Content Marketing Funnel Illustrated-2
I get a lot of questions about the content marketing “flow,” meaning, what is it supposed to look like? Do I write one article, make one picture, do one video, etc.? Or do I do more?
And how do I link these together, what’s the optimal strategy?
So I thought I would write a piece about how this is done. Now, I want to say this first: this is just one representation of how I do it. It’s just one permutation out of maybe millions. You see, there is no perfect “path.” In fact, I would argue that if there were and 1000 people started using the exact same path, the search engines (read: google) would see the pattern and start to devalue the results obtained from that “pattern.”
There are 2 sides to the content marketing puzzle – one is the real, live, traffic (read: interested humans) who want to learn more about whatever it is you are writing, talking, picturing about. The other side is: if you are going to create all this content anyhow, why not get the search engines to feature you in their top ten list when someone searches for your keyword phrase? (By the way, my keyword phrase for THIS content piece is “content marketing funnel illustrated.” Long tail, yes. Rarely searched, yes. BUT . . . number one in google (not the day I write this, but in a few days). The key is having multiple, multiple (read: thousands and thousands) of keyword phrases for which you show up #1 in google. Not 10. Not 100. Thousands.
Let’s say you get 10 visits per month per content piece. Not much. Can’t live on that. But . . . multiply that times 1000’s of pieces . . . and you get a lot of visits each month.
Personally, I like this strategy. It’s really easy to do. But others like to write one big piece and spend a year and many many inbound links, and lot’s of publicity to get their one content piece to #1 to get a 1000 visits a month. Until google changes the algorithm. Then they start over again. That strategy just isn’t for me.
I prefer doing it this way. Holographically, a few visits per month from select content pieces.
So the idea here is that we want to make this as simple as possible to create as many pieces of content in the shortest possible period of time.
So to do that, make a list of the pieces of content you could create from one piece of content.
By the way, it can be an endless list, it can use multiple, multiple pages.
I’ll just keep it to a few to keep it simple (and remember the more pages, the more you can link and cross link)
Let’s imagine:
A 600 word article – post it to ezinearticles.com
Create a 200 word excerpt – post to facebook.
Create a flowchart showing diagramatically what you wrote in the article – save as a picture file.
Put picture file on pinterest.
Convert picture file to a slideshow in powerpoint.
Upload the slideshow to slideshare.
Then record some audio to the powerpoint, upload to youtube.
Now, for each thing that you did in that list, link to 2 other things in that list.
Then start over, but this time, start with a 600 word post on YOUR SITE, not ezinearticles, other than that it looks EXACTLY the same:
A 600 word article – post it to YOUR SITE
Create a 200 word excerpt – post to facebook.
Create a flowchart showing diagramatically what you wrote in the article – save as a picture file.
Put picture file on pinterest.
Convert picture file to a slideshow in powerpoint.
Upload the slideshow to slideshare.
Then record some audio to the powerpoint, upload to youtube.
Now, the linking strategy is a little different. THIS time, link to content from your PRIOR iteration of content instead of to THIS iteration of content.
Then, again, rinse and repeat, with the next iteration starting with ezinearticles like this first, and again, linking back randomly, to prior posts or content pieces in BOTH prior iterations:
If you do this everyday for a year, you will have literally like 1500 pieces of content, all aggressively linking to prior content, and the whole process should take about 30 minutes once you figure it out and get smooth (about 10 iterations)
Now, once you have the starter, basic iteration in place (ezinearticles or YOUR SITE) with a facebook excerpt, pinterest picture, slideshare, and youtube video, you can start creating more and more related pieces of content that keep pointing back to your initial content – for example, you could do a g+ post, you could create a squidoo post telling about the content, you could do instagram, you could do a forum post in your niche, how many other places can you think of to “announce” your content online?
And as you do this, you’ll get faster and faster, and you’ll begin to snowball your traffic.
Of course, this is just the traffic portion of this puzzle . . . once you get people to YOUR SITE, they should get to a squeeze page/giveaway offer very quickly so that they get on your list. Then ALL of your marketing to those people (your subscribers) happens via your EMAIL CAMPAIGN.
The content network is for prospecting. Of course, you can send your email subscribers to your content for . . . content . . . but the selling occurs in your email campaign.
Any questions about this? shoot me an email, I’ll add relevant Questions and Answers to the bottom of this post (or linked there anyhow)
Also, keep this page open in your browser and continue to refresh this page throughout the day and for a few days, I’m planning to put links to sample content for each content piece mentioned in the lists above to make this super-simple!
— Sean Mize
P.S. If you want more detail on this, step by step and advanced training on content marketing, check out my brand new:
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