content marketing plan
Project Ignite Podcast by Derek Gehl A Content Marketing Plan To Generate Instant Social Buzz With Matt Wolfe
00:00:00 00:00:00
  • Episode  32
  • Matt Wolfe

Summary:

Matt Wolfe is an absolute authority on content marketing. Get his method of how to create a content marketing plan that get’s maximum results with minimal effort including his secret content marketing plan that expedites your content creation AND generates instant social buzz

Transcript: A Content Marketing Plan To Generated Instant Social Buzz With Matt Wolfe

Welcome to the Project Ignite podcast–a podcast designed to skip the hype, skip the BS, and bring you real, actionable tips and strategies to help you grow your business and your income on the internet. If I’ve done my job, at the end of this podcast, you’ll have a list of actions, tasks, and steps that you can use to start making more money.

Today we’re gonna be diving deep into content marketing. In internet marketing, a good content marketing plan is the foundation of any good inbound marketing–without it, attracting traffic to your site is virtually impossible. If you don’t have a content marketing plan, you’re going to be needing to pay for your visitors because without that content it’s really difficult to bring visitors.

We’re gonna be focusing on three elements of content marketing, specifically content leveraging. To help us to maximize our content, I’ve invited best-selling author, serial digital entrepreneur, and content marketing expert Matt Wolfe to join us on the show.

Matt, thanks for being here today.
Thanks for having me, I’m really excited!
For just a second, can you share your journey to being a digital entrepreneur? What was your path to becoming the expert I’m interviewing today?

Sure. My story starts back in 2005. I was messing around with HTML, building websites, stuff like that. I was working for our family business, a shutter company in San Diego. My parents knew that I was learning to build websites on my own, and they asked me to put together the company website.

I built this website for them, and they were pretty impressed with it because i had no formal education on web development. They were a wholesaler, so the businesses they sold to started coming to them and asking who built their website. They were saying, “we really like it, and we need to build an online presence. Can you connect me with your web developer?”

My parents, being awesome, gave them my name. So on the side, I started building websites for my parents’ clients.

In 2007, one of those clients came to me and said, have you heard about WordPress? So I looked into it, bought a few online courses, and learned it inside out. I started moving everyone to WordPress, and then learned more about blogging, and advertising on my blog.

So in 2007, I set up my first sort-of info blog. I started a blog on personal finance and started making decent money advertising on it. I thought it was pretty cool, so I duplicated the blog but dedicated it to health and fitness. It really took off.

I ran that in my spare time, in the evenings, and I built these two blogs up until I was making $500 or $700 per month on advertising.

2009, my parents sold the company. I kind of butt heads with him, and I decided to take my skills building websites and blogging to become a full time blogger.

2009 to 2010, I was on EI, and I was building up these blogs at the same time. Around the middle of 2009, people started asking me how I was building these blogs. They noticed it had been six or seven months, and I didn’t have a day job, but I was still paying the mortgage, paying for my cars.

I started teaching friends and family how I was building these blogs. Next thing I know, I made it into a course. It becomes the WordPress classroom. That was my main business for a couple years, until 2013, I partnered with Bradley Will, who built FreeBlogFactory.com. We merged our two businesses into LearntoBlog.com. We started doing about half a million per year, and then this year, I sold my share back to Bradley, because I want to get back to generating income from affiliate programs, and blogging, and creating great content.

That’s the quick business lifespan.

I love listening to the progression of entrepreneurs. Effectively what you’re doing today is based entirely around content marketing.
My business model is to create a lot of content, attract people over to my sites, and then I have a few small info products that I sell to people.
Great. Before we get into the strategies, let’s cover our basics. What is content marketing? What is the role it plays in digital business?

I like to say it this way: there are businesses out there that put up card websites, meaning they have maybe a photo of their business with a bit of contact information. That’s it. Content marketing is taking your business and putting content before the offer. Nobody likes going to business websites–when someone is searching for something, and they find your business, that’s not what they want to find–they want content.

You’re giving them the content that they’re looking for so that they find you when they’re searching for businesses.

Perfect. So now that we’re on the same page, let’s go deeper.

When it comes to content marketing we have three pillars. Creating content quickly, distributing your content, and then making that content drive traffic to our websites.

Let’s dig into each one of those with you–starting with pillar number one, content creation. A lot of people struggle with this, honestly, staring at a blank word document, with no idea what to write. The assumption is that everything you create needs to be some original groundbreaking thought.

How do you do it? How do you create good content?

The hardest part about creating content is opening your WordPress dashboard and staring at a blank screen. So I never start from a blank slate. I either start from a template, or I transcribe audio recordings.

My favourite method is to go out, hire writers, but I hire them to do the research and write the rough draft. Then I paste that into WordPress, and I get to rewrite this message and add my own experience to it all. Now I don’t have to stare at a blank screen.
Content marketing plan
I get so much content created every single day, this has been phenomenal for me.

I like that, because it’s so completely backwards to what I’m used to. Usually, I would write something out and then forward it to a writer for fine tuning. But you always get it back, and it’s never quite in your voice anymore.

This is a brilliant way to get that research done and accelerate your progress.

Out of curiosity, where do you find your writers?

I get them from Jobs.Problogger.Net. I love it. You pay $50 to post an ad, and you’ll get a ton of responses. So what I do is I look at all of my applicants, and I keep them in a spreadsheet, so that I can go back to that list in a few months if I need a writer for a new website.

That’s so clever. You’re not paying the $50 every time, you’re only paying it once, building your writers list, and away you go.

How much are you generally spending for a rough draft?

It’s all over the place depending on the length of the post. Typically I shoot for $30 for 1,000 words. I’ve had cheaper and more expensive writers, but there are a few factors I look at to determine cost. One factor is, what is the social media following of these writers? You can probably guess why I want that information: it circles back to traffic.

If this writer can help me circulate the piece as well, then they’re more valuable to me.

That’s interesting. So you’re hiring people–are they ghost writing for you?

It varies. Sometimes it’s ghost writing, sometimes they ghost write it but I give them a little bit of credit throughout the post, and sometimes it’s a credited post. I like to mix and match. When I create blogs, I like to create an authority blog, with lots of different writers and contributors, whereas a standard blog has one person’s voice with slight variations.

I do have a mix of those three formats, ghost writing, credited post, and those hybrid posts where I quote them or something because I want them to circulate it on their networks.

Interesting. So for them to share it, you offer them a bit of credit. When you pull writers off of ProBlogger, how often do you find someone with a big following?
It’s about 50/50. They all have twitter accounts, but the calibre of the following varies. Most of the writers I find on ProBlogger also have their own websites. They’re all trying to grow their own freelance career.
Of course. So one more question on the creation strategy. How do you come up with topics?

I have a few different places that I find inspiration for topics. If I write a blog post and someone asks a question in the comments, I keep that in mind. I really like BuzzSumo.com, as well, you type in the keyword pertaining to a certain topic and it shows you all of the most popular articles on that topic according to social media.

I like to use that to tap into see what other people are currently talking about. Another way is that I look for Quora.com, type in my keyword, and find common questions.

Thirdly is I look in the iTunes podcast marketplace. I look at what the most popular episodes are and I keep track of them in my niche that I’m writing for, and tap those for content.

If I don’t have a starting point, I’ll check one of those out, and then send it over to my writers.

I think a lot of entrepreneurs sit down and try to come up with stuff off the top of their heads, but you do need to be strategic and there are ways to find popular topics.

So are you creating content with the intent of social circulations? Or do you focus on search as well?

To be honest, I’m not a huge SEO expert. I don’t spend a lot of time on it. But I do answer some of these questions on Quora, and link back to my website. I do the same thing on Reddit, or other social platforms. Also, when I do a lot of repurposing is for the purpose of SEO.
Let’s transition into that next pillar: repurposing content. I see people write up some content, put it on their blog, make one recording, and they put it on YouTube and that’s it. What’s your strategies?

When I say repurposing, I mean, not only are you making one piece of content into other media, but you’re also putting it up on different platforms to draw traffic back. Get the content in front of audiences that may not have seen it.

So often I’ll do an audio blog. I’ll read my blog post in an audio, and put it on iTunes, embed it on my website, put it on SoundCloud.

I noticed you had Eugene Ware on your podcast the other day, and his tool of turning audio into video looks really cool, so I’ll be experimenting with that soon.

If you make slides to your text, you can put it up on SlideShare.

You can translate content into different media, but you can also post it on different platforms. I use the same blog post, and I always link back to my blog.

So in summary, you start by taking a blogpost and turning it into a different kind of media. And then down the road, you take the written content and you put it onto different platforms. I assume that you do that for a few months so that you are the rightful owner of that content in Google’s eyes.

When moving it to another platform, I always let a bit of time pass. That’s how you inject some life into old content. I do like to sort of make condensed versions of a blog post. If a post is 3,000 words long, I might take a 250 word summary and share that on Tumblr, or LinkedIn.

I’ve found that gives me a little boost in the rankings.

You’re going to wind up with great backlinks back to that article. So you’re creating these articles, and obviously you’re trying to engage people when they come to your site as well. What do you do to create more engagement in your articles? In terms of length, format, and images?

I always make sure that I have images and that the posts are visually appealing. I find nice images, use screenshots if I’m describing a process, and then I use my keywords at my alt-tags for an SEO boost. I always put images in.

I’ve found that every time I write a blog post, I mention  a few different names and a few different companies. The reason I do that is because every time I mention someone in a post, I can tell those people that I’ve mentioned them, and they’ll share it on their social media. So I always try to include company names or people’s names.

I don’t have a hard rule on length. Minimum is usually around 1,000 words, but I want the quality to be there. I want people to feel like they made good use of their time. So I don’t worry about length, so long as the take away is there.

Are you working in niches that are unrelated to each other?

I do have a few that aren’t related. Most of my stuff currently goes to my health and fitness blog. I sold my finance blog off to someone, they let the domain die. For awhile I had a blog on organic gardening. I also have several clients that I work with to create content for along with MultiplyAuthority.com.

As far as niche goes, I’m kind of all over the place.

Yeah it sounds like it! The reason I was asking is because I get asked all the time about creating blogs in unrelated niches, and should people use pen names for this?

So do you use pen names?

I don’t use pen names. It’s Matt Wolfe on everything. I don’t see anything wrong with pen names, but I struggle with it because I like doing video and audio.
Now let’s shift to traffic. As we get content out there, how do we use it to drive traffic back to our website?
Really, I would suggest highlighting other people that will want to share that post as well. On Google Analytics, almost all of my traffic comes from either twitter or SEO. People say that twitter is dead but it’s in my top three traffic generators.
Let’s slow down for a second. I didn’t see that coming at all. I very rarely talk to anyone that says twitter is one of their big traffic sources. Is this primarily from the people that you’re mentioning?

Yes, exactly. I tweet at them to let them know they’ve been mentioned. Then I also use writers who have large followings, because they’ll post that. It’s about finding writers that will want to share the content they write, and I have a rule that I want a lot of links in my content. The people that I link to always share posts that they’re mentioned in.

That is a big part of my traffic strategy.

This is such a unique strategy. What we all just heard there was massively valuable. Writing a post, linking to other people, sharing it with them, and having them then share that post. That is huge. So I want to add one more layer on here because I think people will make this mistake when they get started. So you can’t just start mentioning Justin Bieber and hoping he’ll share it.

When you use a strategy like this, you’re more likely to get a reciprocation from someone that isn’t the biggest name in the industry or niche. Look at people on the B level there, they’re trying to build their exposure. When you’re starting out, that’s a great way to go.

Matt, that was awesome. You should write an e-book.

One thing I want to tack on, is that we tend to see the authorities in our niche as bigger than they really are. In the bubble of internet marketing, there’s a few guys at the top, and people look at them and think they’re untouchable.

But if you step outside the world of internet marketing–my next door neighbour has never heard of these guys. I have customers in the pest control niche and there are thought leaders in that niche, too, but most of us don’t see that.

They’re really just guys that live down the street. Regular guys.

If someone in the IM niche were to send me an article I was mentioned in, I would see their endgame. I would know that they wanted me to tweet it. I would understand that. Outside of that, it gets easier, because people not in the IM niche don’t necessarily see the value that they’re generating for your business.

Outside of that, you get such a great response from this.

Business, too. If you mention actual businesses, they’ll want to share as well.
So we’ve covered our three pillars. What are the top mistakes you see people make in content marketing?

One of the things that really bothers me is when people create content with no images. Or when people hire writers and they don’t add their own polish to it. A lot of times, people will hire folks that don’t speak English as a first language. You have to give it a read through and clean it up.

I don’t feel like there’s any point in spinning articles, either. That’s where you take an article and toss it through a system that spins the words around so that Google sees it as a different article but it’s unreadable by humans.

Creating content just for the sake of SEO is a huge mistake. Stuffing keywords into a blog post. When it comes to content creation, create a post for human beings. A lot of that other stuff just tends to follow. Share it on socials, and if it’s great content, then the rest just sort of follows. But you need to create that killer, high quality content.

content marketing process

I love that we’re in a place with social media where you can leverage that content to spread it out over so many different media.

So if our listeners want to find more about you, where should they look?

I’m on MattWolfe.net, my personal blog. I share income reports and personal rants and things like that. Then MultiplyAuthority.com has multiple writers, and that’s about growing your brand and becoming an authority through techniques like content marketing.
Thank you, Matt, for sharing so generously all of these tips and strategies!
No worries, Derek, thank you for having me on! I really appreciate it.

Awesome. Alright everyone, that was internet marketing authority and all around entrepreneur Matt Wolfe. As always, the transcript and show notes will be up at ProjectIgnite.com/podcast. If you haven’t done so already, you can subscribe on iTunes–just look up Project Ignite, Derek Gehl, or Internet Marketing and I’ll show up! If you’re an Android user, just get us on Soundcloud!

Also, please leave a review, tell us what you think. That’s what gives me the motivation to keep creating this information packed podcast for digital entrepreneurs. If you want some more tips and tools, check out our weekly profit report newsletter over at ProjectIgnite.com.

Now it’s time to take the tips, tools, and strategies that we’ve learned from Matt here today, and apply the final essential ingredient to make this all work for you: that ingredient is action. Go forth, take action, and stay tuned for more info-packed episodes of the Project Ignite podcast–a podcast designed to simplify online business so you can make more money.

This is Derek Gehl, signing off. See you in the next episode.

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