a company SOP around systematic, high quality keyword research, content creation and content publishing. As a result, we have noticed that our rankings have been consistently increasing and the portfolio is experiencing pretty solid and consistent growth (as shown below from my income report).

As the site portfolio management started getting more and more efficient with this SOP, we saw potential for expansion as the need for quality content is a common problem for not only myself, but also for most site owners.

I pitched this idea (done for you content marketing) to a few members of my list, and as a result we got a few beta testers to see if the service would actually work for their sites and if they would see value in our processes. After a few months of tweaking our procedures and figuring out where our sore points were, we launched Content Refined, a one stop shop solution for your online content.

Now this blog post is all about sharing the tools, SOPs and insights created/learned in the creation of this system.

 

We truly believe that good quality content creation is attainable for everyone regardless of budget and we would like to share some tips, secrets and even some of our documentation with you so that you can either do it yourself with your own team, or choose to try out Content Refined if it makes sense for you and your business.

The next section will show you how to SYSTEMATIZE and OUTSOURCE EVERY STEP in the process!

1. Hire Your Team
2. Complete Keyword Research
3. Assign Article(s) to Your Writers
4. Writers Write the Articles
5. Systematically Edit the Articles
6. Publish the Articles

Do it Yourself with your Own Content Team:

If you want to create your own content using the Content Refined process, your best friend is going to be Upwork. Upwork is a great platform to hire a small team which should consist of at least one writer and a Virtual Assistant.

DIY – ONE – Hiring a Team:

Hiring consistent and high quality writers is an ongoing battle and something that we are constantly doing- However, we have managed to build up a really good core team of writers that have been with us for a long time and who produce a lot of content for us on a monthly basis by following our Hiring SOP and keep reading to see exactly how to do it on upwork.

Our 5 fundamentals on hiring/managing writers on Upwork is the following:

1. Hire fast with no interview
2. Hire more than you will eventually need. For example, if you have the need for 1 writer, hire 3 or 4
3. Fire quickly-  as soon as it is clear that the writer is not going to be a good fit for you fire them
4. Keep them consistently working! No freelancer wants a dry week. This is their livelihood and they will prioritize another client over you if you don’t have consistent work for them.
5. Make sure you have a system in place to manage their output and that you give them great instructions and feedback! Here are the General Instructions we give potential candidates for their test articles!

Note, me and my team have A LOT of experience on UpWork with 1,661 hires and over $400k in lifetime spend! So the tips above and below have been hard earned.

How to post a job and vet good potential candidates on upwork:

Part A: Posting your job post

Step 1: Log in to your upwork account

Step 2: Go to the Jobs tab and click on “post a job”

Step 3: Select “part time” unless you’re looking for a dedicated full time writer

Step 4: Create your Job posting

Step 5: Make sure that the category is “writing” and the subcategory is “web content”

Then- describe the job with the requirements. Generally what is listed below should suffice

Step 6: Add a screening question to weed people out! Generally with our screening questions, we ask candidates to fix a sentence that is grammatically incorrect so that you can just skip over their profile and application if they answer badly

Step 7: Click “post job”.

DONE! You’ve posted your job!

 

Part B: Hiring Your Writer(s)

Step 1: Wait 12 hours and check your job posting, you should have a few freelancers on the list at this point when you check your job posting

Step 2: Click “Review proposals” and you will get to a list of those who have applied

Step 3: Things we look for

1. Budget: Does the bid fall within the budget that you specified?
2. What have other clients said about this freelancer? We look for 80% job success minimum
3. They have to be North American. Either from the USA or Canada. We’ve struggled with international writers with language capabilities, time zone changes etc.. The best writers for our business have consistently been from North America and educated in North America.

Step 4: If you find one you like and meets the metrics, click “hire freelancer”

TIP – In a world where hiring and firing has almost no cost the risk you are mitigating with an interview is not worth your time. Hire fast and fire fast!

Step 5: Make sure the budget is deposited and give them 3 days to complete their first test articles using these General Instructions.

Step 6: Once you get the articles back, it’s time to review the articles for your quality assessment. You’re going to want to look for the following things:

1. Assess grammar and language capabilities to see if the article meets your expectations
2. Copy and paste text of the article in Copyscape to make sure that the article isn’t plagiarized

           a. http://ift.tt/I3vzgJ (or free option – http://ift.tt/t32mOA)

Step 7: It’s time to make a decision and use your judgment in hiring/firing decisions. If you like what you see then give them a shot and you’ve got yourself a new writer!

TIP – Tools like MarketMuse or Grammerly can help systematize your evaluation of writers.

Now it is time to keep building your content creation team. Just a writer is not enough if you want to build a team to execute the entire strategy!

 

Hiring a Virtual Assistant for Keyword Research and for Content Publishing:

Let’s face it, Keyword Research and Content publishing can be complicated, technical and very time consuming. To understand the fundamentals of Keyword Research, check out the Longtail Pro University course for a really great, in depth look at how to do great Keyword Research.

For more technical tasks such as Keyword Research and publishing, I have traditionally hired a talented virtual assistant to help me with this. Now hiring a VA can be tricky, but for anyone who is trying to build up a good website or online business, I believe a VA is essential. Read below for a step by step guide to finding a qualified VA quickly on upwork.

Step 1: Log in to your upwork account

Step 2: Go to the Jobs tab and click on “post a job”

Step 3: Select “part time” unless you’re looking for a dedicated full time Virtual Assistant

Step 4: Create your Job posting

Here I will put down the requirements for each task that I need completed in the job description.

For Keyword Research I generally write something like this the job description:

“ I need someone to execute high-level keyword research using advanced keyword research tools that we will provide to the right candidate. Candidate must be able to do website research to make sure that there is no overlap in existing content, must have experience with Keyword research and must be able to come up with creative and competitive post titles. Ideal candidate will be either a Native English speaker or proficient in the English language”

Whereas for publishing tasks, I’ll get into the nitty gritty of what I need done for my Content publishing tasks:

1. Publishing professional articles onto various WordPress sites and posting images that are copyright free and relevant to the article
2. Embedding comparison tables using HTML and/or plugins
3. Finding and posting relevant videos
4. Finding authority sites with high DA and PA in the same niche and linking externally
5. Linking internally to other related articles
6. Adding meta descriptions
7. Understanding Keyword placement
8. Understanding YOAST scores
9. Great English communication with the Project Manager is a must

Step 5: Click “post job”.

Step 6: Let some time pass ( 12-24 hours or so) and then it’s time to sort through your candidates

Here we are going to look for 4 things:

• How many hours has the person worked on UpWork (~30% weighting)

The general rule of thumb is “the more hours the better”. What can happen a lot is that someone will sign up on UpWork, apply to a job but then just never complete the assignment. Someone who is dedicated and who has a career in freelancing on UpWork will absolutely deliver results for you as they will want to ensure that they will be receiving positive feedback and future work.

• UpWork Feedback (~30% weighting)

General rule of thumb on this one is that if someone is below a 4 rating I would stay away. Reviews are useful to read but don’t take one negative review too seriously if they have many positive reviews as well.

• Matching Skill Set (~20% weighting)

In my case I am generally looking to find  someone who has done this kind of work before. WordPress experience is a must, whereas for keyword research this is something I am willing to teach based on my own preferences.

• English Skills (~20% weighting)

Communication is essential to this business and I want to find someone who does not have any broken English in their application. What I’ll also do is send them a message via upwork and try to have a real time conversation with them in order to assess their English.

Step 7: Hire 2 of the best VA’s and Give them a Test

The best method that I have found is to do a blind experiment with my VA’s instead of an interview. In real life, the costs of making a hiring mistakes are high. In the online world, ending a contract only costs a few hours of work. You can save yourself tons of time by not doing interviews.

Assign each VA a short term publishing assignment and a short terms Keyword Research Assignment. It is important to send the instructions and assign the tasks right after you have hired them. The assignments I am looking to assign are going to be  something that is simple and but that will test them on skills sets that are required for the job.

Step 8: Time to Review and Compare the VA’s work

The most important first step of the review you’re going to have of them is the initial communication. Questions are great- but in this case, the tasks I need completed are going to be simple and if they actually have the experience that they said they have, I shouldn’t be getting a ton of emails asking simple questions like “how do I save a post to Draft Mode” or anything they could easily learn on Google. If they do, then they will undoubtedly be a burden on me. If they are able to execute the tasks I give them properly, in a timely fashion, and without much guidance, I know that they will be good fit.

Using this method for testing VA’s has saved me so much time and has been a huge help to me and my team in terms of weeding out low performers without spending too much time on it.

Basically the 4 skills that I am looking at during this testing phase is:

1. Speed of communication
2. Quality of communication
3. Quality of questions they ask
4. Quality of final piece of work

CONGRATS! You now have a team to start managing the creation of your content for your sites!

 

DIY – TWO – Keyword Research

So now that you’ve got your Virtual assistant, you can start thinking about Content Creation. The first obstacle is finding solid Keywords and Article Titles for your articles. This is a process that we have nailed and it’s really simple. As I mentioned above, Long Tail Pro University is a great way to educate yourself on how to use the tool properly or you can follow this simple guide on how we conduct solid Keyword Research.

To give you some background, LTP has a few different subscription options that you can choose from. You can read more about the differences between each package here. If you are unsure about buying LTP, you can also sign up for their 10 day free trial.

Step 1: The first thing you do once you have LTP is set up a new project. You can do this by clicking on the green Add Project button.

Step 2: Now that you have a new project, you are able to find some keywords to analyze. You want to click on Find Keywords. Here you will have the option to add your own keywords or add Seed Keywords. If you add your own keywords, it will only analyze those keywords, however if you use the Seed Keyword section, it will find keywords related to the keywords you type in. I like to use the Seed Keyword option as it will bring up keywords you may not have thought of and it will widen your search.

Go ahead and input different keywords into the Seed Keyword option and we like to use these settings:

• Max result per seed keyword: 50
• Monthly Searches Min: 200
• Monthly Searches Min: 6000
• Suggested bid: We leave this blank
• Advertiser competition: We check all

Then click Retrieve Adwords Suggestions.

For this example I am going to type in the following seed keywords:

• cheap 7 inch tablets
• Best tablets for kids
• tablet reviews
• compare tablets

Once LTP gathered all the data, I was left with 62 keywords:

Step 3: Now we will need to do a competitor analysis.

So here, we are looking for at least 4/5 following metrics:

• 3+ sites that have a Domain Authority of 30 or less
• 3+ sites that have a Page Authority of 30 or less
• 4+ sites that have 30 page links or less
• 0-3 sites that have an exact match keyword title
• 1+ sites that are less than 3 years old

What makes this option the quick and easy option is that it gathers all the metrics for each keyword for you! What you need to do is click on each keyword one by one.

For this example, I am going to look at the keyword “tablets under $100”

You will want a place to keep this information, so I have created a document that you can download to help you organize your information.

Another good feature that LTP has is the ability to download the keywords you find into a .csv file onto your computer so you can open it up in Excel. This makes it easier for you as you will not need to type out all the keywords along with their titles, Suggested Bid, and  Local Searches. If you have Long Tail Pro Platinum, it will also give you the Avg. KC.

From the above photo, we can conclude that;

• 0 sites have an exact match title
• 5 sites have a Domain KC of less than 30
• 6 sites have less than 30 page links
• 3 site in less than 3 years old

As we can see from our analysis (green=good), this keyword meets 5/5  of the metrics we wanted, so this would be a good keyword to go after.

After you have your main keyword (keyword with over 1,000 monthly searches) you will then want to find some long tail keywords relevant to your main one. These will help to generate traffic  (in turn more income) to your site and allows you to tie in more products to your site.

DIY – THREE – Assigning Articles to Your Writer

So now that you’ve got your keywords, you can start thinking about Content Creation.

Once you have your keyword that fits within these metrics, you want to create an article title that has the main keyword in it, generally at the beginning of the title. For example, if the keyword is “Survival Tents”, you want the title to be something like “Best Survival Tents for Winter Camping”.

Now, I believe that this part of the process is where we really stick out and where we have really invested in the quality aspect of our content. As you probably are already aware of, Google ranks content based on a number of different metrics. There is so much garbage and terrible content on the Internet that google wants to reward websites who have the best content to encourage quality content creation.

One measure that Google will take is the “In-Depth” article metric. The idea of this is to ensure that a piece of content covering a topic isn’t simply stuffing the article full of low competition keywords, rather they are discussing several topics that broadly cover the “Focus Topic” to give the reader a better understanding and therefore rendering the article more useful to the reader. This is all about LSI keywords and the Hummingbird update (Neil Patel did a great case study here).

So how do we make sure topics are being covered thoroughly? It is difficult for writers to have the knowledge base on every topic assigned for them to cover it “thoroughly” and with accordance to what Google believes is “thorough” and “ in-depth”. To address this problem and in order to setup our writers up for success, we invested in a really great tool called MarketMuse.

MarketMuse is a piece of online Software that allows you to grade your content by comparing it against other high ranking posts on on the same “Focus Topic”. It will help if you assign your articles to your writer and ask them to include topics and other keywords that will lead to different content opportunities.

What we’ve done, is we’ve basically built a brief for each article based on MarketMuse outputs with subheadings and sub topics that will guarantee that our writers won’t miss the ball on the article in terms of content depth.

For example, if I’m going to assign the article “Best 8 Inch Tablet”, I’m going to plug it in to MarketMuse BEFORE the article is written to see what it will suggest to me. See screenshot:

From the Screenshot, you can see that the Focus Topic has been analyzed. Three Metrics from this screenshot will help me determine my approach for my article on this topic.

This is keyword research going beyond what keyword research tools reveal and actually showing how competitive the top pages are in terms of the likely quality of their content.

1. Content Score:

The Average Content Score is 28 whereas the best article on the internet for this topic has a score of 53

2. Related Topics:

MarketMuse will output a list of “related topics” that should be mentioned in the article. Copy this list to be able to provide it to your writers.

3. Content Wordcount:

This isn’t a huge factor for us, but definitely helps us figure out how long our article should be in order to compete online.

So with these metrics in mind, check out the Review Article Brief that I would send to my writer for this article here! Moreover, including an appropriate word count in combination with the suggested keywords and topics, will almost guarantee that your writer will cover the topic properly and that your article will be of high ranking potential.

As an FYI- We have a few different types of articles that we assign to our writers, you can check out our writing brief templates below:

1. Review Article Writing Instructions
2. Blog Post Article Writing Instructions
3. How to Post Writing Instructions
4. Buyer’s Guide Writing Instructions
5. List Post Writing Instructions

DIY – FOUR – Writer Writes the Article

Based on the instructions provided in the section above your writer now writes the article.

DIY – FIVE – Editing Using MarketMuse:

Now do not fear! If your writer didn’t follow the instructions properly while writing your article, you can still salvage it and enrich it using MarketMuse. This step by step guide will show and explain how to use the tool MarketMuse to create better, more valuable and in depth content for  your website!

Step 1: Go to the website of MarketMuse and login with your credentials if you have an account

Step 2: Once you sign in, this will be your view. You might have to click on “dashboard” or “content Analyzer tab” to get to this view if it’s your first time signing in

Step 3: Take the article that you will be editing and simply copy and paste the focus Topic, the Title and the article in the correct areas. The click the “analyze” button

Hint: The focus topic will be the Keyword which is always in the title of the article

Step 4: It might take a minute or two to analyze, but at the Final analysis should look like this. I’ve pointed to the Content Depth Score, the Average Content Score Target and the Best Content Score.

We generally want our articles to be above the average content score target. So for this one, we can clearly see that it needs some work

Step 5: Read the Article from start to finish

Step 6: Now this is a judgment call. IF you feel like the article is badly written or has not been written by a native english speaker ( Basic grammar + sentence structure issues, odd choice of words etc..) you should probably have it re-written by another writer just throwing out the bad article.

IF not, then you should proceed to step 7

Step 7: After you’ve read the and corrected the errors in the articles, you’re going to look on the right side of the page and look at some of the keywords+topics listed.

Step 8: Without “ Keyword Stuffing” or inserting Keywords that are unrelated, start going through the article and adding suggested keywords where they fit and add value. You will see that it is really easy to get the article up to well above average by just adding a few value added sentences addressing any keywords mentioned.

Step 9: Now that we’ve got our content up to a reasonable standard by just using different words, take a look at the missing words on the list of keywords. They will generally identify a missing subject from the article. Here you can see that the writer didn’t think to include anything about Android tablets which is clearly an important thing to mention if the keyword is high up on the list.

Step 10:

This is where your chance to do some content writing fits in. Simply add in a small paragraph that talks about windshield insurance. It doesn’t have to be extensive.

DONE! You have a great article ready to be published!

DIY – SIX – Publish Your Article

Now that you have your crisp piece of market competitive content, it’s time to publish your article. You can either do it yourself if you don’t have a Virtual Assistant, or you can assign it to your Virtual Assistant. Either way, to ensure that all the SEO functionality is being covered, follow these steps:

Step 1: Login

Step 2: Adding a new post to the website

• Once you are on your sites dashboard page, you will need to go to either the left hand side and click on Post —> Add new post or go to the “edit with Thrive” depending on the site
• If you don’t know how to edit with thrive look at these tutorials! They are super useful and will help you figure out Thrive, which is in my opinion the one stop shop for WordPress publishing!

Step 3: Inputting the article into the post

• Enter the title of the article
• Copy and Paste the content from the article into the body section

Step 4: Editing articles

• Ensure all subtitles are formatted to Heading 3 and any other types of formatting edits you want to do! I suggest the following:

• Embed comparison tables using HTML and/or plugins
• Find and post relevant videos to your article
• Find authority sites in the same niche and link externally

HINT*

• Find some relevant popular terms in the article to link to authority sites. So for example, in this article we could link the keyword “graffiti” to the wiki page for graffiti – http://ift.tt/1Vhb5IN

You can do this with different sites such as About.com or any other general authority sites.

• Link internally

• Link internally to other article on your site

 

• Add meta descriptions with the keywords

• Add Tags

• Add Tags For the Post, Use 1-4 tags that are related to the article. In this case the article was about becoming a pressure washers so here are some example tags below:

• SEO (Copy the Title of the post into the SEO Title Box and add the first 1-2 sentences into the Description Below (Each Site Will Have A Slightly Different looking SEO Section here)

 

• Categories

• IF there is a category, select the category (sometimes you won’t have one for your article, which is ok!)

Step 5: Publish your article!

Once you are done, publish your article and make sure that they YOAST scores are either yellow or green!

Good:

OK:

Bad:

The downside of the Do It Yourself Model

Although this all seems pretty straightforward (which it is), one thing we haven’t really talked about is cost.

Downside 1 – Cost of Writers and Tools:

Unfortunately, the tools that we recommend using in order to have a competitive advantage are quite pricey, and it really only makes sense for people who are crushing out massive amounts of content and really making a business out of their websites to invest in these tools.

• LongTail Pro Pricing: Depending on the package you get, you’re looking at between 30-100 dollars/ month for the Keyword Research tool.
• MarketMuse: Again, depending on the package you get, you’re looking at spending between 200-500 dollars/ month for the Marketmuse tool.

Paying your writers and your VA’s: To get a good writer, you’re looking at around $50 an article and to get a good Virtual assistant you’re probably looking to spend between 5-10 dollars an hour.

In total, if you’re doing this yourself you’re probably looking at around 500-800 dollars a month for solid content creation for one website. This doesn’t even include images if you’re sourcing from a stock image account. There are ways to not do everything outlined in this guide and you will be able to save money.

Downside 2 – Time to Setup and Manage the Team

There are a few moving parts in this process that all need to be managed. Getting someone on your team responsible for the overall management of the process including the keyword research and publishing can add a lot of time/cost/complexity to the process.

If you are needing articles right away it can be very slow to get this entire process setup.

Done For You Content Marketing – ContentRefined.Com

This blog post was to give you insight into the exact process we have for content creation so that you have the resources and information at your fingertips to build out a similar system for your own sites.

We hope all the article brief templates shared will be helpful!

Get Your FREE SOPs and Article Brief Templates Here

7 of our KEY templates all shared for free! Steal Them All While They Are Available!

All this free information I am sure will provide a lot of value to many people within the NichePursuits community.

However, for those that are looking to scale their business or find a method to get great content created we have a special offer for you!

NichePursuits Audience Receive 10% Off!

(use coupon code “spencer”)

ContentRefined.com has scaled rapidly since its launch and now delivers a couple hundred great quality posts per month to clients with Affiliate Sites, ECommerce Sites and SaaS businesses.

At ContentRefined we are a marketing first focused content creation service that does everything for you from advanced keyword research through to blog post publishing.

As shown above we believe in being fully transparent and here is our exact process…

As a special for being a NichePursuits member we have a discount for you to give you a 10% discount for the first month using “spencer” – to signup click here

Make sure to use the limited coupon code “spencer”!

The post The Ultimate Content Creation Guide appeared first on Niche Pursuits.

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5 Ways to Amplify the Reach of Your Content Without Spending a Dime

Content marketing can be a soul-crushing endeavor.

It’s like this. You spend several hours or maybe even days meticulously putting together what seems like a brilliant blog post, slideshow, infographic, etc.

But even with all your hard work and dedication, your content falls on deaf ears.

You post it on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and any other network you can think of, but there’s no reaction.

Maybe you get a handful of shares, but your content never gains any momentum.

Are you alone?

Nope.

Some startling stats on content marketing

Here’s the deal.

There’s a lot of content that gets published every day. I mean a lot!

Just take a look at the skyrocketing number of blog posts published on WordPress between 2006 and 2016:

And according to BuzzSumo, “The number of pages Google has indexed over 7 years from 2008 to 2014 has increased from 1 trillion to 30 trillion.

This means one thing: more competition.

As more and more content gets created, it results in more “noise,” which inevitably makes it harder to bring attention to your content.

Here’s the most disturbing stat of all from the American Marketing Association:

“Marketers are blogging 800 percent more but getting nearly 100 percent fewer shares.”

Here’s what that looks like:

This isn’t exactly encouraging if content marketing is one of your primary means of advertising.

So, how can you get your content in front of your audience?

More importantly, can you amplify its reach without digging into your budget?

It all starts with an effective content amplification strategy.

You need to implement tactics that ensure your content attracts two key things: shares and links.

These are the foundation of content amplification.

I would now like to discuss five techniques I have personally had success with, which—if done correctly—can work for you too.

1. Create content that features original research

Let’s start from the top.

I’ll begin by going over a couple forms of content I’ve found to receive an insane number of shares and links.

After all, the first step to amplifying your reach is to create content people are genuinely interested in.

This is a natural catalyst for shares and links.

One type of content in particular that kills it is content that includes original research.

By this I mean statistics, graphs, charts, and other forms of data that provide readers with in-depth insight on a topic.

One particular piece of content I really love and have linked to on several occasions is this one from OkDork: Why Content Goes Viral: What Analyzing 100 Million Articles Taught Us

Noah Kagan (the creator of OkDork) partnered with BuzzSumo to analyze 100 million articles to determine things like:

• which content is likely to get the most social shares
• the correlation between content length and number of shares
• which emotions you should target

Here are a couple of graphs to illustrate the point:

It’s incredibly thorough and well-written and has received a lot of attention as a result.

I’ve also noticed that sites such as The Content Marketing Institute and ConversionXL that provide users with consistent original research perform very well.

I’ve been doing this myself, mining data that has never been collected before and turning it into actionable marketing tactics.

Some of it is super technical data.

But it always has value. And that’s the whole goal!

I realize that performing your own research can be time-consuming and expensive, but it can really pay dividends in the long run.

I suggest incorporating this into your content strategy.

2. Create exhaustive “what is” or “how to” guides

Readers will inevitably have questions.

The resource that answers those questions most effectively is usually the one that gets their attention, which is often followed by shares and links.

You can amplify your reach by being the one who creates the best, most thorough, and most exhaustive guide.

Typically, this will come in one of two formats: “what is” or “how to” guide.

Your goal is to use your knowledge and expertise to walk readers through a step-by-step process, answering any questions they may have along the way.

Here’s an example.

I wrote a long-form article on neilpatel.com called SEO Made Simple: A Step-By-Step Guide.

It covers most aspects of SEO and walks readers through them in a way that’s easy to follow.

I was sure to provide lots of examples, data, screenshots, etc. to provide them with the most comprehensive explanation I could.

The end result was that it received a boatload of shares and links.

Here are the numbers for shares on different platfroms as of February 2017:

I’m not showing you these numbers to brag. I want to highlight the impact creating this type of content can have.

Whatever your niche may be, you can usually amplify your reach by creating be-all and end-all guides like this.

3. Base your content on industry trends

Another strategy I’ve been using for a while involves choosing the topics for my articles based on what’s trending at the moment in my industry.

Although this may not have the longevity of evergreen content and get you shares for years to come, it is a viable strategy for quickly amplifying your immediate reach.

Here’s the logic behind this technique:

• you know for a fact your audience has an existing interest in a particular topic
• you can prove it by analyzing metrics such as shares and engagements
• you’re likely to get plenty of shares and links by creating high quality content based on that topic.

But how do you know what’s hot at the moment?

Well, there are several ways to tell:

• you could simply pay attention to social outlets such as Facebook, Twitter, and even Reddit
• you could stay on top of industry publications to see what’s being talked about
• you could check Google Trends
• or you could streamline your efforts by using one of my favorite tools, BuzzSumo.

It’s quite easy. Just enter a topic in the search box. I’ll use “SEO marketing” as an example.

Here’s what pops up:

Just like that, I can see what the most popular content is based on metrics such as social shares and engagements.

I then use that information to base my next piece of content on.

The likelihood of that content “sticking” and reaching my audience increases considerably as opposed to the content I might come up with off the top of my head.

To learn more about how to use BuzzSumo to generate content ideas, I suggest reading this post from Moz.

4. Share only the best of the best

I feel like many content marketers think it’s a good idea to post every single piece of content they create on every platform they can get their hands on.

And I get it.

You’ve worked hard and are trying to get as many eyeballs on your content as possible.

But here’s the cold truth. The bulk of content of most brands isn’t overly impressive.

Usually only a fraction is super-interesting.

In other words, not every piece of content is a unicorn. The majority are donkeys.

But you want to post “unicorn content.”

Now, I’m not saying you should share only one blog post out of 20.

But you should maintain rigorous quality standards when choosing what to post on social media.

If someone does click on an article that’s clearly sub-par and reeks of mediocrity, two things are going to happen:

1. you won’t get any shares or links
2. it’ll turn many people off, and they won’t want anything to do with your brand

By being selective and sharing only the best of the best on social media, you can uphold your quality standards, which should amplify your reach.

Only share content worthy of unicorn status, and you should be good to go.

5. Leverage connections with influencers

All right, you’re probably getting sick of hearing about “the power of influencer marketing” and all that jazz.

I feel like it’s a topic that’s been done to death at this point.

But the fact is that getting your content featured by a key influencer or even having them give you a subtle nod can amplify your reach dramatically.

Here’s a quick example.

I like Tim Ferriss’ website The Four Hour Workweek.

I like to read his blog, listen to his podcast, and get his take on things. He’s an all around interesting guy, and I think his content is jam-packed with value.

He recently featured a guy who goes by the name “Mr. Money Mustache.”

Long story short, this guy has a blog about how he and his family live a comfortable lifestyle with annual expenses of no more than $27,000.

He tackles topics such as frugal living, efficiency, achieving happiness, and so on.

His content interested me, so I checked out quite a bit of his site.

I had never heard of “Mr. Money Mustache” up until that point, but being featured on Tim Ferriss’ site gave him instant credibility in my eyes, and I was interested in what he had to say.

I mean if Tim gave him his seal of approval, he must be legit. Right?

But if I simply came across his site on my own, I doubt I would give it the time of day.

The point I’m trying to make here is that having your content featured by influencers can take you from zero to hero insanely quickly.

I won’t give you a step-by-step guide to influencer marketing right here. But I will point out a few helpful resources on this topic:

6 Ways to Get Influencers to Link to You
The Ultimate Guide to Writing Epic Content That Will Go Viral

Getting someone influential in your industry to share your content is your ace in the hole.

Conclusion

Content amplification is a way to increase the reach of your content, delivering it to more of your audience.

With such an ungodly mass of content already out there and piles of it being produced every day, content amplification has never been more important than today.

Using the strategies I discussed above should help you amplify your reach without having to dig deep into your pockets.

This should also minimize the numbing sense of disillusionment that so many content marketers feel these days when their content falls flat.

Your content will go further, and your brand equity will continue to grow at the same time.

Do you have any other suggestions for amplifying the reach of your content?

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Podcast 117: How Scott Williams Bought a Website and Doubled the Earnings in 4 Months

Today, I have somebody joining me as a guest on a podcast, his name is Scott Williams from BloggingTrainer.com.

Scott’s story is pretty interesting because like many of you, he has tried and failed to build a few niche websites and his luck changed when he decided, “you know what, instead of trying to build everything from scratch, I’m going to go out and buy a website that’s already making money so that I can use that website and learn from.

He invested some money, about $28,000, to buy a website making about $1,000 dollars back in October 2016, so just a few months ago, 4 or 5 months ago. That has turned out to be a great investment for him so far.

The site as of January 2017 is making about $2200 per month. Scott has done very well, he’s doubled the revenue of that website. During this interview, we’re going to dive into what’s working well for him, what he did to revamp the website and make it perform better, and then of course what he’s done now in terms of link building and outreach and a few other things in between so hopefully you enjoy the interview.

Read the Full Transcript

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Spencer: Hey everyone! Welcome back to the Niche Pursuits podcast. I’m your host Spencer Haws from nichepursuits.com. Today, I have somebody joining me as a guest on a podcast, his name is Scott Williams.

Scott’s story is pretty interesting because like many of you, he has tried and failed to build a few niche websites and his luck changed when he decided you know what, instead of trying and building everything from scratch, I’m going to go out and I’m going to buy a website that’s already making money so that I can use that website and learn from what’ working on that website, why is it doing so well?

He invested some money, about $28,000, to buy a website making about $1,000 dollars back in October 2016, so just a few months ago, 4 or 5 months ago. That has turned out to be a great investment for him so far. The site as of January 2017 is making about $2200 per month. Scott has done very well, he’s doubled the revenue of that website. During this interview, we’re going to dive into what’s working well for him, what he did to revamp the website and make it perform better, and then of course what he’s done now in terms of link building and outreach and a few other things in between so hopefully you enjoy the interview. Hey Scott, welcome to the Niche Pursuits Podcast.

Scott: Hey, thanks a lot Spencer, glad to be here.

Spencer: Yup, it’s good to have you on here as well. What I love is that I’ve been doing a few interviews with Niche Pursuits podcast listeners and readers that are having some success with their niche sites and you certainly fit into that category, and we’re going to jump into that. But before we do, can you give us an idea of your professional background, what you either do for work now or previous to building websites.

Scott: Yeah, in the past I’ve done a lot of sales. I was a door to door salesman for security alarms and financial services net marketing company. Got my real estate license which I still have, I’m still active in, so I still do that. I’m pretty decent in sales, it makes some good money but the hassle of sale just gets to you sometimes and I just want an area where I can get out of that. I kind of take no’s personally sometimes, and you’re not supposed to.

I also went back to school, got a graphic design degree. I learned a lot about web design, user experience design, really just how to communicate visually. During school, my dad owned a business and he let me work for him a little bit during school and after. I helped him with his internet marketing for his websites. We actually created a small little ecommerce site which was kind of fun. That’s was kind of my first exposure in building websites, but that’s kind of my background before all that happened.

Spencer: Give us a timeline, maybe not a timeline but when was the first sort of ecommerce site that you mentioned, when did you build that?

Scott: That was probably about five years ago. He owned a hearing aid company, he wanted a site that talked more about earplugs and selling earplugs, really anything about the ears. The domain was cheapearplugstore.com and we made like $200 each month without doing any SEO or link building or anything because I had no idea what any of that even was. We just built it and tried to see what would happened and we actually made a little of money.

He sold the business in 2015 and the company wanted that website as well but they’re doing nothing with it. That was probably my first one.

Spencer: Yup, but that gave you some good experience.

Scott: It did.

Spencer: Where did you kind of go from there as far as your online business? What other websites did you built, ventures that you pursued that led you to where you are now?

Scott: I built four websites total, probably one after the other. Thinking like oh yeah that ecommerce site did good, this is easy. That definitely isn’t the case. I built four, had no success on the four, made no money on those four, and kind of gave up a little bit but then I started following blogs like you and some other people. They were great, they kind of motivated me a little bit more. Finally, I was just like you know what, I just need to just buy one. I don’t think something that a lot of people jump to, like oh I’m going to go spend $30,000 after failing on four that were free. That’s the step that I decide to take and it kind of worked out for me.

Spencer: That is interesting because I do think a lot of people have the same sort of genesis story that they try a couple of websites and maybe they don’t perform that well. That certainly was my story as well, I built a few websites that never really went anywhere but I cut the bug and luckily I stuck with it and I kept building but I never bought. Take us through that decision, at least to get started, I have purchased websites now but early on that never crossed my mind. What sort of led you to that decision to buying such a big website?

Scott: I know a guy down here, I don’t if you know him, Kurt Christianson. He does a lot of seminars for internet marketing I think. He talked to me about how he got started and he’s like, “I used to buy websites, but that was like a long time ago.” After I had failed on the four, that kind of popped into my mind and I was like I’m going to look into that.

I kind of looked into that a little bit and what was attractive about it was if I could get a website that’s already making some money, maybe I can see how it works on the back end. Maybe I can see the inner workings of the successful sites that’s gained traction in Google and I could really see how it all works and what I’m doing wrong and what I need to do there. That’s really what led me to buy one. I did a lot of research, keyword research because I gained a lot of knowledge in all my research to figure out how to do that and what a good site would be. That was all knowledge because I had no experience, I kind of got lucky I feel like and got a really good one that could grow.

Spencer: Where did you find the site?

Scott: We went through Empire Flippers.

Spencer: Great.

Scott: I looked a lot of different ones like Flippa and things like that but Empire Flippers I felt most confident about, so we went with them.

Spencer: How much was the site making when you purchased it, and if you don’t mind sharing what did you pay for site?

Scott: I bought the site the first week of October, it was about $1,000 a month is what it was averaging. They had a 28 times multiplier, so it was about $28,000 and some change. I forget the exact. That was about $28,000 and it was averaging $1,000.

Spencer: So when you say October, just this previous October 2016?

Scott: Yeah, four months ago.

Spencer: And you keep saying we, is that you and a partner?

Scott: Yeah, my dad helped me out in there, I didn’t have the full $30,000. I got a nice little personal loan from him and he helped me out.

Spencer: Very cool. No, that’s awesome. It’s been four months, the site was making $1,000 a month, and how’s the site doing now?

Scott: It’s doing great. In November, I doubled it, it made over $2,000. In December, it peaked at $3,200, thanks to the holidays of course. Then in, January it just finished at around $2,200.

Spencer: Hey, that’s great. That’s a really good sign. Obviously at November and December there’s going to be a bump there due to the holidays, but seeing the January, it’s still over double what it did in October, I would say that’s excellent. What do you think the reasons are for that? What have you done to increase the earnings there?

Scott: Yeah, that’s a good question. When I bought the site, because of my graphic design knowledge and user experience knowledge, I did a lot of visual design changes because I know that doing that, just to make it look professional, and if you have a good logo it converts better. Since I didn’t know a whole ton about SEO but I still knew a little bit, I didn’t do that yet. I did a lot of just redesigning, making page flow better, user experience better, I saw a bump immediately just after that. That was a good sign.

Spencer: Interesting, let’s dive into that a little bit to give us a better idea. You mentioned logo and some graphic design. Did you also change the layout and how the site flowed itself?

Scott: The logo definitely, I always try to do that because I like to get a better identity. I treat the website like its own identity and I feel like the logo is that face. I always change that, but I also definitely change the pages and flow and have really good content on those posts to make sure that they’re flowing really nice for the reader and that it doesn’t look just like this academic paper, or they get bored and then they leave.

I make sure that there’s buttons and there’s easy ways for them to click those buttons and that they’re not spammy either. Just make it look real, like a real site that someone wants to read and that it flows. It’s easy for them to scan and go through.

Spencer: Absolutely, I agree with that, that can go a long way. We’re not going to share the domain on the podcast, like we talked about before. I can see the domain, you shared it with me privately. I’m kind of looking at the overall layout and feel of the website. And it is, it’s great. I see that, at least in the couple of articles that I’ve clicked on, you’re utilizing sort of comparison charts that are fairly typical I guess for Amazon affiliate sites. Were those in place before or is that something that you added after?

Scott: They were, but they didn’t look very good. I just kind of revamped them and there were really small pictures in them which I kind of took out because they can view the pictures bigger later. I added a check price button so that they could actually click through because there wasn’t anything to click on the old comparison tables. It was losing a lot of probably the conversion there because there just wasn’t any experience for them to click through.

Spencer: Interesting, do you remember what they were using before if it was like a tablepress plug-in or something like that?

Scott: When I bought it, it had Thrive content builder I think. They just used one of the tables that were inside of that. I just continued with that and just added on with those tables, but I do have Table Press on there which Table Press works great. For some of them, I have Table Press working on the pages and for some I’m just using the thrive table on the content builder.

Spencer: Very cool, that’s awesome. You’ve purchased the one site, the other site that you built from scratch haven’t really taken off too much at this point. Is that correct?

Scott: That is correct. Mainly because of my lack of knowledge but I’m going to get busy and get them going and we’ll see how they do.

Spencer: What’s the plan going forward with the site that you purchased? What is your plan to grow it even further?

Scott: I want to make it an authority site. I want to just grow and expand it like crazy. I hired a virtual assistant and she’s going to do a lot for me to leverage my time. I can’t do it all myself if I want to grow a lot and fast. She is doing a lot of outreach for me for guest posting and things like that. She’s also writing some content, and she’s kind of managing some of my flow and getting some block comments in on other people’s pages just for outreach and a little bit of social media.

I do a lot of the optimization and I’m also doing some outreach there and for link building opportunities and things like that. That’s kind of my first step into growing. I’m definitely going to add more posts and keywords and just lots of link building.

Spencer: I would like to dive into link building strategies here in a second, but since you’ve purchased a site, have you added content and if so how much have you added?

Scott: Yeah, I have. I’ve probably added on average about 6 posts a month, about 24 new. Some informational, some commercial to get people to click through Amazon. I’ve added quite a bit just so I can get my keyword count up so I can get more ranks.

Spencer: Do you remember how many articles the site had before?

Scott: Yeah, it had about 60 I think?

Spencer: So you’ve increased it by a third or so?

Scott: Yup.

Spencer: That’s awesome. I’m a big fan of content so I would encourage you to keep that up. Find new low competition keywords, try to be consistent about putting out great content because it really is fairly simple, right? If you’re trying to rank for more keywords, you probably are going to rank for more keywords as long as you’re giving readers what they want and of course what Google wants which is high quality content and reviews of the things you’ve already got. I would definitely encourage you to continue to build out content and do that keyword research.

The other thing that I do want to ask about is link building, what link building strategies have worked well for you on the site?

Scott: The top one right now is guest posting, I know that it’s slow and it’s tedious and it’s hard work, but it’s something that I feel like is really valuable especially if I get some good guest posts with good sites. I get a 4% conversion rate, I don’t know if that’s good or not based on what I do. I’ve averaged to 100. I’ve gotten a lot of guest posts which has been great and those have been really quality ones.

I’ve been trying to avoid black hat stuff, I’m kind of scared of it, especially PBN. I bought the site and it had a small PBN but I didn’t know much about it. I’d like to do more research on that since sometimes you see what the benefits are in there. But for now, just trying to stay white hat and guest posting for sure is the number one for now.

Spencer: Yeah, I agree. I think avoiding PBN is a good idea, at least that’s what I would recommend and trying to stay as white hat as possible. I know a lot of people love sort of grey hat or PBN type things but I think in the long run if you’re really trying to build a sustainable website and a sustainable business, just do things that Google approves of that you know are going to work long term and you don’t have to worry about anything.

The other sort of benefit is that if you ever decide to go and resell this website. If you decide, you know what this makes $3,000 a month, I can triple my money, let’s just sell this thing. You’ll get a higher multiple if you don’t have a PBN involved because there’s some risk there. Empire Flippers tend to disclose that to buyers and they say “Hey, there’s a PBN and the multiple as usual is a little bit lower.” You can command a higher price if you do everything white hat.

Scott: Yeah.

Spencer: Guest hosting, how are you finding sites to reach out to?

Scott: I’m using a book, I think they’re called bullion search things where you put site, colon, and then just the website. I’ll do that at the domain and then I’ll put guest post or write for us and just do a lot of different ways to try and search for those.

Instead of just leaving the search to just to let it be, I’ll actually go to the tools in Google and do a timeframe rather than open ended. Who’s doing this forever? I  kind of go for like the last month first for that specific and see what comes up and searches for the last month, which has been really good for blog commenting which I kind of appreciate it because they’re a little bit more recent. I’ve been doing that to find and I just outreach everybody that I can through email. I’ll do some pretty outreach a little bit, kind of like them on Facebook, pat them on the back a little and do some comments and then outreach to see if they will let me guest post on theirs too. That seems to work very well.

Spencer: Yeah, it sound like it’s all fairly manual process, are you using any tools to help you along the way?

Scott: No, it’s all manual and probably slower than it should be. But it’s all manual.

Spencer: Hey, that’s okay. It seems like you’ve gotten a few links that way and the site’s growing. Right?

Scott: Yeah.

Spencer: There are certainly tools if you decided to do more outreach or to do it on a larger scale. There’s tools that will help you email people like GMass is sort of a way to email lots of people a similar thing at once through Gmail. There’s other tools that can maybe help you find contact information like Buzz Streams for websites. It sounds like you’re probably visiting every website, you’re seeing if they have a contact page or an email listed somewhere right?

Scott: Yeah.

Spencer: That can be time consuming as well.

Scott: Very.

Spencer: There’s tools like Buzzstream that you basically just plug on the URL and it will find the contact information for you and it saves a little bit of time.

Scott: Oh yeah, probably tons of time.

Spencer: Any other link building strategies that you’re using right now besides blog commenting and guest posting?

Scott: No, I’m actually starting a scholarship program. I’ve heard some good things about that. I’ve heard that it’s kind of an old process but I’d like to see if it works or not. I’m just kind of testing. That’s one thing that I’ve kind of learned online, you just kind of test and see what works for you. That’s kind of what I’ve been doing a little bit, just testing stuff out and see if it works, given the stuff is kind of an old strategy. I’m doing the scholarship thing to see if that’s going to work or not.

Spencer: Yeah, that can be a good one, it’s one that I’ve done in the past for sure. You can absolutely get links from great .edu domains. Sometimes, it’s questionable whether or not how valuable that link is. I think it can depend. If you’re listed on a scholarship page that has 500 other scholarships on that page, maybe your link isn’t that valuable, right?

Scott: Right, yeah.

Spencer: But, other time you’re listed on a page that has a little bit more authority and that can be valuable. It can be hit and miss at times but I think it’s absolutely worth testing out because it’s a great outreach tool, something that you can say, “Hey, we’re doing a scholarship.” People are usually willing to listen to that.

Scott: Yeah.

Spencer: When you look at what you’ve done in the last four months, you purchased a site, you’ve added content, you done some link building, you’ve done some design changes. If there was one thing that you think has been the most effective, what would that be?

Scott: Probably the guest posting actually, because I got a lot of immediate traffic from guest posts which was great, which led to a few sells. That was good and then I know that in the long term my domain will have more authority as it grows and gets more of those links there. I think that’s probably been the most effective, the guest posting.

Spencer: Cool! Yeah. That is something that I don’t know always think about and maybe a lot of other people don’t think about is that you can get that direct traffic. Hopefully if you’re posting on the site that actually has readers, actually gets traffic, there can be a lot of direct clicks coming over to your site. That’s awesome. Very good. Any other tips for building or buying niche sites that you’d like to share that’s worked for you?

Scott: Yes, because I had some failures in the past and then I get to see how this works, the tip or the value that I’d probably like to share that has affected me the most is actually following, because I’m still learning, right? Just following one mentor, or one or two. Preferably one, or a blogger that teaches the stuff when you’re really just starting out or just trying to figure out what to do if you’re kind of in a slump.

I feel like it’s easy to get pulled in multiple directions which I definitely have done. When I tried to do that and apply lots of different strategies from different sources, it just gets crazy and it’s backfired. The tip that I’d say is to follow one guy, one mentor, or whoever and learn from them. Do what they do and then get some success and then move on to the next and maybe apply some new strategies after that. That’s my goal anyway, just to continue to do that until I’ve perfected those things or at least come close and then move on.

Spencer: That’s a great tip. I think a lot of people, especially people just starting out, can have that information overload. They’re trying to read everything, listen to every podcast. They can get stuck, they’re not sure, they have 50 different ideas and they’re not sure where to start. I agree, I think just finding one or two people that their strategy seems to work and sticking with that and sort of developing a plan and trying to focus. I think that’s a great reminder for everybody.

I maybe going to turn the tables just a little bit, do you have any final questions for me, anything you’d like to ask me about either your new site or building sites or anything in general?

Scott: Yes, thanks for turning the tables, I wish I would have prepared some questions. I’ll throw some stuff out there. For somebody new like me, I have a little bit of experience like building and designing them, but really making money has only been a four month thing thanks to buying it. If I wanted to start a new one or things like that, what would be too many website to do? Should I just focus on this one until it starts making my desired income, should I work on this and also maybe build one from scratch? What’s your advice there?

Spencer: Well, that is a great question. I think it comes down to how well you think you can set-up systems and how much money you’re willing to invest in your business. If you’re willing to reinvest essentially every penny that’s coming in from the site that you purchased, you probably have enough funds there where you can hire, I think you already mentioned hiring a VA right? You could hire one or even two VA’s to be doing a lot of work for you.

I think when you’re starting out, I think focusing on one website is probably the best strategy. Once that starts to see some traction, it’s making $200 to $300 per month for people, then maybe move on to the next website.

I think at this point, you will be fine going out and starting one more website and just focusing on those two until you see the second website start getting some traction, making $200, $300, $500 per month and putting some sort of VA or system in place where they’re doing a lot of the manual labor and then you can move on and start another one. That would be my advice on that.

Scott: Okay great, thanks a lot.

Spencer: I sometimes have this problem for myself, because I have several websites that I’m working on and I think what can I handle now, and it comes down to how much am I willing to invest, am I willing to hire somebody else to help me out? I don’t have a lot of time at this point to do all the work myself. Sometimes it comes down to that, what are you willing to invest and what are you willing to risk. Great tips for what you’ve learned buying and building out the website. I think we pretty much covered everything that I wanted to cover. Do you have anything else that you’d like to share or any parting words of wisdom or anything like that?

Scott: I think just the last thing is to just do it, that’s something that has taught me just to go for it. I think stop waiting for a perfect program to come out or more time to come in your life to start. I think a lot of people are like when I talk to, they’re like, “Oh, I don’t have a lot of time, I just want to do this.” And they end up watching a show on Netflix. Nothing will change unless you do, if you want something you gotta get out and do it and go work hard until it works. One last plug out there to go out and do it.

Spencer: Everybody go out there, take action, I agree. I think that’s excellent advice. Scott, thanks for being on the podcast.

Scott: Yeah, thanks a lot.

Spencer: If people do want to get in touch with you, is there any way that they can do that?

Scott: Yeah, I have a personal site that people can contact me through there and it’s not much. It’s just there for me where I keep notes on there. I use it as a way to gather a lot of info and remember stuff. I’m going to make a tracking system for my success later, but for now it’s just there, people can go there, its bloggingtrainer.com. They can contact me there if they’d like.

Spencer: Perfect. So bloggingtrainer.com, if you want to get in touch with Scott you can do that. Like I said, Scott thank you so much for being on the podcast and thank you everybody for listening.

The post Podcast 117: How Scott Williams Bought a Website and Doubled the Earnings in 4 Months appeared first on Niche Pursuits.

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February 2017 Income Report for All My Brands, Including Niche Pursuits

After a significant break from doing a real monthly income report, I’ve decided to give it another shot.  I’ve done sporadic general business updates, but I’m now ready to get more consistent with sharing what’s working in my business.

And the big change (that I’ve never done before), is I’m adding the income generated from NichePursuits.com!  I’ve never shared the income derived directly from this site, but hopefully a few of you will find that interesting.

I hope seeing the inner workings of my business a little bit more, including the income from the various activities that I’m involved, will be motivating in some way.

I hope these monthly income reports are a win-win.  I get a chance to reflect on my business and plan how I can do better the next month.  You get a chance to analyze what’s working in my business and get some takeaways that you can use to increase the income in your own business (hopefully).

I fully hope to make these income reports a monthly thing.

Oh and I figured I better take a selfie every month right before I hit publish on these reports so you can watch me getting older.  This should be fun!

Exclusive Picture for the Income Report! Showing signs of age?

A Quick Explanation of How I View My Business

As you read the income reports below, you will notice that I’ve broken them down by “Brand”.  In the last 6 months or so, I’ve started viewing my business this way…as a collection of brands that I’m trying to grow.

So, rather than just lump all the Amazon Associates earnings I make from all of my websites into one line item, I’m breaking the earnings out on a site by site basis.  This will give a more realistic picture of what brands are working well, and which ones I need to put more effort into.

Some of the brands also sell products via Amazon FBA.  For these brands, I have a website that I use to send traffic to my Amazon listings.  These sites also make affiliate sales or generate Google Adsense earnings.  As a result, I don’t break out how much I make on Amazon FBA overall…but I categorize the earnings by brand + website.

I also have dedicated brand managers working on growing some of these brands, so I truly do view them as standalone businesses…rather than just a bunch of niche sites.

For example, Niche Pursuits is its own brand and I act as the full-time brand manager.  I have a home goods brand that has its own full-time brand manager, etc.

So, with that brief explanation, here’s the income report!

Please note: *Gross Profit is the profit after all costs of good sold.  So, for any Amazon FBA product sales, I’ve already subtracted the manufacturing costs, returns, shipping costs etc.  However, this is not a net profit number…to get that, I’d need to subtract out salaries, software expenses, etc.

NichePursuits.com Income - Feb. 2017

Income Source	Gross Profit	Monthly Change
Total	$3,945	($5,139)
Bluehost: Inexpensive Web Host	$270	$0
Jungle Scout: Amazon Product Finder	$230	$112
Jump Send (manage Amazon promotions)	$0	$0
Thrive Themes (See my strategy for increasing subscribers with Thrive Leads Here)	$1,402	($587)
AmaSuite 5 ($100 Discount Here)	$181	$328
Easy Azon Plugin	$385	$85
SalesBacker (auto-email Amazon buyers)	$254	($1)
MerchInformer Software. (See how to start a t-shirt business with Merch Informer here).	$431	$328
Authority Hacker: Authority Site System Course	$108	($5,236)
ListingEagle.com - Amazon Hijacker Monitoring (Get a 50% discount here).	$50	($1)
Content Refined (Exclusive 10% off When You Use Coupon Code: "spencer" at Checkout)	$0	$0
Long Tail Pro*(*My affiliate commission only, not my ownership distribution).	$334	($315)
SEMRush Competition Analysis (See an in-depth tutorial and video here).	$208	$56
Inventory Lab: Amazon Profit Tracking Software	$5	$5
PointBlankSEO Link Building Course	$30	$30
Hire Writers	$58	$58
Ninja Outreach: Link Building Software	$0	$0

For the amount of traffic and size of my email list, I make very little on NichePursuits.com.  To be honest, I have never focused very hard on making much from affiliate commissions.  As a result, I believe that I can significantly increase the earnings on NichePursuits.com.

In my mind, I’ve focused more on case studies and tutorials that eventually helped me build a highly successful software company (Long Tail Pro).  Now, that I’ve sold Long Tail Pro, I’m going to take a look at Niche Pursuits with fresh eyes and see how I can turn it into a higher earning brand without sacrificing the quality.

As you can see from the income above, I made a significant amount from promoting the Authority Hacker Authority Site System in January.  I only sent out 1 email and never even mentioned it on NichePursuits.com…not bad. So, the income dropped significantly in February primarily due to the fact that I made a bunch of one-time sales for this course in January, but did no promotions in February.

Overall, I have some plans in the works to increase the income overall…and I’ll definitely share what’s working next month.

Also, please be aware that generally speaking, NichePursuits.com is a small portion of my overall income.  Most of the revenue generated in my business is from the actual products and brands that I own outside of the internet marketing space.

So, I’m in the trenches with you guys building real businesses…not just talking about it!

Home Goods Brand Income - Feb. 2017

Income Source	Gross Profit	Monthly Change
Total	$15,775.26	$(4,915.10)
Amazon Product 1	$10,258.52	$(4,967.93)
Amazon Product 2	$2,414.54	$(2,257.90)
Amazon Product 3	$1,081.44	$158.76
Amazon Product 4	$279.14	$9.15
Amazon Product 5	$81.62	$(13.66)
Amazon Product 6	$(7.46)	$1,219.97
Amazon Product 7	$(150.65)	$2,184.67
Amazon Product 8	$(281.61)	$(281.61)
Amazon Associates	$1,557.86	$(993.96)
Google Adsense	$541.86	$27.41

My home goods brand is where I started my Amazon FBA journey.  I’m very happy with the way it’s turned out!

As you can see, most of the income is derived from the top 3 sellers, while several other products we’ve tried have just kind of fallen flat.  This often seems to be the case.  But overall, it’s a very profitable venture.

We use our niche website to generate lots of free SEO traffic and then drive a portion of that traffic to our Amazon listings.  This helps us generate more sales, which in turn helps us rank better on Amazon.

Because some of the articles on our site review products or target keywords outside of the products we sell, we also monetize the site with Amazon Associates and Google Adsense.  This is sort of “bonus” income.  Our real concern is selling our own products.

For this brand, I just hired a part time brand manager in January…and he will be starting full-time very soon!  I’m excited to have Jason on board, and I’m sure I’ll have a chance to introduce him more officially to the Niche Pursuits audience down the road.

While the income is down quite a bit for February, I am not too concerned.  Here’s why:

• January tends to be the biggest month after November and December, so a drop in February is to be expected. (Plus it’s a shorter month).
• We are also going through a complete rebrand of our products.  So, we’ve changed the domain name and did a 301.  This caused our traffic to go down, but it’s on its way back up and Google is catching up to everything.

March is off to a good start already, and so I fully expect this home goods brand to move back in the right direction.

Tools Used in February for this Brand

• Jungle Scout – We constantly are using this to see how much potential profit we could make with new product ideas.
• Jump Send – Ever since the incentivized review changes late last year, I’ve avoided doing any sort of special promotions.  However, now that the dust has settled, we started a promotion/discount for a few of our products using Jump Send (where we do NOT ask for reviews).  So far, I’ve been very impressed with how easy Jump Send is to use, and how effective it’s been in generating discounted sales.

Fitness Brand Income - Feb. 2017

Income Source	Gross Profit	Monthly Change
Total	$1,221.71	+$577.14
Amazon Product 1	$695.36	$659.16
Amazon Product 2	$4.61	$4.61
Amazon Product 3	$(19.82)	$(19.82)
Amazon Product 4	$(37.44)	$(37.44)
Google Adsense	$25.20	$(9.52)
Amazon Associates	$553.80	$(19.85)

This is a site that I started several years ago; however, not until recently did we start selling physical products in this space.

“Amazon Product 1” is actually one we have been selling for several months, but it went of stock in January…but finally started selling again.  The other 3 products are brand new and show a loss because we only sold a few at a discount.

This is a brand that Jake helps manage (along with several other responsibilities he has).  Jake has been focused on hiring and managing writers/editors to beef up the site, and he has also started to do some more link building.

We have started to use Ninja Outreach quite a bit to prospect and find link building opportunities.  Jake has had some great results using the software so far.

My plan is that when this brand (or any brand) does $2,500 in gross profit for 3 months in a row, I will hire a part time brand manager.  I think this site has a lot of potential to be the next brand I hire for.  I hope so!

Going forward, we will continue to do some additional promotions for existing products to help them sell a bit better.  However, we also have a couple of brand new products in the works that are being manufactured right now.

The potential is very good that once we launch these 2 new physical products that this brand will start to take off and need a dedicated manager.  There’s just no way I could manage all these brands myself.

Music Brand Income - Feb. 2017

Income Source	Gross Profit	Monthly Change
Total	$781.27	($423.25)
Amazon FBA	$720.55	$81.33
Shopify Sales	$0.00	($565.30)
Amazon Associates	$60.72	$52.85

Although this brand doesn’t seem significant right now in terms of earnings, it’s one that I’m VERY excited about.  This is a brand that I purchased about a year ago off the Empire Flippers Marketplace.

The physical product associated with this brand is super high quality.  In the past year, we have had ZERO returns.  That’s unheard of for an ecommerce business.  People love this product.

However, because Jake and I have been so busy working on other brands and projects…this one has been somewhat neglected.  I do believe this brand is going to turn around quickly though.

In January, I took a risk and hired a part-time brand manager…a musician that actually understands this space and happens to be good at internet marketing.  He’s already implemented some great changes, and I really do think that the next 6 months will be quite good for this brand.

The “Shopify Sales” on the chart above refer to our own eCommerce store.  We took down the store in February to try seeing what would happen if we sent all our traffic to Amazon.  The end result was not good!

So, we are in the process of revamping our site and will focus on building a real brand with the majority of sales taking place on our own eCommerce site moving forward.

Amazon FBA Incubator - Feb. 2017

Income Source	Gross Profit	Monthly Change
Total	$2,530.77	$560.72
Amazon Product 1	$215.75	$(19.36)
Amazon Product 2	$590.78	$27.75
Amazon Product 3	$107.05	$1.36
Amazon Product 4	$6.55	$3.19
Amazon Product 5	$0.88	$69.92
Amazon Product 6	$19.79	$(11.78)
Amazon Product 7	$542.79	$(84.55)
Amazon Product 8	$29.75	$182.75
Amazon Product 9	$175.64	$(71.00)
Amazon Product 10	$-	$(134.19)
Amazon Product 11	$5.06	$(20.31)
Amazon Product 12	$591.72	$468.54
Amazon Product 13	$202.15	$189.05
Amazon Product 14	$6.68	$(18.50)
Amazon Product 15	$36.18	$(22.15)

I have several other products that sell on Amazon that are in just about every category imaginable.  If I see a good idea or want to test something out, I just launch it.  I don’t worry if I have an existing brand that it fits under.

So, for all these “misfit” products that don’t fit under any of the previous brands, I call my “Incubator”.  Jake manages all these incubator products and we try to get them to a point where it makes sense to build out a branded site and start pushing a bit harder.

As you can see, the incubator brings in $2,500 a month or so, which I’ll take all day long for just some things we are testing out.

Total Income From All Brands – $24,254.01

Undisclosed Income

I’ve been quite detailed in the income listed above.  However, I also have several other sites or income sources that I prefer not to be as detailed with.  I hope you don’t mind.

Here’s some additional sources of income that I won’t reveal the exact amount of:

• Small niche sites making less than $500/month.  I still have several niche sites from the “good ol’ days” or a few that just haven’t taken off yet that are not mentioned above.  So, for any sites that make less than $500 a month, I don’t plan on doing any sort of detailed reporting.  If a site starts making more than $500 a month, I’ll add it to the official income report.
• Long Tail Pro Ownership.  I still own a portion of the Long Tail Pro business and receive quarterly distributions based on net profits.  (The Long Tail Pro income listed above is only for my affiliate commissions from Niche Pursuits, not the total income I make from Long Tail Pro).
• Investment websites.  I have invested in several other websites, some of which are quite valuable.  For most of these I own anywhere from 5% to 33% of the business.  However, they are all passive and managed completely by other people.  Because there are other owners involved, I won’t be disclosing the income from these sites.
• Jake FBA Business Partnership.  I invested in an Amazon FBA brand that Jake runs personally.  This business is doing well, but I am not comfortable disclosing income from this business, since I am just an investor.

A New Project and Your Thoughts

I do have one other project in the works that I am very excited about.  However, it hasn’t gone live and isn’t making any money yet.  However, I expect to share more about this “top secret” project in the next couple of months.

Overall, I’ve never shared the full income from NichePursuits.com, and it’s kind of nerve wracking!  And perhaps I picked a bad month to start showing income as it’s down for a couple of my brands (including Niche Pursuits).  But if I’m going to consistently share what’s going on in my business, I have to share the good and the bad.

I would love to hear your thoughts on my first income report in a long time.  Do you find this interesting at all?  I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

The post February 2017 Income Report for All My Brands, Including Niche Pursuits appeared first on Niche Pursuits.

from Niche Pursuits http://ift.tt/2mEsRh7

7 Ways to Get High Quality Paid Traffic with Rock-Bottom CPCs

I’ve said it before: a successful PPC campaign boils down to two things:

1. Increasing click-through rate (CTR)
2. Lowering cost-per-click (CPC)

Pretty simple, right?

But I want to add one more point to that statement. It’s not complicated.

You also need to get high quality traffic.

This means reaching your target audience and bringing in visitors who are ready to buy. What you don’t want is lukewarm traffic with only a vague interest in your product/service.

You want leads who have one hand on their wallets, ready to whip them out and make a purchase.

Now, allow me to point out a brutal truth about PPC marketing.

It’s a slippery slope, especially if you’re new to the game.

If you don’t know what you’re doing, it can chew you up and spit you out.

Many “noobs” quickly find their budgets depleted with only a handful of sales to show for it.

Some even end up spending more on their PPC campaigns than they get in return from sales. It’s not a good situation.

In order to get a favorable ROI, you want to ensure that 1) you’re driving high quality traffic to your landing page and 2) you’re not overspending on CPC.

In fact, you want rock-bottom CPCs.

To accomplish this requires a bit of an out-of-the-box approach.

You need to zig when other PPC marketers zag.

Let me show you seven ways to get high quality traffic while spending the absolute least amount of money on it.

1. Look beyond Google AdWords

When you hear the word PPC, what’s the first thing that comes to mind?

I would bet that for at least 90% of you, it would be Google AdWords.

And why wouldn’t it be?

It’s had a stranglehold on the PPC market for years.

In fact, a fairly recent study from Smart Insights reports that Google controls 67.78% of the search engine market:

Of course, this is the natural choice for an average PPC marketer.

The logic is that it receives the most traffic, so it’s the perfect PPC platform to target.

But I would have to disagree.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have anything against Google AdWords.

In fact, I’ve pulled in a massive amount of high quality traffic from it over the years, and it has netted me thousands in sales.

But you should by no means pigeonhole yourself and think that this is the only platform there is.

Why?

Because it’s uber-saturated and highly competitive.

This means one thing: a high CPC.

Here’s a breakdown of some of the most expensive CPCs according to industry:

I’ve even heard of some keywords costing as much as $100 a click. That’s crazy!

So even if you bring in a lot of high quality traffic, your ROI will be minimized because you’re spending a fortune on each click.

This can quickly eat away at your profits.

The bottom line here is that it’s smart to explore alternatives to Google AdWords.

Here is a list from PPC Hero that highlights some specific platforms to check out.

Although you may not get the same volume of traffic, the CPCs tend to be much lower on average.

2. Lower your max bids

This is perhaps the simplest way to reduce your CPC.

Lower your max bids, and your CPC will diminish as well.

But there’s a catch.

If you lower your CPC too far, the positioning of your ads can suffer (e.g., they fall down the page, and fewer people click on them).

The trick to pulling this off is to find the sweet spot, where you lower your bids without your CTR taking a hit.

Here’s what I suggest:

1. Identify a handful of your top performing keywords
2. Lower their bids slightly (you may even want to start with just a cent or two)
3. See what your new CTR is
4. If those keywords still perform well, lower your bids again

Repeat this process until you find the sweet spot.

Just be sure not to make any monumental changes right off the bat, and keep a close eye on things.

If you notice a drastic drop in performance, increase your max bid to a number that’s closer to the original bid.

3. Do manual bidding

There are two types of bidding on most PPC platforms: automatic and manual.

While automatic bidding is more convenient and can be a good way for beginners to test the waters, it can definitely lower your CPC.

If you’ve primarily been sticking with automatic bidding thus far, I suggest switching to manual (at least for a little while) to see if it has a positive impact on your CPC.

This gives you a greater level of control and you’re not at the mercy of an algorithm that may not always have the best interests of your ROI in mind.

But here’s the deal.

It can be overwhelming if you’re doing manual bidding across several campaigns at once.

Start with just one campaign initially until you get the hang of it. Then you can expand to others.

4. Target long-tail keywords

You’ve probably heard me sing the praises of long-tail keywords in the past for organic SEO.

There’s no doubt that long-tails get results.

In fact, long-tail keywords account for 70% of all keywords.

But the truth is that they’re something you should implement in your PPC campaign as well.

Why?

It’s simple. You’ll pay considerably less for a click from a long-tail keyword.

Here’s an example…

Let’s see what the suggested bid for a broad keyword is. I’ll use “running shoes.”

As you can see, it’s $2.66.

Now let’s see what the suggested bid for a long-tail variation is.

It’s only $0.61. So you can save over $2 per click by simply using a long-tail keyword.

Just think of how much you would save for 100 clicks or 1,000.

I recommend looking at your ad groups to see if there are any broad keywords that could be revised and made into long-tail keywords.

It will take some trial and error, but this is a great way to reduce your CPC dramatically.

Of course, you won’t receive the same volume of traffic. But you can maintain higher quality standards with the traffic you do get and save a boatload of money in the process.

5. Add negative keywords

One way some PPC marketers get themselves into trouble is by forgetting to include negative keywords.

What exactly is a negative keyword?

White Shark Media defines it as “a word or phrase that allows you to filter out who your ads will be served to in the search results page.”

In other words, it minimizes the odds of the wrong person clicking on your ad.

Using negative keywords is important because it ensures you’re not wasting your money on irrelevant clicks from unqualified people.

Implementing negative keywords can really help you cut costs in the long run, thus lowering your CPC.

But how do you come up with negative keywords?

One of my favorite tools is Wordstream’s Free Negative Keyword Tool.

Allow me to show you how it works.

Start by entering your keyword phrase in the search box. We’ll stick with “running shoes” as an example.

You’ll then get a list of potential negative keywords.

Just choose which ones are irrelevant by clicking “No,” and they’ll be moved to the right hand side.

If I’m selling men’s running shoes, I would want to use “women’s running shoes” as a negative keyword.

Keep clicking on keywords that are irrelevant to fully populate your list of negative keywords.

Then add these to your campaigns and ad groups on your PPC platform.

6. Keep devices in mind

Here’s the deal with devices. Each one has a different CTR.

For instance, smartphones may outperform tablets and desktop computers.

In fact, that’s exactly the case according to a study from MarketingProfs that analyzed Google AdWords CTR by device:

By looking at this data, you can conclude that you would want to put an emphasis on reaching customers who are using smartphones.

However, this is just an example and doesn’t necessarily mean that this is the best course of action for your campaign.

What I’m saying is that you should keep devices in mind when looking over your reports.

If it’s clear that a certain device is outperforming the others, make it a focal point of your campaign.

You’ll also want to scale back or even eliminate other devices that aren’t carrying their weight.

7. Check geographic locations

Finally, there’s the issue of location.

You want to make sure you’re only reaching people in locations your business can actually serve.

Otherwise, you’re basically throwing money away.

Let’s say you’re a brick-and-mortar business located in Dallas.

The only customers you need and want to reach are those located within the greater Dallas area.

In this case, you wouldn’t want to spend money on a click from someone from Charlotte or Miami. It just wouldn’t make sense.

Your best bet is to select a radius so you know for sure you’re only paying for clicks from a relevant audience.

Conclusion

There’s a lot that goes into a well-run PPC campaign.

This makes it one of the more challenging marketing strategies, and there’s plenty of room for error.

But at its core, your end goal is to get high quality paid traffic while keeping your CPC to a minimum.

This is the key to maximizing your ROI and getting the most bang for your buck.

Although there are a lot of different ways to go about this, the following techniques I mentioned are some of the more practical ones.

Figuring out the ideal formula for you requires perpetual testing and plenty of trial and error.

But once you’ve got it pegged, you can rinse and repeat until you’re running a rock-solid PPC campaign.

What’s the most you’re willing to pay for a click?

from Quick Sprout http://ift.tt/2lE9vUo

5 Clever Facebook Video Ad Hacks That Will Lower Your CPM by 81%

Scroll through your Facebook feed, and you can’t help but see video ads. Quite a few of them actually.

You may have even seen my video ads, which I’m using to promote my businesses.

I’m doing this, of course, because Facebook Video is huge right now.

One of the more recent studies found that there are “8 billion daily views for Facebook Video in November 2015—a 100% growth from 6 months prior to the study.”

And here’s another interesting stat.

Videos’ organic reach on Facebook is 135% greater than that of photos.

This means one thing. There is an insane number of opportunities out there.

Including Facebook Video ads in your marketing repertoire can yield big results.

But like with any form of paid advertisement, you’ll naturally want to lower your costs and maximize your ROI.

That’s a given.

I’ve done plenty of experimentation with Facebook Video ads and have come up with a recipe that gets me the most bang for my buck.

More specifically, I’ve come up with a way that will lower your CPM (cost per thousand) by as much as 81%.

Here are five clever Facebook Video ad hacks you need to know and implement right away.

1. Only feature videos that you know get engagement

Although this is an incredibly simple hack, it’s one many marketers overlook.

Often, they’re so thirsty to get their video content up and running on Facebook, they never take the time to perform some basic split-testing beforehand.

Here’s what I recommend.

Create a few different videos or variations of a single video (at least three), and do some basic split-testing to see which one is getting the best response.

However, place them on channels that won’t cost you a dime.

For instance, you might:

• feature videos organically on Facebook
• place them on your website or blog
• place them on other social media channels

Then, take a look at some key metrics such as:

• play rate
• average length of viewing
• engagement levels
• number of leads each video generated
• number of conversions each video produced

Here’s a graph that illustrates the various methods of measuring video success:

You get the idea.

Before you put your hard-earned money into Facebook Video ads, test the waters and see which video(s) your target audience responds most favorably to.

That way, you can approach Facebook Video ads with confidence.

That, right there, should lower your CPM considerably.

2. Keep them short and sweet

Wistia performed some fairly extensive research on the length of videos and engagement levels.

In fact, they examined 564,710 videos and more than 1.3 billion plays for their research.

Here’s what they found:

As you can see, there’s a steady level of engagement for up to 2 minutes:

But after the 2-minute mark, engagement drops off considerably until it hits 6 minutes.

At that point, engagement stabilizes once more until it reaches 12 minutes.

So, here’s the deal.

I wouldn’t recommend exceeding 2 minutes with your Facebook Video ads.

You probably won’t do yourself or your marketing budget any favors if you exceed this time limit.

Or as Wistia puts it,

Two minutes is the sweet spot.

But they also make another interesting point:

Engagement is steady up to two minutes, meaning that a 90-second video will hold a viewer’s attention as much as a 30-second video. This is surprising and actionable information for video marketers.

If you’re making short videos, you don’t need to stress about the difference of a few seconds. Just keep it under two minutes.

I find this to be great advice. You don’t need to sweat, getting your video length to an exact number of seconds.

Just keep it under 2 minutes, and it should maximize your engagement and lower your CPM.

But if you absolutely have to make a longer video, make it between 6 and 12 minutes because this is the “sweet spot number two.”

Anything longer than 12 minutes is just foolish.

3. Advertise “without advertising”

Here’s the thing about Facebook. Most people aren’t in the buying mindset when they log in to their accounts.

Most people are simply checking in to see what’s going on with their social circles and what their friends and family are up to.

Their mindset isn’t usually,

I’m desperately looking to make a purchase.

They may be thinking that when they log in to Amazon—but not Facebook.

Or as Aaron Zakowski eloquently puts it,

They’re buying intent is low.

This graph shows how people spend their time on Facebook:

And guess what? None of these activities involve buying.

I think it’s really important to keep this in mind when approaching your video ad content.

The last thing you want to do is clobber users over the head with ads that have the subtlety of a slap in the face.

What you want to do is to promote your product/service/brand without making it seem like an advertisement.

You need to be cool about it. You need to be stealth.

How exactly can you deliver your message without being overly salesy or pushy?

Here are some suggestions:

• infuse humor into your ad
• use storytelling
• surprise them/catch them off guard
• teach them something
• offer insightful information

In other words, ditch the pitch.

People hate being pitched to, and it’s only going to inflate your CPM.

Instead, try to be entertaining and strive to make a genuine connection.

4. Add captions

There’s another phenomenon about Facebook videos that I’ve noticed.

It’s that many of us don’t watch videos with sound.

I know I find myself doing this quite a bit. And there are several reasons for this.

For instance, a person might be at work and “sneaking into” their account when they should be tending to more pressing matters.

Or a person might be accessing their Facebook account via mobile device in a public location where it’s simply not appropriate to have the sound blaring.

This means that a decent chunk of the people viewing videos are doing so without any sound.

If your video ads lack captions, this can obviously be a problem because it’ll be difficult for the viewer to decipher what you’re trying to promote.

One study of Facebook video ads even found that

41% of videos are basically meaningless without sound.

In turn, many people will simply gloss over your video ad and scroll down to the next interesting thing in their feeds.

If you haven’t been using captions thus far, I suggest including them right away.

This is almost guaranteed to improve engagement and, in turn, lower your CPM.

In fact, internal testing from Facebook found that

captioned video ads increase video time by an average of 12%.

5. Add music for those who do listen

I know it may sound a little contradictory to suggest adding music, considering my last point was about a great number of people viewing video ads without sound.

But there will be a portion of users who will view your ads with the sound on.

You’ll want to do everything within your power to increase their focus.

One of the most effective ways to go about this is to include music.

I’m sure you’ve heard about how helpful music is for aiding students in studying:

But you don’t want to include just any type of music.

You also don’t want the music to get in the way and drown out what someone is trying to say in the video.

It should simply accompany the video and enhance it.

But which type of music is ideal?

There have been several studies done to determine which kinds of music aid in focus and concentration.

By and large, classical music is the way to go.

According to a particular study, “researchers found that listening to classical music had the greatest effect on improving visual attention.”

This doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to use classical music. It just means that classical is one of the best “go-to’s” for capturing viewers’ attention.

Here’s my suggestion.

Play some type of background music throughout the duration of most of your ads.

If classical music happens to fit your message, brand, theme, etc., that’s great—stick with that.

But if not, go with something you feel would be suitable for optimizing your video ad.

I would recommend experimenting with a few different options until you find the one that meshes with your content the best.

Conclusion

The way I see it, Facebook Video ads are a fairly cost-effective form of paid advertising.

I get the fact that most people aren’t exactly “dialed in” to make a purchase when using their Facebook accounts.

But I have experienced first hand the results that video ads can get when they’re used effectively.

And, of course, you don’t want to just throw something at the wall to see what sticks with this, or any other, form of paid advertising.

It’s all about getting a solid ROI and lowering your CPM.

These hacks are great little loopholes for doing just that and will lower your CPM by as much as 81%.

Do you have any other Facebook Video Ad hacks that have helped you reduce your costs?

from Quick Sprout http://ift.tt/2lrbzig