Join Other Entrepreneurs and Build

Your Content Machine

There’s a lot covered in this book, and many of these topics are
better discussed with a community of likeminded entrepreneurs.
If you are serious about implementing what you learn in this book,
I’d love to have you in my private community. It’s where I hang out
with entrepreneurs and content marketers who get shit done.
Every day we dissect different topics around entrepreneurship, with
a focus on online and content marketing.
Visit http://contentmachine.com/community to check it out, I’ll see
you there.
 Contents
Foreword by Neil Patel
Introduction
Chapter 1: How to Build a Business with Content Marketing
Chapter 2: Content Marketing Basics
Chapter 3: High Quality Content
Chapter 4: Differentiation
Chapter 5: Scale: Building The Machine
Epilogue: Where To Go From Here
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
 Foreword by Neil Patel
To say I have committed to content marketing as a key strategy in
business would be a huge understatement.
As a content creator I’m a natural and passionate educator. I’ve been
actively creating content for my businesses for over eight years.
Even though it was a slow start, I have now used it to build four
multi-million dollar businesses.
There’s no doubt content marketing is powerful, but it’s not easy.
The messages, specific instruction, and associated resources in this
book will help you do it right.
I started content marketing because I couldn’t afford to pay for
advertising. Writing a blog post was free, so I wrote a post called
“Got Crunched” about being featured on Techcrunch. I figured I’d get
some traffic from the popular news site Digg.com, and I’d get some
attention for my business.
Good news—I got the traffic. Bad news—it didn’t stick. So I kept at
it, and worked tirelessly on creating content that people cared
about.
My first successful post was about 75 designer resources. It was a
detailed list of specific things that designers could use. This post was
much more successful than others I’d written, and I knew I was onto
something.
My plan evolved into writing detailed, highly actionable, long, and
practical content.
I’ve written countless 5,000+ word posts on virtually every online
marketing topic you can think of on my sites: Kissmetrics and
Crazy Egg. I’ve even done some 20,000- and 30,000-word guides on
Quick Sprout. Any time I can think of a project that can be more
practical, more useful, more detailed, and more actionable, I will do
it.
As a result, I’ve built blogs with millions of visitors and turned that
attention into multi-million dollar business results for my
companies.
My approach is to go above and beyond others to get noticed, and
that is certainly what has happened. As Dan will address in Content

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Machine, it’s not enough to create great content. You have to create
content so much better than your competition that you really stand
out.
There is no point at all in generating mediocre content. Don’t just
write about your business or your product. Your content has to be
educational and solve problems.
Talk to potential customers and figure out what they want. Throw
away everything you learned in school. Writing content is a two-way
conversation, not a speech. Be personal and make people feel like
you are there with them.
Selflessly help your customers. Give the Zappos experience through
education.
This is how you get noticed, how you truly help people, and it’s how
you create content that people care about.
Doing it just for keyword rankings or to hit quotas is a frivolous
exercise.
Content Machine will show you exactly how to do all this, and much
more.
All the best in your content marketing journey.
Neil Patel
Entrepreneur and Passionate Content Creator

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Introduction
“If you suck at sales, can you be an entrepreneur?”
From 2002 to 2006, when I was working a job, I assumed the
answer was no.
The entrepreneurs I looked up to, like Richard Branson and Steve
Jobs, seemed to be epic salespeople. I figured entrepreneurship
wasn’t for me. Besides, my job was good, my income was going up
every year, and things were okay.
But in 2006 I did start a business. My income took a big hit, and I
continued to ask myself this question for the next eight years. I
asked it every day in the seven years of my first business, a failed
web agency. I asked it every day in the year of my second business, a
failed software startup.
I asked it for the last time on June 27, 2013.
In the year prior, I’d spent $60,000 to buy 12 months of runway for
my software startup. I had two weeks left, was losing $1,500/month,
and found myself in the process of starting to look for jobs.
It was my lowest point as an entrepreneur. I’d decided that maybe I
wasn’t an entrepreneur after all. My kids were at the age where they
were starting to ask what I did for a living. What would I tell them?
It’s now June 2015. In the last few months I’ve spoken as a business
expert in five cities around the world, I have a best-selling book on
Amazon, and I run four businesses; including one of the fastest
growing WordPress support companies in the world, WP Curve. We
have built a team of over 45 developers in seven countries, worked
with over 4,000 clients, and turn over a million or more in
Australian dollars per year.
My income chart looks like one hell of a rollercoaster ride:

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In the end, I figured out I could be an entrepreneur. And I still suck
at sales.

You Are Lucky!

If you had been born just one generation ago and I had told you
there was a way to build a million-dollar business without spending
a cent on advertising, while at the same time helping thousands of
people, you would have told me I was crazy.
Yet here we are. The most powerful and valuable form of marketing
is at your fingertips, freely available and almost free to use.
“Sure,” you say, “it’s easier than ever to create content, but there’s
also way more competition.”
Really? Take a look at your top three or four competitors and see
what sort of quality they are putting out. I’d be willing to bet it’s not
great.
If that’s the case, you have a huge opportunity waiting for you. This
book will help you take it.
I’m on a plane writing this—my second book—only two weeks after
the launch of my first, The 7 Day Startup. I gave away 13,000 free
copies of that book on Amazon Kindle in the first week. It took me

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six months to put together, including 200+ emails to both my editor
and my formatter.
Giving it away was an easy decision, because it’s what I do with all of
my projects: create lots of useful content, give it away for free, and
use that attention to build a business.
I’ve taken this approach from day one of my WordPress website
support service, WP Curve. In the two years since we launched,
we’ve spent a total of $181.23 on advertising, and haven’t done
anything that would represent traditional “sales” work.
Instead of paid advertising, I focused on creating content and giving
it away for free. The 7 Day Startup was only a tiny exercise
compared to all of the content I’ve put together over the years. In
fact, at 26,000 words, it represents just 4% of the total amount.
Since 2008 I’ve written around 600,000 words, which adds up to a
book longer than War and Peace. I haven’t charged a cent for any of
it.
We still don’t spend money on advertising for WP Curve. We have a
full time content manager, paid guest writers, and continue to focus
on content marketing as our only marketing strategy.
Content Machine will show you how to do the same thing. I just don’t
want it to take you two years and half a million words to get there.

Quality Over Quantity

I was flying blind when I first started content marketing. I followed
the general “write every day” advice and focused too much on the
amount of content I was creating. The problem was, 90% of it went
pretty much unnoticed.
In this book I’m going to show you a simple, three-piece framework
for ensuring this doesn’t happen to you. For now, let’s go through
some of my early numbers:
• Since 2008, I’ve created around 700 pieces of content.
• At least 400 of those were in the last two years.
• I’ve sent an email to my list almost every week.
• I wrote about 350 on-site articles before I had an article
with more than 10 tweets (that should be ringing alarm
bells).
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 • Almost every article I wrote prior to two years ago still
has less than ten tweets, with only a handful with just
over.
• I didn’t really start believing we could build a business
using content marketing until last year!
I invested too much time in every type of content you can imagine:
• I did intense content creation sessions, including one in
August 2012 where I wrote 13 articles in one day.
• In one week of December 2012, I launched a new
podcast, created ten podcast episodes, wrote six blog
posts, and appeared on three other sites.
• I spent weeks working on single pieces of content that
got less than 100 total views.
I ran webinars; created free plugins; designed infographics;
commissioned funny illustrations; recorded podcasts; produced
videos; wrote long posts (5,000+ words); crafted
interactive/graphic content; created detailed step-by-step
marketing guides; built email courses and sequences (some as long
as 52 emails); developed video training; wrote guest posts;
composed interactive guest posts; combined writing, illustration,
and audio; recorded hundreds of guest interviews; presented at
conferences; wrote media releases, ebooks, and books; targeted
articles at press outlets; conducted significant influencer outreach;
answered questions in forums; did AMAs; and much, much more.
You name it, I’ve tried it.
I loved creating the content, but there was a problem. I measured
myself based on how much content I created, not how much traction
that content got. The quantity, not the quality.
Like Neil Patel, I eventually worked out that one spectacularly
successful piece of content was infinitely more valuable than 100
pieces of content that go unnoticed.
By using the tools in this book, you will hopefully get the fun without
the struggle.
Throughout the years I’ve become passionate about content
marketing. I’ve helped other people build their businesses with
content, and I’ve reached out to people who are getting great results
with their own content.
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Most people don’t see great returns—in fact, according to the 2015
Content Marketing Institute (CMI) research on business to business
marketers, only 38% regard their content marketing as effective.1
The respondees are mostly CMI members, so you can imagine what
the average business owner thinks.
I’ve made it my mission to ensure you are not one of the people who
regards content marketing as ineffective.
This book will help you achieve a few things:
First, you will fully understand what content marketing is and how a
working content marketing strategy is put together. You may decide
it’s not for you, or you may jump in headfirst, screeching with
excitement. Either way, you need to understand it before you decide.
Second, you will learn a simple three-step framework for content
marketing success. It will help you focus on the right things, as
opposed to simply “writing every day.”
On top of that, I’ll make your life easier by providing a number of
downloadable frameworks and assets that you can plug into your
business immediately to ensure your content marketing strategy is
effective.

Start Taking Action on Content Marketing Now

I’m big on taking action. I hope you take action with this book, be it
by creating a blog, re-working some old content, or releasing a
podcast.
If you implement one idea or like a quote in this book, I’d appreciate
if you could share it with the #contentmachine hashtag on Twitter
or Instagram. You can tag me if you like (@thedannorris). I love re-
sharing the mentions, and it’s great for me to see what parts of the
book are having an impact.
I’ve also put together a bunch of resources for this book to support
every chapter. Visit http://contentmachine.com/resources for free
access to frameworks, resources, quotes, and every link mentioned
in the book.
I want this to be the most actionable book on content marketing in
the world. I want to show you specific examples of entrepreneurs

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who have made content marketing work, and then give you the tools
to do the same for yourself.
In short, regardless of your experience with online content right
now, my goal is for you to finish this book and be in a position to
build a high-growth business without spending a cent on
advertising.
Let’s get started.

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Notes
1. Joe Pulizzi, “New B2B Content Marketing Research: Focus on Documenting Your
Strategy,” Content Marketing Institute, Z Squared Media LLC, last modified October 1,
2014, http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2014/10/2015-b2b-content-marketing-
research/.

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Chapter 1: How to Build a Business
with Content Marketing
Let’s start with a super simple definition for content marketing:

Content marketing is releasing something

interesting that grabs attention for a business
and builds trust.
That’s it! Easy, right?
For some companies, like Red Bull, it means hundreds of staff in
professional studios creating multi-million dollar feature films and
releasing them for free. For others it means writing blog posts,
putting recipes and nice images on Instagram, or recording a
podcast.
The most important pieces of the content marketing definition are
attention and trust.
You want to put out content that helps people, gets them to pay
attention to you and your business, and, over time, garners their
trust. These people become part of your community, they help
promote your content, refer people to your business, and may even
become partners or customers.
This book is a form of content marketing. If you are reading it, I have
your attention. By the end, you will feel like you know me, and you
will trust me more than you did before. You will know of my
businesses and you will be part of my worldwide community of
passionate content marketers.
The idea has been around for hundreds of years. One of the earliest
recognized forms of content marketing was a magazine started in
1895 by John Deere called The Furrow. It provided interesting
information about farming and built a worldwide following for the
brand which continues to this day.
With the emergence of the web and social media, content marketing
has exploded. The core idea is the same, but the methods for doing
it—and, more importantly, doing it well—have changed
dramatically.
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Are You a Blogger or a Content Marketer?
So you’re fired up about content marketing and ready to start or
improve on your own content strategy.
But first, I’m going to fill you in on some bad news. I get hundreds of
comments and emails from people who are frustrated because, for
the vast majority, content marketing does not seem to work.
Out of all the failure I see, I can narrow almost all of it down with
one simple question:
If I were to ask you what the most important task as a content
marketer is, what would you say?
How about you? Did you say “creating content” or “blogging”?
If you did, then you made the mistake that most failed content
marketers make. You see yourself as a creator of content or a
blogger but you don’t see yourself as a marketer.
You have assumed that your job is to create content, when really
your job is to market a business.
Luckily this book isn’t a book on how to write blog posts. It’s a book
about how to build a business using content marketing. Let’s look at
how that works. There are 3 components.

Of course you need great content that grabs the attention of your
audience and builds their trust. The ability to identify what great

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content is and do it at scale on an ongoing basis is what the majority
of this book focuses on.
Creating great content is not enough, because without a great
business, you are sending attention to something that is broken (or
non-existent).
Finally there needs to be a logical link between the two. I call this
Monetization Logic. I will talk more about that towards the end of
this chapter. For now let’s look at how to build a great business.

10 Characteristics Of A High-Growth Business

After nine years of entrepreneurship, I’ve had a lot of ups and
downs. I’ve had businesses that completely failed, one that
stagnated for seven years, and others that grew to multiple six-
figures in under a year. I’ve learned that some businesses are
fundamentally designed to grow and some are not. I’ve paid
particular attention to the startup world where growth is
worshipped while staying away from accepted small business
advice.
Through my own experience and observations of other successful
companies, especially those I covered in my first book, The 7 Day
Startup, I’ve narrowed these traits down to 10 Characteristics of
High-Growth Companies. If these are not present in your business,
you will struggle to make any form of marketing work.
When someone isn’t able to grow their business from high-quality,
differentiated, scalable content marketing, something is
fundamentally flawed in the way the business is designed. They lack
one or all of these characteristics.
I see these traits in businesses that are designed to scale without
their founders. If you are going to focus on building a content
machine, you need something that will grow without your constant
attention.
Some of these things might challenge you. Not everyone wants to
build a high-growth startup. However, rather than dismissing them
right away, I encourage you to take some time to consider the
possible implications for your business. If there are things you can

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apply to create a more sound business, it makes sense to implement
them now so you get a better return from your content marketing.

1. They Are Fundamentally Profitable

What happens when the business expands, and the founder isn’t
capable of doing all the work anymore?
If the profit margin in your business is set so you are unable to
replace yourself and still make a profit, then you are in trouble.
Despite what you may hear, it’s not an easy problem to solve. You
think you can just raise prices, but that may send your customers to
more affordable competitors. Your business might be fundamentally
unprofitable.
Here’s a very simple calculation I recommend every business owner
should perform: Figure out everything that goes into serving a
customer. How many hours will you need from X, Y, and Z staff
members to complete the tasks, and how much do those staff
members cost. Imagine your business is at a reasonable size, and
that you have all of the tools and technologies necessary to manage
a decent number of clients. Distribute the costs across those clients
to come up with a rough idea of how much it’s going to cost to
deliver your service. Take that number and, at the very least, double
it. That is your price.
Charge that much now, and see if your business grows. If it doesn’t,
you might have a problem—and no amount of content is going to fix
a fundamentally unprofitable business.
Pricing is a complicated topic in itself, but many businesses haven’t
done this basic calculation, and they end up running fundamentally
unprofitable businesses. Then they wonder why their content
marketing isn’t building them a profitable business.

2. They Operate In A Large Market

Common business advice tells you to find a small niche and go after
it. I don’t like this advice, and I don’t see successful high-growth
companies doing it.
The main difference between my first business and my third was the
size of the market we were in. My first, the failed web agency,
targeted mainly local businesses in my geographical area. My third,
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WP Curve, is available to anyone in the world who uses WordPress
(70 million websites).
Being in a large market has resulted in constant, high, and at times
almost unmanageable growth. It also means we can be broad with
our content and build a lot of support from a large community.
Your content marketing is often available to the whole world. If you
can figure out a way for your business to be just as available, then
your content will have much more power.

3. They Naturally Build Assets Over Time

All high-growth companies have some sort of assets that set them
apart from their competition. It could be the IP for software; it could
be their people; it could be their brand. This is something that small
businesses don’t often think about, but investors in large companies
obsess over.
The question they ask is, “What is stopping someone else from
coming along and taking what you have?” This is very difficult for a
small business to build on when they are starting out, but it’s
something worth thinking about for the future. Is your business
structured in a way that makes it extremely easy for competitors to
come along and do the same thing? Can customers just leave and go
somewhere else without any difficulty?
If that’s the case, what can you do about it? Can you invest in your
brand, your people, or something else? Can you get legal protections
like trademarks? Can you build technical expertise or something
physical and tangible?

4. They Have a Simple, Relatable Differentiator

I noticed that high-growth companies tend to go after existing
problems, and they solve them with a unique twist. This means they
don’t have to convince people of the fundamental problem—people
are paying for a solution already. They just have to stand out with
one major differentiating factor, and ideally it will be one people will
talk about because they care about it.
Here are some examples:
• WP Curve: Like a developer except unlimited fixes 24/7.

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 • Uber: Like taxis except cleaner, safer, cheaper, nice
smelling, and they actually arrive.
• Airbnb: Like hotels except you get more for less.
• Trello: Like post-it notes, except on your computer.
• Evernote: Like your brain, except you can’t forget.
If the part after the “except” is something customers care about
enough to talk about, then you are off to a good start. If your
business has no differentiating aspect, or has one that customers
don’t care about and won’t talk about, then you are in trouble.

5. They Focus On Growing Consistent Revenue At a High

Lifetime Value
Not all revenue is equal. Predictability in business is highly
underrated. Businesses that are successful in the long term
generally have a predictable revenue model. Those categorized by
huge peaks and troughs, one-off launches, and up-and-down months
are far more difficult.
If you operate a business with monthly consistent revenue (ideally
recurring), then everything is much easier. You can invest in tools,
technology, and people that you need to grow, because you are
confident you will be able to afford it next month. You can say “no”
to certain customers or projects, because you already have a good
solid base of revenue. You can accurately estimate your profit
margin and your cashflow.
If your business is cyclical and inconsistent in revenue, think about
how you can make it more consistent. Making less money on a
recurring monthly basis might be a better long-term option, as long
as you still have an acceptable profit margin.
It’s also important that over time, you make a reasonable amount of
money from each customer (called Lifetime Value). Building a
business by selling a one off $20 product is going to be a lot tougher
than a business that sells an $80 monthly subscription. If you don’t
have a reasonable lifetime value, you won’t get adequate reward for
your hard work getting the attention and building the trust.

6. They Invest In A Memorable Brand

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Design and general execution is one of the most underrated
marketing strategies in business. I’ve noticed that most successful
new companies have very short, memorable, and well-executed
brands. They fall easily into conversation, and they spread via word
of mouth like wildfire.
Think about: “We caught an Uber”, “Put it in Slack”, etc.
Make sure you have thought about building a real brand in your
business. Not just a website with a bunch of keywords in it, but a
strong brand—ideally short and memorable—that is well executed
with world-class design that stands for specific values. People want
to fall in love with brands, so don’t skimp out on this aspect in your
business. No one will ever tell you they decided to use a competitor
because they didn’t trust your overall design, but it happens
constantly.
Remember that you aren’t a designer. Once you are up and running,
this is something you need to take seriously and get some real help
on—and not from your friends on Facebook.
Find a designer who can execute something of top quality for you, so
you can truly compete or even stand out from the competition.
The best part is that content is a huge brand builder. If you can focus
on your design and keep your content at the same level, pushing a
similar message, design, and content can work together explosively.

7. They Are Started By A Team, Not An Individual

A lot of solo entrepreneurs struggle with the same issue: the founder
is responsible for too many different jobs. That works only as long
as the founder is capable of doing those jobs.
It’s extremely rare for a decent company to be built by an individual
and not a founding team. Just look at the startup world for guidance.
• Almost every startup I can think of had a founding team.
• Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator and one of the
world’s leading startup experts, cites “single founder” as
the top item in his list of why startups fail.
• Incubators that are designed to find the highest potential
customers, invest in them, and grow them rarely accept a
company without a founding team.
• Investors will rarely invest in a startup with one founder.
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 • An individual with all of the necessary skills to run a
great business is like a unicorn. Maybe they exist? Maybe
they don’t? I’ve never met one.
• Like every entrepreneur, I tend to think I can do
everything and am “a jack of all trades”. But I had zero
success until I started businesses with other people.
• Running a business is an emotional rollercoaster of epic
proportions. You can’t ride it alone—get someone else on
board.
Think long and hard about this one. Can you realistically be an epic
entrepreneur as well as a world class content marketer?
When I started WP Curve, I agreed to give half of the company away
so I could start it with someone else. In two years, the company
became five times the size that my last business was after seven
years. I would rather own 50% of a million-dollar company than
100% of a $150k company.

8. They Know How To Say “No,” And They Do It Often

Great businesses choose what they are going to do, and they do it
extremely well. It takes a long time, generally a lot of people, and a
lot of money to truly achieve “world class” status. If your business
has multiple focuses rather than one main task, it might be a sign
that you are in trouble. You might not have enough confidence in
your ability to meet a world-class standard and attract enough
customers.
Bolting more sub-par solutions onto your main service will not solve
that problem—it will only complicate your business and increase
the likelihood of running into a fundamentally unprofitable model.
Learn how to say “no”. Instead, reach “world class” status at one
thing. Be confident that you can use your content marketing skills to
get so much attention for this one thing that there will be plenty of
demand.

9. They Understand The Power Of Monthly Growth

I mentioned consistent revenue above, but let me illustrate the
power of monthly growth with an example. Say your business is

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currently doing $6,000 per month, and it’s growing at 15% every
month.
After two years, you will have a two-million-dollar annual business.
After three years, you will have a ten-million-dollar annual business.
Of course, nothing is ever as simple as growing from two to ten
million in one year. However, it illustrates the power of monthly
growth. Great businesses understand this and they obsess over it.
Don’t think so much about how much money you will make in a
year. Think about how much you will grow every single month, and
before you know it your business will be significantly bigger.
This is also a great way to think about the metrics for your content. I
noticed our blog traffic grew by about 5% per month in the early
days. At first it didn’t seem like much, but with consistent monthly
growth, before we knew it, we had tens of thousands of monthly
visitors.

10. They Think “Long Term”

Great businesses avoid get-rich-quick schemes and over-
optimization. They focus on solid, long-term strategies.
Getting in the press, building a public profile, putting out useful
content, fostering important relationships, and developing a great
company culture are all examples of solid long-term strategies.
These aren’t going to result in quick wins, but they are what creates
great companies.
Think about these things from the day you start your business and
act as if you are building a brand that you can pass onto your
children. This will drive you to excellence and steer you away from
the latest marketing fads that probably won’t work for you anyway.
Think about all of these characteristics and how you can build them
into your own business. If your content isn’t getting the results you
want, think about whether there is something fundamental here that
needs to be addressed.
Don’t forget to review these characteristics step by step and make
sure the business you build is worth sending leads to.

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Monetization Logic
Sometimes content marketing fails because the business is
fundamentally broken. Other times it fails because the content is not
good enough. But content marketing can also fail if both the
business and the content are sound. This happens when the
business strategy includes poor monetization logic. That is, there is
no logical link between the content and the business.
Monetization logic is a simple “Yeah that makes sense” test that is
often missing from people’s content marketing efforts. The easiest
way to determine whether it exists is to ask the question, “Does it
make sense that someone would consume this content and then go
on to become a customer?”
Let’s look at some examples.
Moz has a great blog with useful content about how to rank well in
Google. Their business is selling software to help people rank well in
Google. So it makes sense that someone interested in content about
ranking well in Google would also be interested in buying software
that helps them rank well in Google. This is an example of strong
monetization logic and they’ve built a $30m business off the back of
their content.
Intercom has a great blog with useful content about how to build
software companies. Their business is a messaging app for software
companies. So it makes sense that someone interested in building a
software company would also be interested in using their messaging
software. Again, this is great monetization logic.
If Moz created content about building a software company, it
wouldn’t work nearly as well because it doesn’t make sense. If
Intercom created content about ranking well in Google, that
wouldn’t translate into a good stream of leads.
Another example where people get monetization logic wrong is
geographically. Say you run a local agency that builds websites for
bricks and mortar businesses. You have an internationally popular
design blog that breaks down the amazing design work you do. It
might get huge worldwide traction, but it fails the monetization logic
test. Most of the people who see the content aren’t local and
therefore can’t become a customer. It’s also failing at a topic level

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because it will appeal to designers, and designers won’t become
customers of another design firm.
It doesn’t mean you have to specifically create content only for your
customers, but it does mean it has to generally make sense.
There needs to be a logical link between your content, your
audience, and whatever it is you are selling. A decent percentage of
your audience should be potential customers or potentially refer
other customers to your service. If they aren’t, then the
monetization logic is off.
Think about this as you grow your content marketing strategy. Does
it make sense that consumers of your content would help your
business (by becoming customers or referring customers), or does
something need to be tweaked to make sure this logic is in place?

The Content Marketing Leap of Faith

Okay, so where are we at?
You know the basics of content marketing and why it often fails. You
understand you need great content, a great business, and a logical
link between them.
You are good to go, right?
Not quite. There’s one more reality check.
The content marketing leap of faith.
There’s another important reason why people fail at content
marketing. It’s a reason that is visible on the Google Analytics charts
of most successful blogs. They look something like this.

- 20 -
Hopefully you spotted it: they give up too soon. It takes a long time
to build momentum, and most people don't have the patience to
back something that isn't delivering immediate results.
Content marketing, by its nature, is a long-term exercise. Most top
blogs create content for months or years before they hit traction.
This is the norm, and there are a few reasons for it.
1. Content marketing is about building trust, and you can’t
build trust overnight. Trust is crucial online. People
won’t rush to read and share new sites. You have to earn
trust over time, and you do that by consistently building
your content brand. Unless you are a well-known
entrepreneur, you are going to have to do the work.
2. It takes a while for some channels to kick in. For
example, Google favors older sites with more links and
more content. If we create an article right now on
WordPress speed, it will rank well. But if we did that in
our first week of business, it wouldn’t rank at all. As it
turns out, we do have an article on WordPress speed that
was written some time ago. That particular article got
5,000 visits just from Google last month. It’s hard to
place a value on that amount of free traffic just for one

- 21 -
 article. We get tens of thousands of visitors every month
to posts that were written years ago.
3. It takes a long time to endear a valuable community
member. Much like physical communities, you can’t just
waltz in and expect to be at the top right away. It takes
time for you to learn what the community members like
and for them to learn that you are a valuable contributor.
4. It takes time to find your place. I’ve mentioned how
critical it is to work out your core vision and work out
what your audience loves. This is hard to do quickly, and
you should expect some trial and error on that journey.
5. Good content breeds more good content. It could be the
value gained by linking between blog posts, doing guest
content on topics that went well on your site, or doing
another post similar to one that did well on your site.
Whatever it is, there is an “economies of scale” effect
with content marketing. As you create content and you
craft some winners, it becomes a lot easier to get more.
I experienced this myself in the years between 2008 and 2013. I
really struggled to find my place, had patchy results, and created a
lot of content that didn’t result in much benefit. In 2013 I hit my
stride. I released a bunch of posts that garnered over 200 tweets
each and thousands of visits; I started getting mentioned on my
favorite podcasts; I appeared on other posts as a guest author; and I
was voted as Australia’s top small business blogger by the readers of
Smarter Business Ideas Magazine.
Before 2013, the highest number of monthly visits I had ever gotten
to the site was 5,000. In 2013 I was getting 10,000 per month, and in
2014 I was getting 60,000 per month.
At some point along the way, I had to take a leap of faith. I had to
accept that it was going to take me a long time to figure out how to
get big results from the content, but I would figure it out. I trusted
myself to work out what content I loved creating and how to best
position it on my site. I worked through the void of limited results to
our current position of ultimate competitive advantage, where we
can acquire customers without spending a cent.

- 22 -
With the lessons in this book, you can get there quicker than I did.
But it won’t happen overnight.
Take the leap of faith.

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Chapter 2: Content Marketing Basics
The rest of this book is dedicated to helping you create high-quality
content that grabs attention, builds trust, differentiates you from
your competitors, and can be scaled.
Let’s start with a content marketing strategy.
There are some things that are non-negotiable when it comes to
creating great content, which is why I have found that drafting a
content strategy, before you dig into plans and execution, is a good
move. Remember, you don’t want to spit out just any content at a
rapid speed. You want to do it with direction.

The 10-Minute Content Strategy

Like a lot of entrepreneurs, I find it more natural to “wing it” than
have things documented all the time. Still, when it comes to a
content marketing strategy, it makes sense to write it down. When
you are on your own, you might get by with a “make it up as you go”
approach. If you want to build a real long-term machine, you need to
remove yourself from the process at some point. You need to define
a strategy and then build processes around that strategy.
I’ve included a free ten-minute content marketing strategy template
at http://contentmachine.com/resources for you to work through.
Here are the components:
• Vision – What is your blog about when it reaches its full
potential?
• Values – What are the key values that will inform your
content choices? You can refine these over time. They
will end up being a blend of your personal philosophy
and what has worked well with your audience.
• Inspirations – Where do you look for inspiration (design,
content, voice, etc.)? These can be direct competitors or
people in a totally separate industry.
• Strategy Comment – Do you have a high-level description
of the overall strategy behind the blog? Do your best to
come up with something now, but it will be easier to

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 refine this after you have finished this book, particularly
the “Building The Machine” chapter.
• Target Communities – What groups of people are you
creating content for, and where do they hang out?
• Differentiators – How will this blog be different from
what is already available? You might have a handle on
this now, or you may refine it over time as you learn
what’s working.
• Unfair Advantage – What about you, your business, your
style, your team, etc. gives you an advantage? Again, you
might know this now, or you might notice it over time as
people start engaging with your content.
• Key Relationships – Who are the big influencers capable
of boosting your content if you get them on board? These
will be the ones who have a decently sized audience
within the types of communities you are going after. I
find normally it’s not that hard to figure out who these
people are. If you are struggling, check out
Followerwonk or Little Bird.
• Metrics – How will you know when your content is
successful? If in doubt, use my three key metrics of total
shares, comments, and email replies (more on these
later).
• Lead Magnets and CTAs (Calls to Action) – What items
can you use to encourage people to opt in, and what will
your CTA be? This may change after you’ve been through
the “Building The Machine” chapter, but for now, think
about a downloadable you can give away to entice people
to sign up for your emails, or simply create a nice banner
ad that aims to get people on your main landing page.
The template provided at http://contentmachine.com/resources
includes instructions and enables you to create your own strategy in
ten minutes. Most of the areas are fairly self-explanatory, but let’s
delve into two that require some further reinforcement.

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Your Content Vision
It’s going to be very hard to make a content marketing strategy work
if you aren’t clear on the end game. A good way to think about your
vision is answering the question, “What will I/we stand for?”
When I started WP Curve, I knew the world didn’t need more
marketing blogs. It certainly didn’t need more “How To” WordPress
blogs. There wasn’t a lot of unique value to offer there.
However, I knew my entrepreneurial friends and I needed more
“real” entrepreneurial content. By creating a lot of content in this
space, I gradually found a voice that really appealed to other
entrepreneurs. Themes began to emerge.
My income reports got a lot of attention, because I’d delve into
incredible detail about what decisions I was making at what stage of
the business. Entrepreneurs could relate to it and were fascinated
with what I was doing. Often they didn’t agree, and they left
passionate replies to that effect. But they were interested. They
were engaged. Radical transparency became a theme.
My stories about my previous failed businesses have resonated well.
Entrepreneurs have ups and downs—they don’t want to see only
success stories; they want to know what others have learned along
the way. Some of my deepest content has been about when I was
struggling through difficult times, and that has had a great impact on
my audience. Deep emotional connection also became a theme.
Our blog has turned into a place where bootstrapped startups can
get real advice about how to start, grow, and market a business. We
don’t post the typical fluff you find on other similarly-themed sites.
We post detailed lessons learned from the trenches of our own
business and others. We began to notice that the highly tactical,
actionable, detailed, step-by-step content resonated well. Actionable
content then became another main theme.
These themes turned into a vision of a blog where entrepreneurs
could come for real, transparent business advice; real-life
entrepreneurial stories; and highly actionable, applicable resources.
We release intimate details about our own business, including our
income, our traffic stats, our team size, our revenue/costs, etc.
People love this sort of content, because it makes everything real for
them.
- 26 -
We interview other entrepreneurs and learn how they started, got
through the rough times, and ultimately grew their businesses.
Giving away detailed processes or tools that have helped us grow is
another important factor. For example, they get to see our policies
on hiring developers or managing guest authors. This is useful for
other entrepreneurs, and it’s not the typical content you get on
startup blogs. If you are interested in checking some of these out,
I’ve added the top posts on http://contentmachine.com/resources.
I believe a lot of information you get from business books and
traditional “expert” business channels is generic and boring. I
wanted to resolve that with a blog that provides something
interesting, up-to-date, and real.
This philosophy emerged as the vision behind the WP Curve blog.
What is the vision for your content? What will separate it from
others in your industry? What do you believe will influence your
content strategy?
In short, what do you believe people want that they aren’t currently
getting?
You may not have a clear idea about this at first, but keep coming
back to the vision as you go through this book and, over time as you
create more content, something will emerge that will give you a
unique edge and take your content to the next level.
Here are a few examples from other businesses to give you some
more ideas:
Kathryn Minshew started The Muse because she believed that
people hunting for jobs wanted to seek out companies, not the other
way around. They were looking for a place where they could gain
intimate details about working at a company, but no such place
existed. So Kathryn created one. The Muse films in-depth and high-
production value videos for companies to demonstrate what it’s like
to work there. Job seekers can then find those videos, and their ideal
employer, in the process. It flipped the traditional hiring model on
its head.
Buffer believes in radical transparency in business. Entrepreneurs
want real, in-depth detail about what is happening inside a business
to make better decisions about their own. There were no good
places for them to get this information. So Joel and Leo created it.
- 27 -
Their website has a live dashboard that displays all of their key
company financial metrics to the public. Everything from revenue, to
churn, to growth. They provide in-depth details about how much
they pay staff and why, how much they spend on staff retreats, and
how they manage their people.
They are a multi-million dollar funded company with thousands of
customers. Since day one, they have executed this vision to have one
of the most successful startup blogs in the world.
Tim Ferriss believes there are more efficient ways to break down
success and learn what works. He didn’t believe there was a good
place for people to go to find out these hacks. So he created one.
On his blog, he interviews people and has guests share lengthy
(5,000+ words) posts about their processes in goal achievement. He
treats himself like a human guinea pig and has created best-selling
books and a TV show on the topic. All of the content he creates is
loosely based around this theme, and he’s defined a clear space that
he leads in that area.
Dave Asprey believes that traditional diet and exercise advice is
harmful for mental performance. He believes you can change your
life and “upgrade” yourself with simple diet and exercise “hacks”. He
believes people want to discover this info from alternative sources
and didn’t believe there was a good place for people to do so. So he
created one.
His website has a blog with millions of readers, a top-ranking
podcast, best-selling books, and downloadable resources on a range
of topics around his central theme. Plus, he’s built a seven-figure
business mainly selling supplements, like Bulletproof Coffee, off the
back of his content.
Success stories aren’t limited to the big name entrepreneurs, either.
In some cases, content can deliver amazing results on a very small
scale. This has been the case for my latest business, Black Hops
Brewing, a craft beer producer on Gold Coast, Australia. In
Differentiation, I’ll go into detail about how we’ve attracted
investors, local newspapers, conference invitations, customers, and
partners all from only eleven blog posts on the site. We’ve done it,
because we believe it should be easy for keen brewers to find

- 28 -
information on everything they need to get into the craft beer scene
in Australia, and currently they can’t.
In these examples, people aren’t simply writing blog posts. They
have defined a community to help, and they are executing on a
broad vision. They believe something about what people want and
aren’t currently getting. And they are using their unique advantage
to fill that gap.
That is the essence of an effective content marketing vision.
What is your vision? What place do you fill in your market? What do
you want people to think of when they think of your brand? What do
you believe people want that they aren’t currently getting?
This might be something you are clear on from the start, or perhaps
you’ll build this over time as you learn what works. Maybe you see
an unmet need or maybe you are passionate about a subject that you
like to talk about. Keep coming back to this and work on a unique
vision for your content. It will impact every decision you make about
content, and will ultimately be what helps you grab attention and
direct it to your business.

Who Are You Creating Content For?

You might have heard the term “blogger” to describe people who
create online content. “Blogger” became the term of choice when
blogs were first introduced as a way for people to share their
thoughts online. While content marketing as an idea has been
around for hundreds of years, the focus on online content has thrust
the content marketing concept onto a new level.
A blogger is someone who creates content on a blog. As I’ve
mentioned already, your job is not primarily about creating content.
Your job first and foremost is about marketing a business with
content. That’s why I prefer the term “content marketer,” and the
focus for content marketers is, therefore, the business.
I want you to think of yourself as a content marketer.
You’re someone who has a business, wants to grow their business,
and wants to use content to do it. When you create your content it
has to be targeted, because the ultimate goal is to sign up customers.
That doesn’t mean you expect customers to convert directly from

- 29 -
your blog posts. That is very unlikely, particularly early on. Content
marketing is a long-term strategy, not a direct response marketing
technique.
However, how well your content is targeted is critical.
There is an undercurrent that flows through all of your content, and
that is your customer. These customers are part of communities that
your content has to appeal to.
If Dave Asprey’s or Tim Ferriss’s businesses were aimed at
conservative senior executives, their experimental ways would fall
on deaf ears.
There are two ways to define who you are creating content for. One
is to come up with a “Customer Avatar” that describes exactly who
your ideal customer is, what their wants and needs are, and what
they are looking for in your content.
For example, let’s say we define a person: John, who is a 32-year-old
male entrepreneur struggling to create an eye-catching site and
grow his business.
The accepted wisdom around avatars suggests that you would
create a piece of content for John; he would find it through Google,
having never heard about your company before; and then he would
sign up to be a customer because he trusts you.
The problem is, in my business and in most cases that I’ve seen, it
rarely works that way.
That’s why I think taking this avatar approach is the wrong way to
go about it.
Here’s a closer example of how it normally works. For WP Curve,
our ideal customer is John. He’s an established entrepreneur with a
real business. He’s not super passionate about WordPress, but he
does use it for his site and wants it to be secure and valuable to his
business.
• John watched a video by Bryan Harris on Videofruit
about how Bryan is increasing email conversions with
the help of WP Curve. We helped Bryan design the
content idea for his audience. John isn’t particularly
interested in email conversions, but he loves Bryan’s
videos.

- 30 -
 • John attends the WordPress conference WordCamp,
because his hosting company is sponsoring the event. I’m
speaking at the event on how to build a WordPress
business, and John attends the talk. He’s in business
himself, so he finds the topic interesting.
• Two months later, John starts to think about how he can
improve his own site, and when he catches up with a
fellow entrepreneur, Brooke, over coffee, she mentions
she just listened to a WordPress episode on Pat Flynn’s
Smart Passive Income podcast. It was with a guy named
Dan from WP Curve, who discussed how to improve
WordPress sites. He checks out our site and remembers
that he saw me talk at WordCamp.
• A month later he asks his developer to install a new SEO
plugin, and his site crashes. It’s late at night and his
developer is MIA. He googles “WP Curve”, jumps on the
live chat, and signs up.
This is typically how content marketing works. Some of our
customers had been following my content for five years before they
signed up. It doesn’t work the same way for everyone.
This indirect relationship between content and a sale means the
typical advice, “Choose an avatar and create for them,” doesn’t really
work. Your ideal customers will hear about you over a long period of
time, through multiple sources, and that is how trust is built.
A better way to think about it—and the second way to define who
you are creating content for—is to choose a community and help
them with what they need.
Some people in the community might end up becoming a customer.
They might fit your profile directly. Most, however, will simply
become consumers and advocates of your content. Some may just
read it and occasionally engage with it (comment or share). Others
might become raving fans and share it with everyone they know.
These are all good results, because they get your brand in front of
more people through more sources.
In the examples above, if we had created some content called “How
to fix SEO plugin theme crashes”, we would not land John as a
customer. Why?
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Well, to start, we wouldn’t have created the video with Bryan on his
site, Videofruit, because we were too busy creating content for John,
and John doesn’t care about email conversions.
I would never have presented at WordCamp, because WordCamp is
for passionate WordPress geeks like myself, not for busy
entrepreneurs like our ideal avatar.
Brooke would never had heard my podcast with Pat Flynn, because I
never would have done it. I know more traditional entrepreneurs
like John don’t listen to Smart Passive Income. It’s for the younger,
modern-tech-savvy crowd.
Instead, our strategy is to help out web-savvy entrepreneurs with
their business and online marketing. While this is a broad strategy
based on an ideal community rather than an avatar, it’s extremely
beneficial.
It means when Bryan asks for help with doing a piece on his site, we
say yes. When WordCamp asks me to present, I say yes. When Pat
Flynn asks me to be on his podcast, I say yes. It results in free, useful
content for our community, and, in the long term, it builds trust and
spreads the word of our brand.
I have no expectation that any of it will lead to direct sales, and it
rarely does. But it’s a content marketing strategy that works over
time.
Don’t be picky about whether each piece of content is generating
leads. Just create as much value as you can for the most amount of
people in your chosen community. Give away as many useful things
as you can, create content that people can really relate to, and if
possible, offer a unique perspective that people haven’t come across
before.
Who is your community?
How are you going to help them?
Spend a good amount of time thinking about this and have it
documented in your content strategy.

Onsite vs Offsite: The 70/30 Rule

Since you are creating content for a community, it’s important that
you get in front of those community members. For people starting

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out with content marketing, I like the idea of the 70/30 rule. When
you have an established content marketing machine, you have a big
enough audience for posts to gain traction on their own. If you’re
starting out, however, you don’t have this luxury, so you need to
focus on getting new people into your audience. The last thing we
want is for you to create a whole bunch of content, get no traction,
and have your motivation suffer.
The 70/30 rule says that when you still don’t have a big enough
audience for your posts to gain traction on their own, focus 70% of
your efforts on off-site content. This could include guest posting,
content partnerships, interviews on other podcasts, or more actively
promoting your content. The remaining 30% should be spent on on-
site content.
Once you have your audience, you can flip it the other way and do
70% on your own site and 30% off-site. As you get a more
established audience you might find the off-site content portion
goes down even further, but probably never stops completely (even
the content godfather Seth Godin turns up on other people’s
podcasts every now and then).
The point is: you need to get new people seeing your content,
because your small existing audience won’t do enough sharing to get
your name out there.
So write some guest posts, go on some podcasts, and talk to other
influential people in your niche about doing some co-authored
content to increase the “new” traffic on your site.

That’s The Basics—Now What?

As you know, it took me a long time to get content marketing right.
I’m confident, with the lessons in this book, that you can do it much
quicker than I did.
You’ve confirmed that your business either has the 10
Characteristics of a High-Growth Business, or you are working on
building a business that aspires to have them. You’ve taken some
time to sit down and write out your 10-Minute Content Strategy, and
given some serious consideration to your vision and who you are
creating content for.

- 33 -
You have accepted that you will have to take the leap of faith,
because it’s unlikely that you will get outstanding short-term results
with content marketing. But you have a trick up your sleeve. Create
most of your content offsite to start with to get some early attention
and traction.
In the next chapter, we are going to jump into the fun stuff: how to
create high-quality content that people care about.

- 34 -
Chapter 3: High Quality Content
Now that you have a good foundation in business and understand
the basics of content marketing, you are ready to work on figuring
out how to create content that people care about.
Not all content is equal.
You don’t get rewarded for the amount you produce. You could
write thousands of low-impact posts and get virtually zero benefit.
On the other hand, I’ve seen people make a name for themselves and
their brand with just a handful of high-impact posts.
I want you to think of yourself as a designer and a creator, not a
robot. Quantity doesn’t matter. Impact matters. In this chapter I
want to show you how to create high-impact content that people
care about.

Let’s Start Creating Some High-Quality Content

If your content is not high quality, it won’t grab people’s attention,
and your business won’t get the benefit it deserves. Other than
fundamentally broken or non-existent businesses, poor-quality
content is the other top reason content marketing fails.
I’m constantly amazed at how many people (including content
marketing experts), simply don’t “get” what great content is. Luckily
for you, this won’t be a problem once you finish this book.
Here’s my definition:
Great content is something you provide to your
audience that captures their attention and
encourages them to engage and share.
The two parts of that sentence will form the basis of your content
marketing from here on in:
1. Great content succeeds when people engage with,
comment on, and share it. Just creating lots of content
isn’t good enough. Getting lots of pageviews isn’t enough.
If people aren’t truly engaging with it in a meaningful
way, then it’s not great content.
- 35 -
 2. Great content needs to capture attention. That means it’s
tightly related to how good your competitors are at vying
for your audience’s attention. For example, a blog post on
“How to drive sideways” is not going to compete with
Red Bull’s WRX video 1 that shows a professional driver
going sideways down a public street in San Francisco.
But if your competitor is publishing no content, then
your article will be mighty effective. This is a theme
throughout the book. Content marketing is generally like
business. There is no blueprint for content marketing
success—there is only doing something better than your
competitors.
When people come to me and tell me they aren’t getting traction on
their content, it’s almost always because it’s not great content. It’s
broad instead of highly specific and actionable; it’s the same generic
info and nothing new or unique; and it’s boring. People don’t love it,
they don’t engage with it, they don’t share it, and you have
competitors creating content that is better.
It is literally that simple.
No amount of poor content is going to get you the results you want.

Lessons Learned From Bad And Good Content

Since poor quality is one of the top causes of failed content, there is
one question you have to keep coming back to: Is my content
actually good?
As you know, I did hundreds of pieces of content before I got any
traction. In the end I had to accept that it was because the content
wasn’t good enough.
Through years of trial and error and asking myself the above
question, I eventually arrived at these seven lessons, which I keep
coming back to. These things have consistently resulted in high-
impact content that has reached traction and broke me out of my
bad rut.
If one of these resonates with you, think about how you can add
them to your strategy and use them when you generate ideas.

- 36 -
1. Don’t Be Afraid To Go Outside Your Niche
Content must not be boring. If you are in a boring niche, don’t feel
like you need to create content around topics in your niche. Think
more about your community and what they care about.
For example, if you have a backup company, you may not have much
success with posts about why people should back up their files.
People don’t get excited about that. Think about who your ideal
community member is and what other things they do get excited
about, and create content about those things.
Maybe your ideal customer is a location independent entrepreneur
who needs to have their files centrally backed up. Why not inspire
them with stories of other entrepreneurs travelling the world? That
will be more interesting, and when they think about backups, they’ll
think about you.
Remember our definition of content marketing? If it’s not
interesting, it’s not content marketing.
Creating niche-specific content is the easy option, and it will be the
first thing your competitors do. Get the jump on them by going
outside this content to more interesting topics.

2. Care About Your Community

If you create a deep connection with your community, they will
become a never-ending source of topic ideas. I will talk more about
building a community later. For now, have them in the front of your
mind as you start to think about topic ideas.
Ask them what their problems are and what they need help with.
Ask them what other sites they like and pay attention to what they
share.

3. Be More Generous
Content marketing is a trust-building exercise, so the more
generosity the better. In the next chapter, I will tell you about how I
was inspired by Noah Kagan’s appearance on the Smart Passive
Income Podcast.
His generosity really took me aback, so I asked myself, “How can I be
even more generous than that?” Noah had 650 comments on Pat’s
blog after that episode. How could I beat that?
- 37 -
I volunteered to review websites for anyone who posted a comment
on the episode. At the time of writing, there are over 700 comments.
I reviewed sites from all over the world, at airports and hotels as I
travelled. I probably spent a full week in the comments on that site
reviewing websites. What can you do to be more generous than your
competition?

4. Be More Transparent
Being transparent is a natural trust builder. Transparency in
business has become a trend of late, and it’s a trend I have been very
keen to embrace. I’ve released income reports since 2012 when I
had no income. We’ve put all of our key processes up online, even
the ones we use to hire our development team. I’m 100% open and
honest about what is going on in our business in interviews and my
writing.
You may not be comfortable taking this approach, and that is up to
you. But it’s something that I know works.

5. Be More Contrarian
It’s not easy to get noticed among all the noise of the modern web. In
the early days of blogging, it might have been okay to create some
generic content and preach well-accepted maxims in your industry.
Now, you need something about your content that acts as a talking
point. A point of difference or something that surprises people.
People need to be given a reason to pay attention.
I wrote my first book, The 7 Day Startup, at a time when The Lean
Startup was all the rage, and every entrepreneur was singing the
praise of “validation”. It started with a blog post I wrote called, “Is
Startup Validation Bullshit?” It was my most successful blog post,
and it convinced me there was an appetite for a book.
I put forward a contrarian view on validation, suggesting that for
most self-funded founders it was a flawed exercise, and the only way
to validate a startup was to launch it.
The 7 Day Startup went on to sell tens of thousands of copies and
even briefly passed The Lean Startup in the Amazon rankings.

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Offering a contrarian view got me a lot of attention. At the time of
release the only startup book outranking it on Amazon was Zero To
One, a book about how to build a business by being contrarian.
It’s not essential that all of your content disagrees with everyone.
It’s just one way to get noticed, and every industry is filled with
popular ideas that are ready to be tested as time goes on. Perhaps
those well-held ideas just aren’t relevant anymore?
Keep an eye out for this when you listen to podcast interviews or
read articles in your industry. Thought leaders like Tony Robbins
and Seth Godin use this technique all the time. “Most people think X,
but actually…” If you are one of the people that think X, then you
certainly need to pay attention to why Tony thinks you are wrong.

6. Be More Actionable
Challenge yourself to truly help people out and take action.
It’s one thing to create something that is interesting, but it’s another
to create something that is truly useful. Useful, by definition, means
that someone can take what you have produced and use it in their
life.
For example, a list of top ten mistakes to avoid when writing a sales
letter is interesting. An actual sales letter template which walks
people through how to structure their own sales letter is truly
actionable, because people can take it and use it.
That’s why I’ve included lots of frameworks in this book. The book
itself might be interesting, but I want you to take action on the
information. The frameworks enable you to do that.
You can easily determine if something is actionable by looking at
what people say about it. That could be in the comments on your
site, on social media, or in reply to your emails. Are people saying
things like, “Great post,” or are they saying, “This is awesome! I’ve
just set up X and I’ve used this post as a guideline”?
If you can create content that is legitimately actionable, it will get
consumed more, shared more, and it will convert more readers to
active community members or eventually customers.
Think about how people will use your content and what you can do
to make it more likely that they will actually use it.

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7. Tell A Better Story
The most powerful content in the world moves people in one way or
another. It could be through humor, through surprise or shock, or
just purely joy (entertainment). In short, you do it by telling good
stories.
Storytelling is a great way to capture and hold people’s attention. It’s
been proven over generations and is a simple strategy for you to use
with your content. Learning how to craft stories and how to follow a
framework to tell your story is a worthy exercise.
Have a look at this line chart that represents the story of Cinderella
as designed by Kurt Vonnegut. 2

Look familiar?
Do you recall my income line chart from the beginning of this book?

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I tell my story like this often because people can relate to a story
that follows this pattern of fortune and misfortune. They’ve learned
to do so through years of books, movies, and stories passed down
through generations. They relate to stories presented in this way on
a deep subconscious level.
One of the best indicators that you are doing this is through
feedback from people saying things like, “I feel like you wrote this
about me,” or “I’m exactly where you were and it’s refreshing to see
your progress.” This comes down to knowing who you are creating
content for (your community) and what they care about. Look out
for people saying these things, and you will know you are on track.
Learn about storytelling models that would work for your topic
areas and figure out a way to tell your story in a way that people can
relate to.

Generating Your First 100 Content Ideas

In chapter two, Content Marketing Basics, we went over a content
marketing strategy that included your vision and who you are
creating content for. Now you can get to the fun part! What are you
going to create content about?

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I’ve found the most effective way to come up with content ideas is to
use a proven framework for both generating topics and
transforming those topics into content ideas. These are handy when
coming up with a bunch of initial content ideas. After the first few
you really start to get a feel for what your audience wants and ideas
start coming to you from all angles.
This is where you want to be: a point where you aren’t wondering
what to create content on. This will come once you get traction.
These idea frameworks will be useful if you aren’t at this point yet
or as a resource to return to if you do happen to run out of content
ideas down the line.

Generating Content Topics (The Twenty Topics Framework)

Let’s start with finding topics. These are the broad areas you will
cover in your content.
I’ve compiled a list of about twenty ways you can find content topics.
Even if you only find one through each item on the list, that will be
enough to develop those into at least 100 pieces of content.
This framework is available as a downloadable resource at
http://contentmachine.com/resources. It’s a Google Doc that you
can use to build a list of your own ideas.
1. Twitter – Enter a keyword that represents your
business, put a # in front of it (e.g. #wordpress,
#startups, #onlinemarketing), and see what people are
discussing. Pick a broad topic that sounds like a good fit.
2. Google Analytics – Click on “Behaviour/Site Content/All
pages”. Make sure you have a decent time period
selected, and you will get a good feel for your most
popular content. Pick a topic that relates to content you
have created successfully in the past. This obviously only
works if you have already created content on your site.
3. Google Webmaster Tools – Click on your site, click
“Search traffic”, and then click “Search Queries”. This will
list your top keywords. Choose the keyword that seems
like the best fit for your blog. Again, this only works if
you have already created some content.

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4. Meetup – Search for a broad keyword (“WordPress” or
“Startups”, for example) and see what sort of topics
people are meeting up about. If something catches your
eye, add that as a broad topic to your list.
5. Ask Your Audience – Use your email sequence (I’ll go
over this chapter five if you don’t have an email sequence
set up yet), blog posts, or social media to ask people what
they would like to hear your opinion on. One really
simple way to do this is to have an automated email sent
to people when they first sign up to your list that asks
them what topic they are most interested in learning
about.
6. Guest Authors – Look through blogs from others in the
industry and find articles written by freelance writers.
Get in contact with them and ask if they have any ideas
about what to create for your site.
7. Personal Story – People love stories and everyone has a
unique one. If you have a story that you think would help
your audience, make sure you tell that on your site. It
could be your personal story, a story from a team
member, your business founding story, or customer
stories.
8. Help Desk – If you have a support desk or enquiries
email box, log in and have a look at the common things
people email about. If people are often asking the same
questions, it could be a good indication that it’s a
common problem you can help solve with some useful
content.
9. Trends – Put in some broad keywords. Scroll to the
bottom right for additional keywords and see if you can
tap into some hot topic areas.
10. Inbox – Open your inbox and look for emails from
customers to find common questions. Replies to your
autoresponder emails will be a great source of ideas. Just
make sure you aren’t using a no-reply email box and
remember to specifically ask people to reply with ideas.

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11. Google AdWords Keyword Planner – Click “Search for
new keywords and ad group ideas”. Enter some broad
keywords and click “Get ideas”. Look at the ad group
ideas and the keyword ideas to find a few topics to cover.
12. Forums/Groups – Use forums or social media groups in
your industry to see what people are discussing. Groups
exist on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+, and it’s never
hard to find forums for most topics online.
13. Competitors – Visit your competitors’ sites to see what
posts are doing well. Some blogs have a “top posts”
sidebar widget, and you can also look at the number of
tweets for articles.
14. BuzzSumo – Search for broad keywords. It will list high
traction articles from top blogs and give you more ideas
for other topics.
15. Top Industry Blogs – Visit top industry blogs and see
what they are covering. They often have a decent team
who can find great topics to cover. You can offer a
different spin on the same topics.
16. Thought Leaders – Use Twitter to search for industry
thought leaders and see what they are sharing. You can
simply search for keywords or one or two influential
people you already know of, and Twitter will point you
to other people to follow. Most influential people on
Twitter are good at sharing the important content from
their industry, which will be an easy way for you to see
the popular topic areas.
17. Amazon – Look at the topics of popular books in a broad
category relating to your industry. You can also read
through the comments people are making about a certain
book to learn what people are interested in.
18. Quora – Enter a few broad keywords into the search
option. It will specifically list questions people have,
along with the answers if they have been provided. This
can be useful for a general topic and can also be a good
source of quotes or answers for the content itself.

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 19. Reddit – Find a subreddit for your niche and look at the
trending threads. There is a subreddit for almost every
topic you can think of, and they are often quite active.
Most of the time, Redditors are constantly sharing useful
content from around the web.
20. Podcasts – Search iTunes for popular podcasts in your
niche. Look through the episode titles and listen to some
of the more popular episodes. This will show you some
great general topic areas and also help you identify the
influencers worth getting input from on your content.
Going through this process should result in at least twenty different
broad topic ideas. If you are going through it for the first time, it
could result in hundreds!
The next step is turning these topic ideas into actual pieces of
content.

Creating Content Ideas (The Content Multiplier Framework)

Now that you have (at least) twenty different broad topic ideas, it’s
time to turn them into workable ideas for content.
To aid you in this step, I’ve put together the Content Multiplier
Framework.
This framework is available as a downloadable resource at
http://contentmachine.com/resources as a Google Doc. You can
keep reusing it to come up with multiple content ideas. Here’s how it
works:
For every broad topic area, you can use the framework to multiply it
into nearly a dozen ideas for content. I recommend just doing five to
ensure that you only execute on the highest quality ideas.

Step 1 – Write Your Topic

Choose your first topic from the previous step. I would always start
with the best topic possible to make sure I’m executing only the
highest quality content. For this example, I’ll choose the topic
“WordPress speed”, because that is our most popular blog post.

Step 2 – Write A Problem And Aspiration For The Topic

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People are drawn to content that solves their problems or appeals to
their aspirations. Take your topic and write out both a problem and
an aspiration relating to the topic.
In my case, I’ve gone with:
• Problem: Having a slow site will escalate bounce rate and
result in losing customers to your competitors.
• Aspiration: I want a site that runs as fast as
WordPress.com.

Step 3 – Choose Up To Five Content Types

There are almost endless types of content you could potentially run
with on your site. I’ve listed eleven common content types below.
The idea here is for you to choose five that best represent the topic.
I’ve bolded the ones I would want to choose for the WordPress
speed topic.
1. Case Study
2. Guide
3. Roundup
4. How to
5. How not to
6. Infographic
7. Comparison/Review
8. Cost/Price
9. Data Driven
10. Best of/List
11. Opinion
I could have picked most of the options above, but I generally choose
ones I think will come to me naturally, and those that would be
unique compared to other solutions out there.

Step 4 – Brainstorm A Descriptive Title

In this step you will create a descriptive title for the content. For
now, just make it a simple description of what the post is about.
Title 1 – How WP Curve reduced their bounce rate by 30%.
Title 2 – The ultimate guide for speeding up your site
[INFOGRAPHIC].
Title 3 – Four experts weigh in on WordPress speed.
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Title 4 – Six plugins that will slow down your site.
Title 5 – Things worth doing to speed up your site.

Step 5 – Add A Hook

In some cases you might leave the title as is, but if you can, add a
hook to grab your reader's attention. It will have a much bigger
impact. Always remember not to be too “over the top” with your
hooks, or you will run the risk of disappointing your readers once
they check out your content.
There are six hooks I’ve included in the framework for grabbing
people’s attention:
1. Contrarian – give them information that is the opposite
of convention.
2. Surprising – give them a fact that will surprise them,
something simple that is the opposite of what they might
assume.
3. Overcome Objections – consider what their objections
might be and directly respond to them in the title.
4. Guarantee – Give them a guarantee of success.
5. Interest – Give them interesting facts to chew on.
Percentages or real world examples could work well.
6. Fear – Appeal to their inbuilt sense of fear.
Here are some examples from my topics above:
Title 1 – How WP Curve increased conversions and reduced bounce
rate by 30% without compromising site quality.
The conventional wisdom might be that you have to make
compromises to speed up your site.
Title 2 – The ultimate guide for making your site load faster than
WordPress.com.
This would appeal to their aspirations and offer them the cool benefit
of having a site loading faster than WordPress itself.
Title 3 – Matt Mullenweg and three other experts weigh in on their
top ideas for speeding up WordPress.
This mentions a specific influencer which will grab their attention if
they know WordPress (Matt created WordPress).
Title 4 – Five web design compromises worth making to speed up
your WordPress site.
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This is an opinion piece where I’d talk about the level of compromise
that is worthwhile when it comes to speed.
Title 5 – How to avoid the average 20% reduction in conversions
that result from slow websites.
This provides an interesting stat that could grab their attention.
Title 6– Six plugins that kill site speed (hint, you are probably using
at least one).
This appeals to their sense of fear in thinking that they are making a
big mistake.
Writing titles is a bit of an art form. If you want extra help with this,
visit http://contentmachine.com/resources and check out the guide
there on writing effective headlines.
Another useful habit is paying close attention to content that does
really well in your niche. (BuzzSumo is great for this.) When you see
the types of posts that are doing well, you will notice that their
subject lines are often very well written.

Managing Content Ideas With A Content Calendar

I’ve found the easiest way to manage content ideas is using the free
app, Trello. Trello is like post-it notes, but on the web. You can
create a card for each idea, assign it to a writer, add notes, and much
more. It even has an editorial calendar feature.
In chapter five, I’ll talk more about how to use Trello, but for now it’s
worth setting up a free account and starting a “Content Marketing
Ideas” board.
I’ve create a simple template board you can use, which you can grab
at http://contentmachine.com/resources.

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Understand And Leverage Your Strengths
I’ve mentioned that it took me a long, long time to find my way with
content marketing.
Part of the reason is because I kept seeing other people succeeding
in something, so I thought I’d try it as well.
With content specifically, and in business generally, this is a bad
idea. Rarely have I been able to replicate someone else’s success,
because there are just too many variables.
Every content creator is unique, every audience is unique, every
business is unique. Not to mention it’s always hard to figure out why
a person is actually successful. Often they don’t have a good handle
on it themselves!
What works for me is to experiment with what resonates with my
audience, what I can do well, and what I can do consistently.
I tried out video, but I found I couldn’t really do it at a high standard.
I also found it stressful and hard to come up with ideas. Plus it got
very little traction. I know it works well for some other people, but I
don’t like it, so I don’t do it.
I’ve created a few podcasts over the years and recorded around 100
episodes of my own podcasts. However, I found it annoying to line
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up guests, and I couldn’t find a unique angle for our podcast. It just
felt like I was doing “yet another interview”. On top of that, when it
came to hiring a content marketing manager, it was a very difficult
content type to delegate to someone else. For that reason, with WP
Curve, I decided to only do guest interviews on other podcasts and
not have our own.
If you are going to create content as a significant part of your day,
you have to do it in a way that you love. One of the most common
questions I get asked is: how do you find time? The answer is that I
never really think about it. I don’t have to find time. I do content,
because I love doing it.
I’m writing this book on a plane. The guy next to me is watching a
movie (hopefully he’s not reading this). The guy in front is listening
to music. The people behind me are sleeping. It’s lunchtime on a
Monday, but I don’t want to be watching movies, listening to music,
or sleeping—I want to be writing. So, I’m writing.
You might not like writing, which is cool. What do you like? Do you
like presenting? That’s an awesome way to create content, and you
can easily have someone re-purpose it into videos for your website.
Do you like talking to other entrepreneurs? If so, a podcast might be
worth a go, or you can start doing free “office hours” calls and
upload the transcripts to your website.
Maybe you like making videos, or designing, or coding. Whatever
you enjoy, if you can point yourself in a direction that creates
something useful for your community, then you are well on your
way to creating good content.
If you are a designer and love designing things, don’t write about
design. Create logos and themes and give them away for free.
If you like presenting, record videos for YouTube or Instagram or
stream content live on Periscope.
If you are a developer, create some plugins and give them away on
your site. That’s a great way to generate signups and shares.
You won’t have to worry about “finding time” if you focus your
efforts on things you love doing, particularly once you start getting
rewarded for your work with a grateful community and a growing
business.

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Of course this assumes you have built a great business that enables
you to spend time on what you love. If you are struggling with time,
it could be worth revisiting chapter one.
Pay attention over time to what you love and what you can do well.
Focus on that, and you will be in a good place.

Content Quality Standards

The other thing I’ve found useful is to set some high standards
around making my content high quality. They may not be the same
for you, so they aren’t concrete rules—just personal observations.
You can use these as a starting point and adjust them to build your
own list of high-quality content standards. You can even build them
into your content creation guidelines, to ensure you and any guest
contributors, remember them when it comes time to create content.
A fair amount of this list would likely be applicable to most types of
written content, particularly in the B2B small business space that
I’m in.
This list is available as a download at
http://contentmachine.com/resources as a Google Doc, so you can
use it or customize it to your personal needs.

Useful
Would someone actually use this? Write to solve an issue or pain
point for a community of people. If you are using these standards to
review an existing piece of content, what can you do to make the
content more useful?

Easy To Read
Ensure that your audience doesn't struggle to read your content.
Have short intros, simple language, lots of white space, and
eliminate fluffy language. Don't let pop-ups or other objects intrude
on the writing. Readers like to skim through and hit all the high
points quickly, so use bulleted points and lists; large, high-contrast
text; clean images; and a minimalist, simple design to effectively
hold their attention and make them want to return for more.

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Has Credibility
Extra credibility helps. How else can you add credibility to this
content? If the author has credibility to start with, that is great.
Having opinions from experts included in the article is another way.
Data and links from external sources is another way. Great design
and high-quality writing is another.

Emotionally Relatable
If you are specifically targeting a community of people, you should
have a good handle on who they are, what they feel, what challenges
them, etc. Write stories that will appeal to their emotions. What
images and words can you use that will grab them?

It’s Not All About You

Some content about you can work well, but generally it should be
about the reader. Look for more “you’s” than “I’s”. The exception
would be if you are specifically telling a personal story that you hope
they can relate to.

Be Specific, Not General

Broad, general content is rarely useful. Be as specific as you can and
use active language. A useful tool for finding sections where you use
passive voice is the Hemmingway Editor.

Be Generous
Look at your content and make a call on its motives. Are you just
trying to get people to pay for something else? Or are you being
legitimately generous?

Be Original
Is it a new idea or rehashed old stuff that has been said thousands of
times? Can you add something to the content to turn it into
something that hasn’t been done before?

Make It Shareable

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Create the type of content people would share and tell others about.
The way I think about it is, if 100 people just click “Like” on my
content, that’s 100 people who thought it wasn’t good enough to
share. It sounds harsh, but it’s a good benchmark for quality.

Interesting
Remember, if it’s not interesting, it’s not content marketing. Is the
headline eye-catching? Does the content have a good hook to get
people in? Does the content itself have a unique perspective that will
be interesting to your community?

High-Quality Design
Make sure your content is executed to a high standard design-wise.
Does it have high-quality, original supporting images—not cheesy,
pixelated stock photos?

Flow
Does the content follow a logical structure that draws readers from
one section to the next? It should be easy to read from section to
section. Include short intros and conclusions to sections or bridges
to get people from one section to another.

Entertaining
If you can get a laugh in, that’s a big bonus. Obviously, it’s not always
possible or desirable depending on the context. I talk more about
humor specifically in chapter four.

Long
I have found that long and detailed content works well. Content
posted on social media can (and sometimes must) be short, but if it’s
on your site, give the visitor something to sink their teeth into.
Would readers bookmark it and come back to it when they need to
implement the advice?

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Monitoring Traction
Of course, just paying attention to what you want isn’t a recipe for
success. In the end, it’s your audience that matters. You need to look
at what content is resonating with them and find the sweet spot
between what you are good at and what the audience loves.
Look at how your current content is performing. That’s the easiest
method. After 600+ posts, I arrived at a place where I knew the type
of content that worked well for our audience. I did that by ignoring
traditional metrics in favor of other, more meaningful ones.
A lot of people look at the number of views on an article to work out
if it’s successful. Views are relevant for media companies who sell
ads based on the number of pageviews. For the rest of us, they don’t
tell us much about how much people care about our content.
People look at “Likes” and assume a lot of likes on a piece of content
makes it good content. To me, a “Like” is a sign that the content
wasn’t good enough to share. They are setting the benchmark too
low.
I recommend paying attention to three key metrics.

Shares
Rather than focusing on visits or likes, I suggest looking at social
media shares. For our content specifically, I evaluate our Twitter
stats. This gives me a good indication of what content is more likely
to be shared. Someone reading it or “liking” it is great, but actually
sharing is a whole new level. Only the best content gets shared. For
our content, Tweets seems to be a more stable metric than LinkedIn
or Facebook shares.
To work out total shares you can add buttons to your site or use
Like Explorer or BuzzSumo.

Comments
Much like shares, getting people to comment is another level above
getting them to read or like a post. However, looking at the number
of comments tends to be a bit of a vanity metric.
I recommend paying attention to the words people are using. I use a
plugin called Disqus, because I get higher quality comments with it

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(no spam or comments looking for backlinks). I found our income
reports generated serious engagement and lots of interesting
questions and advice from people. As a result, we ramped those up
to a point where we do them every single month as the first piece of
content we write.
I like to see evidence that people are getting real value out of
content and actually taking action. Comments like “great post” are
nice. But comments like, “This is really useful, I’ve applied this in my
business,” are far better. If people are actually using our content, we
know it’s effective.

Email Replies
We have an email list we’ve built up over the years, and each week
we send out our best content. These come directly from my email
address, and the replies tell me what is really resonating with
people. Sometimes I’ll get hardly any replies; other times, I’ll be
inundated with supportive messages or questions. That’s when I
know we’ve really nailed a piece of content.
Over time you will get a clear picture of what content works best for
your audience. This will then feed back into your content strategy.
Sometimes the impact you have on people isn’t easy to see. Cool, you
got some tweets for an article—but do they care? Comments give
you good insight into whether or not people care. Numbers don’t
matter, but the words people use do.

Content Driven SEO

To wrap up the chapter on high-quality content, we have to talk
about SEO. Lots of people will tell you that when you are focusing on
an effective content marketing strategy, you need to optimize
everything to appeal to search engines. While I do agree that SEO is
important, I think high-quality content is more important. When I
think about SEO, I think about it mainly as a content quality issue.
I ignore the so-called “experts” who say they have a “secret” to
ranking well in Google. In my experience, trying to outsmart Google
is not the answer for long-term, sustainable traffic.

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The right approach is much simpler than some sort of complicated
SEO secret.

1. Don’t Screw Up The Basic On-Page SEO Factors

Getting your website ready for SEO is very easy. In fact, if it’s not ten
years old, it’s probably ready now. Here are the only four things you
need:
1. Make sure your theme is using the right tags in the right
places (for example, your post titles are H1 tags).
2. Make sure it’s coded with clean HTML/CSS and not some
old dodgy tables and other rubbish.
3. Make sure the URL of your content is logical.
http://wpcurve.com/wordpress-speed is logical;
http://wpcurve.com/p=45234dfg?? is not.
4. Make sure you are able to control the title, description,
and URL of each post. If you are using WordPress, then
the free plugin WordPress SEO by Yoast does this.

2. Create Lots of High-Quality Content

Hopefully this chapter got you pretty fired you up to do this, but in
case it didn’t, know that Google loves lots of content. It doesn’t love
lots of crappy content, though. High-quality stuff is more to Google’s
taste. And it’s smarter than you at determining what high-quality
content is. So just trust me, and don’t try to outsmart Google.

3. Do Basic Keyword Research When Needed

For a lot of my content, I don’t target a specific keyword. I’d rather
focus on the fundamentals, and if I have a good handle on my
audience, then I can probably make a good decision on the sorts of
keywords to target.
Sometimes, however, it makes sense to target a specific keyword,
and it’s not hard to quickly check Google to see what keywords are
best to look at.
If you are just getting started with keyword research, the easiest
option is the Google Adwords Keyword Planner. I put in a broad
keyword for what I want to write about, and then I’ll choose a
keyword that people are actually searching for. The tool enables you
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to filter by the number of exact searches. These numbers vary a lot
depending on the authority of your blog. Early on you might want to
choose a keyword with between 50 to 200 exact searches. Later on,
it might be a few thousand. There are also more advanced keyword
tools available if you want to delve further into the weeds on
keyword research.
If you can spare the time, and you are working on a post that you
think could be the best in your industry, choosing a popular
keyword can be a wise move.

4. Optimize The Post For The Keyword

The final step is to optimize the post for your chosen keyword. Most
website systems will enable you to do this. As I mentioned above, if
you are using WordPress, this is where Yoast plugin comes in.
If you chose a specific keyword, that’s cool; if you didn’t, you can still
do this step and just take a guess at what the dominant phrase might
be in the content you’ve created. Yoast will give you a drop-down
list of suitable choices once you start typing in the keyword idea.
To fully optimize the post, there are really only three main things
you need to do.
1. Make sure your keyword is used in your post title. This,
in turn, will ensure it appears in your heading tags, any
auto generated internal links, and your page URL
(permalink if using WordPress).
2. Mention the keyword in your first paragraph. Usually
this is pretty easy, and you would do it anyway.
3. Make sure your SEO title (sometimes the same as your
post title) includes your keyword and is the right length,
and you have a description that includes your keyword
and entices the user to click through from Google. If you
want to use a different SEO title, this can be easily done
with a plugin like Yoast.
There are a lot more detailed optimization steps you can take, but
these are the basics and they have served me well. Focusing on the
absolute essentials might seem like a cavalier approach, but to me
the quality of the content is more important than the optimization
choices.
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People share and link to high-quality content. This is what Google
loves, and that will never change.

High-Quality Content? Check. What’s next?

You’ve been through the fundamentals of high-quality content, part
one of the three aspects to making content marketing work. But how
do you create your content in a way that gets noticed and gets better
results?
In the next chapter we’ll run through some case studies of
entrepreneurs who have done just that and provide you with some
practical tools to enable you to do the same thing. Some of these
sites are well-known, established sources of content, and others are
brand new and much smaller in scale. At least one of them should
get you thinking about what you can use to differentiate your own
content.

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Notes
1. “DC SHOES: KEN BLOCK’S GYMKHANA FIVE: ULTIMATE URBAN PLAYGROUND;
SAN FRANCISCO," Youtube video, posted by DC Shoes, July 9, 2012,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuDN2bCIyus.
2. French, Katy. Visage (blog). http://visage.co/. "Kurt Vonnegut Graphs the Shapes of
Stories." Last Modified August 13, 2014. http://visage.co/kurt-vonnegut-shows-us-
shapes-stories/

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Chapter 4: Differentiation
How To Be An Entrepreneurial Content Marketer
As I discussed in the introduction, one of the biggest mistakes that
failed content marketers make is focusing on the output and not the
strategy. A blogger creates blog posts. A content marketer markets a
business.
You need to be entrepreneurial to be a great content marketer. Most
people think that entrepreneurs look for gaps in markets and enter
those gaps. I believe that the most successful ones go into existing
markets with a unique offering.
My business, WP Curve, hasn’t created a new innovation. It’s taken
an existing healthy market (people paying developers to fix their
website) and put a unique spin on it (unlimited fixes 24/7 for a
standard monthly fee).
Uber entered an existing, large, healthy market (transportation) and
put a unique spin on it (cleaner, safer, cheaper, and they actually
show up when called).
Airbnb entered an existing, large, healthy market
(hotels/accommodation) and put a unique spin on it (individuals
rent their houses, so customers get more for less).
For the most part, this is what entrepreneurs do. They enter into an
existing space with something better and different enough to get
noticed. It’s also what the world’s best content marketers do.
They don’t simply create content. They create content for a certain
community of people, and they do it better with a unique angle so
they get noticed. Remember, you want the thing you do differently
to be something your customers care enough about to talk about.
This aspect of differentiation is the biggest opportunity for content
marketers, and it’s barely talked about in other content marketing
books and articles.
Throughout this chapter, you can see how other successful
marketers have broken out of the “write every day” struggle and
found a way to create high-quality content that grabs attention and

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builds trust. You will find at least one strategy that may resonate
with you and one that can be disruptive in your industry. Some
industries are far more advanced than others—even the simpler
tactics here could be explosive in certain industries.
When you read through these stories, think about things you can
bring to your own content. Can you use aspects of Marcus Sheridan’s
approach by creating problem-solving content that other people
keep secret? Can you be like Noah Kagan and give and give until you
can’t possibly be any more helpful? Would your audience be
interested in the transparent details of what is going on in your
business?
If you generate ideas for content using the blueprints in this chapter,
remember to add them to your Trello board.

The Whisperer
In 2008/2009, the U.S. economy was tanking. The fiberglass pool
business was not a good business to be in. Marcus Sheridan’s
business, River Pools and Spas, was struggling. He could no longer
afford to pay the advertising he’d always relied on to keep his
business breaking even.
Content marketing had been around for a long time. But the web
was relatively new and traditional industries were a fair way
behind, so neither Marcus nor his competitors had a strong online
presence. In those days, content marketing systems were rare and
the standard website was a “brochure site”.
Marcus saw an opportunity. He knew Google was exploding in
popularity, and the way people searched for businesses like his was
changing. He didn’t have much time, either—he had to act quickly.
He gathered his team together and delivered an inspiring speech
akin to William Wallace’s epic monologue in Braveheart.
He tasked the team to write down the top questions that prospective
customers ask. Between everyone, with duplicates removed, they
arrived at 100 questions. They were things like:
• How much does a pool cost?
• How long does it take to install a pool?
• What approvals do you need to install a pool?
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 • What is the difference between a fiberglass and an
inground pool?
Marcus knew that if customers were asking these questions of his
team, they were probably also putting it into Google. However, when
he Googled, “How much does a pool cost?” he got the same generic
fluff that he expected: “call for quote”, “there are too many factors”,
“we can’t be held liable for quotes”, etc. Marcus knew people weren’t
expecting an exact quote, but giving a rough guess would at least
help them move onto the next stage of their decision-making
process.
He decided that he could be the guy to let those secrets out. After all,
everyone in the industry knew the answers anyway—there was
nothing to lose.
So he got the team to write out answers to all of these questions and
started posting them on his blog. They wrote posts about how much
a pool costs, how much a fiberglass pool costs, how much an
inground pool costs, and so on.
He even pulled the key articles together into an ebook and provided
this to his customers before they engaged his team. This worked as a
pre-sales qualifier and made the sales process a lot smoother.
Customers trusted him, because he was helping them from the start.
While he answered hundreds of questions on his site, he identified
five of the key things that customers liked hearing about:
1. Cost/price articles
2. Problems articles
3. Vs./Comparison-based articles
4. Review-based articles
5. “Best of” articles
His examples of each are:
1. How Much Does a Fiberglass Pool Cost?
2. Top 5 Fiberglass Pool Problems and Solutions
3. Concrete vs. Fiberglass Pools vs. Vinyl Liner Pools: Which
Is Better?
4. A Review of Barrier Reef Fiberglass Pools
5. Who Are the Best Swimming Pool Builders in Richmond
Virginia?

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Marcus’ business went on to become a breakaway success. Instead
of failing like a lot of similar businesses at the time, it continued to
grow and became the number one fiberglass pool company in the
U.S., turning over multiple millions of dollars a year. His site
continued to grow as well, and it became the number one resource
in the world for fiberglass swimming pools.
What Marcus did was nothing advanced, certainly by today’s
standards. But it was something that no one else was doing yet in his
industry, and therefore he got noticed.
I believe there are industries in the world where this approach can
still work—sectors where people are still secretive and no one has
taken on the role of the whisperer, revealing the secrets to the
public and letting them make up their own mind.
In fact, with my new craft beer-making business, Black Hops
Brewing, we are doing exactly that. With a bunch of simple posts
about how we make the beer, our plans to set up a brewery, and
other similar “behind-the-scenes” knowledge topics, we managed to
obtain some amazing results. In the first few months of the blog,
we’ve been featured on all the main craft beer blogs and in local
papers, and we’ve received four investment offers to build our own
brewery. Every event we go to, we run into people who tell us they
read the blog and love it.
This transparent approach to doing business, where you confidently
give out secrets that others keep close to their chest, is a big trust
builder. It’s also a great way to tell your story and people love a
good story.

How To Become A Whisperer

Step 1 – Research the most important “top five content” keywords
for your field. For example, if you are a bookkeeper, you might use:
“How much does a bookkeeper cost”.
Step 2 – Visit Google and search for each keyword phrase, one at a
time. Start to look through the results to see (a) if the same site
keeps ranking for them, and (b) how good the content is on the
topic. Ignore the paid ads—just look at the organic listings and use
our previous criteria for good content to make a decision on the

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quality. In this case, it would likely be a utility that you would look
for. If there are posts that skirt around the issue in a vague way, then
there is a good opportunity for you to create something better.
When I started looking around for good content about starting a
craft beer brewery, I only found one blog that had legitimately
useful, real advice on costs, the process, etc. That blog had one or
two older articles—other than that, the information was just not out
there. If you find the same thing, that’s a great result!
If you think there is a gap, you are ready to create the content.
1. Start with Marcus’s top five customer questions and put
them through the Content Multiplier framework
available at http://contentmachine.com/resources. This
will give you a bunch of potential articles for each one.
For example, “How much does a bookkeeper cost” could
become “How to avoid excessive bookkeeping fees”, “6
simple steps to bookkeeping bliss”, “A simple process
used by X to reduce their bookkeeping costs”, “The 3
most affordable bookkeeping tools reviewed”, etc.
2. Take another leaf out of Marcus’s book and look
internally. Ask your team what the common questions
are and ask them to write out solutions to those
questions.
3. Create a post for each one of your content ideas. Review
the Content Quality Standards to ensure that it is high-
quality content.
4. Once you have exhausted Marcus’ top five questions,
look through the first twenty topics framework for more
sources of where you will find common problems and
repeat the steps.
A few other notes about this strategy:
• Be personal with the content. This strategy is about
building trust long-term. Write them under your own
name, include your picture, and use casual (but not lazy)
language. Customers love this and it makes them feel like
they are talking directly with the owner of the business.
• Don’t come at it from a position of disdain towards your
competitors (e.g. “Our competitors will have you
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 believe…”). Bagging out other people doesn’t build trust.
Take ownership of your role at educating your
customers and accept that they will be the ones to judge
whether they like you better than your competitors.
• Have your best content in an ebook or some sort of
downloadable, behind-an-email opt in. This type of
content works well via email, so after they opt in for the
ebook, you can send out regular communications. As a
result, when they are ready, you are top of mind. I go into
more detail on this process in Scale: Building The
Machine.
• Get active in the community, either on social media, in
person, or in forums. This type of content is going to
need a bit of a kickstart—you will have to put yourself
out there as a helpful person to go to for information like
this. This only really happens by being that helpful
person. Over time people will recognize it; you can send
them to the site, and ask them to share the content if it’s
useful. Gradually, Google will realize that your site is the
authority on the topic.
Also, keep in mind that this isn’t the most advanced content
strategy. If it works for you, great. But stay on your toes and be
ready to innovate if your competition catches up. This is an easy
strategy for them to replicate.

The Hustler
Every once in a while, someone comes into a market and completely
blows everyone out of the water. It doesn’t happen that often,
certainly not in the online marketing field where everything is tried
and tested. But it happened in late 2012, when John Lee Dumas
started Entrepreneur on Fire.
A few months before, I’d been sitting in a presentation in the
Philippines listening to how Dan Andrews turned his podcast,
Tropical MBA, into a successful business. One thing Dan mentioned
was finding a unique angle, and he put forward the idea of a daily

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entrepreneurship podcast. I didn’t think much of it. It honestly
sounded like it would be too hard and altogether not very useful.
I guess everyone else thought the same thing. That is, everyone
except John Lee Dumas.
John was busy working on exactly that: a daily podcast for
entrepreneurs. It wasn’t going to be all that different from other
interview podcasts like Mixergy or This Week in Startups, except it
would be daily. Every day, he would interview a new entrepreneur.
John started by working with an experienced marketer and
podcaster, Jaime Tardy. He attended New Media Expo and, through
Jaime, connected with a lot of big names in the space such as Derek
Halpern and Pat Flynn. He asked them on the spot if they would
come on his show. To his delight, most people said yes and then
followed through as well.
Meanwhile, he told anyone who would listen about his great new
idea. Most people came back with the same answers. “That’s not
possible”, or “You can’t do that many!”, or “You’ll run out of
entrepreneurs”, or “Do people even want to listen to a podcast
everyday?”, and, of course: “How are you going to make money? You
have no business model.”
John pushed on and started interviewing as many entrepreneurs as
he could in the lead up to releasing the podcast. His idea was to
stack up 30 or 40 interviews so he could hit the ground running
when he launched. His other genius insight was to make sure the big
name influencers were on the first few episodes. This gave him huge
launch traction and immediate credibility.
John and his partner Kate did hit the ground running—and they
kept running. They’ve built a seven-figure business off the back of
their podcast in less than two years. They’ve interviewed over 1,000
entrepreneurs and released a podcast every day since they started.
If that wasn’t enough, Kate has even launched her own podcast!
I don’t think John got there solely because of the unique angle he
took. I’m still not convinced that having a podcast every day is a big
factor in choosing a podcast to listen to. I think he just got there
through pure hard work. He out-hustled everybody.
Everyone else was doing one podcast a week at best. John said,
“Nope, I’ll do ten podcasts in one day.” On Mondays he stacks his
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interviews back to back and loads them up for the week. It’s a big
day, but then the rest of the week, he’s free to work on his business
and do other marketing like off-site podcast interviews and
webinars. And because he does more than a week’s worth at once,
he can stack them up for when he takes a few weeks off.
He took it to a whole new level, and his initial burst onto the scene
kicked off a ball of momentum that continues to roll forward to this
day. He was featured in iTunes New and Noteworthy, getting great
rankings from iTunes in his first eight weeks. He was mentioned
consistently by the big influencers he had on the show during the
first few weeks of launch. This gradually grew his listenership as
people came in from all walks of entrepreneurship.
He has built on his content, releasing amazing monthly reports and
useful webinars. He’s developed strict processes around his content
that has enabled him to execute his part in batches, and the rest
happens without his involvement. Because his episodes keep
coming out so regularly, the downloads keep going up, and other
businesses are knocking down his door to advertise on his show. He
makes over $60,000/month just in advertising through his podcast.
This represents a fraction of his overall revenue, but it’s not bad for
one day’s work per week!
I think there are certainly a lot of industries where people need to
be blown out of the water. Where it’s common to just write one
general post per week, or create one video. Where someone can
come in and burst onto the scene with pure hustle and ride the wave
of momentum from there.
Is your industry like this?

How To Become A Hustler

Again, as with the “Whisperer” differentiator, this probably isn’t
going to work if someone is already doing it. If you are into
entrepreneurship interviews, then you are out of luck. You won’t get
the attention doing the same thing that John is already doing.
So have a look around to see what is going on in your industry. Look
on Google to see what’s ranking for content around your topic. Look
on social media to see what articles people are sharing and how

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those people are going about creating their content. Look in iTunes
and YouTube to see what the industry leaders are doing.
Here are a few things you might want to try:
• Release more content, perhaps a daily podcast or daily
blog post.
• Release longer content. Perhaps the incumbents are
releasing general, boring 500-word posts. Can you do
2,000-word detailed posts?
• Be more generous. What can you give away? Are others
asking people to “sign up for emails”? Can you give away
an ebook, some software, some processes, or
frameworks? Can you do it without even asking for their
email?
• Can you utilize new platforms? Check iTunes, Medium,
YouTube, the App Store, iPad magazines, Periscope,
Snapchat, Kindle—everywhere. Can you come into a
platform and fill it with the best content and take that
space away from incumbents who are focusing
elsewhere?
There are also some logistical things you’d have to consider:
• Do you need to hire virtual assistants to help with the
core part of the work?
• Can you hire someone to ghostwrite or guest write the
content?
• Will you get your team to help?
• Will you utilize external services for part of the process
or hire a remote team?
• What is your plan for when you are sick or you are
away—can you stack the content up?
Ultimately, working out how it gets done in the long term is
probably a problem you can solve (particularly if you have a
budget). Short term, it might just be a case of working harder and
longer than everyone else and sticking with it no matter what. That
might be an unpopular message, but that’s how John did it and that’s
the hustler’s mentality.

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If you are going to do the daily thing, you can create the posts in
WordPress and use the scheduler to publish them in the future. A lot
of the steps required to help with this level of content production
can be managed by a Virtual Assistant for $400-$500 a month, full
time. Check out Virtual Staff Finder if you want to go down this
path.

The Giver
Noah Kagan is a guy I could have featured in a few of these chapters.
Noah really shines in his approach to how much he gives away.
Ultimately, content marketing is about creating value for a
community of people. The more you can give away, the more you
are going to stand out. It’s quite easy to give away a few small blog
posts, but how far could you take it?
I first noticed the extreme nature of Noah’s giver mentality on his
interview 1 with Pat Flynn on Smart Passive Income. He talked about
validation and starting new businesses. Not just his own story about
how he started AppSumo, but lots of practical advice on how other
people could do the same.
It was one of the most useful podcast interviews I’ve ever listened
to. But for Noah, that wasn’t enough. After about an hour of straight
value bombs when the interview was wrapping up, Noah asked,
“What can I do to make this the best interview you’ve ever done?”
When Pat responded, Noah kept going, rattling off more useful
things for people to try.
But he still wasn’t done. “You know what we should do?” he said. “I
should have someone from your audience fly out to Austin, and they
can spend the whole day with you and me working on their
business.” I knew Noah has charged $10,000 for a day of his time,
but he was in giving mode, and nothing would stop him creating the
most valuable interview on record on the show.
Since then, Noah has taken it to whole new levels again. His
AppSumo business sends out giveaways on anything from ebooks to
software tools. Well-known software tools like Neil Patel’s Crazy Egg
and others have provided lifetime free accounts to people in his
audience. He started releasing his own plugins under the SumoMe

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brand. At first a Twitter highlighter tool, then a heat maps tool, then
a pop-up tool, then a content marketing analytics tool—all for free.
All that on top of regular high-quality, detailed posts via his blog OK
Dork, and regular appearances on podcasts and webinars to help
other entrepreneurs.
Noah is a giving machine, and he has taken that approach to build an
email list of close to one million people, a brand that is recognized
by every entrepreneur I know, and a multi-million dollar business.
While other entrepreneurs were working on blog posts, he gave
away software, training, his time, advice, plugins, and more.

How To Be A Giver
I would say that out of all of the differentiation strategies, this one is
the most likely to work. And yet, even in the online marketing space,
this approach is rare. Most people don’t give away useful resources
that people would happily pay for to such an extent. This is how we
have grown a lot of our audience—with free books and plugins and
giving away a lot of my time.
In more traditional industries, these opportunities are endless.
Have a look to see what others in your industry are doing. If you
don’t see all of the things on the list below, then get to work!
I wouldn’t be afraid to spend money on giving away things. Just
remember that even giving people free incentives creates
expectations of support later on, and those have costs. It may be
money well spent, but make sure to budget for ongoing support.
Here are a few things you might want to consider giving away. Keep
in mind, it needs to be something valuable to your community.
• Big content” books. Doing a free book on Amazon.com
exposed me to a whole new audience that wouldn’t have
known about me or WP Curve otherwise.
• Organized, in-person events.
• An app that does something useful for your community.
• Onsite calculators or graders that make your community
members’ lives easier. These are often cheap to build and
get a lot of interest.

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 • WordPress plugins or other small software items. People
love free software!
• Your time, via office hours or doing an AMA (Ask Me
Anything) thread in a forum, or being interviewed on
podcasts. I do three to four of these per week, and I use
Schedule Once, so people can easily book times directly
in my calendar.
• Industry guides that help everyone in the industry.
• Email courses on helpful topics.
• Video training on YouTube or sites like Udemy.
• Conference presentations—perhaps you can present,
sponsor, and make time for people to chat with you.
Simply be more generous and give more than everyone
else.
There’s no shortage of what you can do here, and the only downside
is that you will help others in the industry. It might cost you some
time or money, but it’s not time or money wasted as it is with
advertising. It’s helping someone, and in the end, it will probably
come back around to help you.

The Analyst
Is it possible that, buried deep in the data of your business, there
exists stories with the potential to go viral all over the world? Well,
if you are in the business of dating like OKCupid, then the answer is
a resounding yes.
Through analyzing the data gathered by the site, the team at
OKCupid have been able to produce consistent viral content for their
blog, building their business into a $50 million exit in the process.
All of this in one of the most competitive niches in the world, which
is littered with high-profile failed companies.
Take their “10 Charts About Sex”. At the time of writing, the post has
over a million views and 4,000 tweets.
Their style is quirky, somewhat controversial, but genuinely
analytical. Perhaps an article about whether vegetarians are less or
more likely to enjoy giving oral sex would be silly. But backed by
data, and portrayed in a chart… well, that’s just clever!
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Gathering and reporting on original data is one of the best ways to
build a content marketing strategy. Why? Because it’s automatically
differentiated. It’s difficult, if not impossible, for competitors to
report on the same data as you.
The Content Marketing Institute have a yearly report on what’s
going on in content marketing that they produce themselves. Each
year they have guaranteed press, a bunch of sites linking to them
and discussing the report, a whole suite of aesthetically pleasing
brochures and presentations, and an open license to market their
own institute by way of educating the public.
Some companies gather and report on data based on information
they are already collecting. Some undertake dedicated surveys to
produce unique content.
Analysing and reporting on data is a tried and true content
marketing formula. As long as you have enough data to draw on, and
the ability to create content that is unique, you have a good shot at
making this work.
If you don’t have enough data to draw on, research efforts like this
are well suited to partnerships with other companies. Alternatively,
you can simply survey a bunch of influencers. Every two years, Moz
brings together over 100 SEO experts to pull together their Moz
Ranking Factors Report.
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How To Be An Analyst
Assuming you don’t have the data in-house, an easy way to get
started with this strategy is to undertake a basic group survey. Here
is a quick summary of how to make it happen. In the process of
writing this book, we did this internally at WP Curve, creating the
Startups Content Marketing Survey with great results. You can see
an example of our report at http://contentmachine.com/resources.
• Use a survey tool like TypeForm or Google Forms to
build and send out a survey. We used TypeForm, because
it creates great-looking surveys and looks very
professional.
• With the results, write up a well-designed graphical
report which summarizes the results. If you don’t have a
designer in-house, Google Sheets is an easy way to build
the charts.
• Create a SlideShare summary of the result for sharing
and a full PDF report for your site.
• Write a press release and share it with journalists who
would likely be interested in the topic.
• Use Click to Tweet to pull out the most effective tweets
from the survey results and include them in the posts
you write.
• Reach out to other blogs who cover the same sort of
topics, and send them the report with some quotables to
share with their audience. Give them the SlideShare
embed code as well, so they can embed it directly in their
content.
• Reach out to influencers and ask for their opinion on the
results. Ask them to share the report.
The cool thing about data collection and reporting is the whole
industry benefits, so it’s easy to get people behind the idea.
If you can create something useful for your industry, you can build
processes around doing a survey like this every year.

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The Comic
“What would Steve do?” asks Matt, the founder of Vooza, walking
confidently across the stage at the 2014 Next Web Conference.
“You need to emulate the young Steve Jobs.” He pauses. “How do you
do that?” His slides show a quick list of actionable steps.
1. Wear a black turtleneck (he’s wearing one).
2. Stop showering.
3. Take LSD as much as possible.
The crowd erupts in laughter as Matt expected, and he moves on.
Matt is a comedian, so he knows simple comedy tricks like the Rule
of Three (things that come in threes are funnier than other numbers
of things).
Matt runs a fictional startup called Vooza. The company describes
itself as “a mobile web app that steals data from your phone, so they
can sell it to Eastern European spammers” after pivoting from
“Spotify meets Grinder but for rental cars”.
They originally launched through a series of videos talking about the
(fake) product. Those videos got the attention of the startup world,
which was held in suspense before Vooza announced what they
actually did: created video content for startups, featuring native
advertising.
Vooza are a team of professional stand-up comedians, and they have
executed this idea well.

How To Be A Comedian
I debated whether or not to include this differentiator in the book,
because being funny is not an easy task for non-comedians. In the
end, I decided that even if you only remember one of these tips and
make your content just one percent funnier, then you are better off.
That is how powerful humor can be.
Even if you don’t want humor to be your only thing, adding some
humor into what you already do can be an epic way of getting
attention. Marie Forleo is a great example. She has built a business
education empire by delivering serious messages in a fun and quirky
way.

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Magically transforming your personality into Marie’s isn’t
something you can (or should!) do. However, you can definitely add
a bit of your own style of funny, and that might be enough to help
you stand out.
So. Can you train yourself to be funny?
David Nihil, author of Do You Talk Funny: 7 Comedy Habits to Become
a Better (and Funnier) Public Speaker, says yes.
David started off like the rest of us: petrified of public speaking. But
he transformed himself into a professional stand-up comedian in a
year-long experiment. He now runs a startup helping businesses use
humour in their content. In fact, his business, FunnyBizz, offers a
service that specifically rewrites blogs posts and makes them
funnier.
According to David, most stand-up comedians have become masters
at a structured craft as opposed to being naturally funny people.
The rule of three, used by Matt above, is one example.
Incorporating some of the tricks used by stand-up comedians to
generate more laughs can dramatically transform your otherwise
boring content into an engaging, shareable piece that stands out
from the crowd.
Here are some of David’s tips:
1. Tell a story in a relatable way, include something broad
that people can specifically relate to (maybe local
references), then bring it back to something that
happened to you.
2. Set the scene. Write as if you are describing something to
a blind person, and be very specific with detail.
3. Use emotive or funny words like “weird”, “crazy”, or
“nuts”, and be passionate. Underpants is 15% funnier
than underwear. Words with K in them are also
considered funnier than others.
4. Use present tense—“I'm walking and I see” rather than “I
was walking and I saw”.
5. Use the rule of three to create memorable content. Build
tension and surprise with items one and two and
something unexpected with three.
6. Add a callback at the end to tie it together.
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David says the safest humor involves personal stories, because they
are guaranteed to be original and can be easily practiced and
perfected. Often great stories come from seemingly mundane topics,
and once you start telling stories you will find they really work. Even
if you fail on the humour, your content will be more memorable.
My friend Kevin Rogers is an ex-stand-up comedian, and he’s also a
world renowned copywriter. He offers a specific structure for
making stories funny:
1. Identity – Who are you; set the scene; who are you with;
how are you feeling?
2. Struggle – What are you struggling with?
3. Discovery – What was your big discovery?
4. Surprise – What is a surprising twist that no one is
expecting?
This is a structure used by comedians all the time to tell stories and
jokes. The key is the “Surprise” component or where you “reframe”
what the person thinks you are going to say.
As a content marketer you’ll often find yourself telling stories. Even
if you can include just a few of these tips in those stories, it might be
enough to stand out from the crowd.
Kevin’s free book, 60-Second Sales Hook, is a great place to start to
dig into this further.

The Pioneer
In October 2008, Pat Flynn announced that he would write a blog
post each month reporting on the income generated from his online
marketing efforts.
These days, the idea of transparently reporting on your income is a
growing trend. In 2008, however, this was highly unusual. There has
always been a lot of hype and secrecy in the online marketing space,
and Pat vowed to usher in a new era of transparency.
Pat created his site, Smart Passive Income, and began writing
monthly entries for how his various efforts were going. In that
month he managed to bring in $7,900 from a few sources. Pat was
laid off a week earlier, referred to his earnings as “a very successful

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month”, and hoped he could continue with that revenue so he didn’t
have to get another job.
In the years since, Pat has become a household name in the online
marketing space. His revenue is consistently ten times what it was
in October 2008 and his income reports have formed the platform
for a site that generates millions of visits each year. Pat is now an
international speaker, author, software entrepreneur, and online
celebrity. And no, he didn’t have to get a job.
It’s not what Pat did that was the difference—it was when he did it.
These days, releasing your income online is a trend adopted by a lot
of up-and-coming startups. WP Curve releases a monthly income
report, and it’s one of our most popular posts each month. Buffer, a
company doing $4 million in revenue per year, releases their live
company metrics, staff wages, investment data, and anything else
you could imagine online.
But it’s 2015. In 2008, it was unheard of and Pat Flynn was the
pioneer.
For every trend in content marketing, there’s one company at the
forefront that creates a momentum burst to keep them going for
years.
• Downloading resources relating specifically to each blog
post – Hubspot ($1b market cap at the time of writing).
• Automated follow up sequences for content –
Infusionsoft ($500m valuation).
• Bringing the best bits of content and copywriting
together – CopyBlogger (multi-million dollar businesses
Synthesis and Rainmaker, among others).
• Commercial blogging – Jason Calacanis with Weblogs Inc.
($30m exit).
Being first isn’t easy, but if you can do it, it can set you up for the life
of your business.
It’s easy to look back with 20/20 hindsight and say these guys were
clearly onto something. It’s much harder to be the pioneer yourself
for the modern age. One framework that can point you in the right
direction is provided by Peter Thiel in his book, Zero To One.
The book is about creating companies, but its core purpose is to
provide a framework for creating something that is revolutionary by
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answering one simple question: “What is one thing you believe to be
true that most do not?” This is taking a contrarian position.
Pat Flynn believed that he would capture more value for his
business if he released his revenue figures rather than worry about
the value lost by giving up his secrets.
This belief is essentially the message in this book: “Take the content
marketing leap of faith.”
Yes, you do lose something when you “give away the farm”, as Neil
Patel calls it. But you stand to gain much more if you can make it
work.
If you can’t answer that question, you can fall back on this quote
from the book: “If you want to create and capture lasting value, don’t
build an undifferentiated commodity business.”
In other words, it’s not enough to enter into a highly competitive
area (online content) and produce an undifferentiated product. You
have to do something unique. So analyze your content and compare
it to what else is out there. How many other people are doing
content like you? If everyone is doing it, then why would people pay
attention to you?
Being a pioneer is not for everyone. Even these days, I get a lot of
flak for our monthly reports despite entrepreneurs like Pat paving
the way before me. But if you come to a decision based on a strong
belief (that you accept and others don’t share), then you are
equipped for dealing with the backlash.
Whether you see yourself as a pioneer or not, you should still have
some fundamental beliefs driving your business and your content.
That will be a good step towards differentiating yourself and
standing out from the crowd.

The Opportunist
“Newsjacking” is a term coined by David Meerman Scott to describe
taking someone’s news story, attaching yourself to it, and riding the
wave. Journalists do it all the time, sometimes releasing five or six
follow up stories about the same thing with a slightly different angle,
because they know the story already has people’s attention.

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It’s a similar technique to what we do with the content multiplier
framework: take something that works and do more of it. The only
difference is, in this case we are taking it from someone else.
Borrowing it, perhaps.
This is what an opportunist does. Figures out what already has
traction and creates something, ideally in a unique way, around that
topic.
Elisa Doucette, who has an online column on Forbes called
Shattering Glass, uses this technique often when determining what
kind of topics to cover there.
In November of 2014, she was looking over the trending topics on
Twitter and noticed a news story that looked interesting to her.
Since she was working on a book proposal about shame and
criticism, she had a lot to say about some online bullying of
President Obama’s daughters at the White House’s annual turkey
pardoning ceremony (yes, that’s actually a thing in the United
States).
As a result, her article 2 received over half a million views in less
than 24 hours and helped to establish her as an authority in the
niche, and got her appearances on outlets like Sirius News Radio
and Huffington Post TV.
Within six months, she was meeting with agents and publishers in
New York to discuss the book proposal that was just an idea before
that post hit. As an editor that provides feedback and critiques on
content every day, she made a great impact with one trending story
that she was able to add a unique perspective on.
Catching one of these waves can get you a huge amount of attention,
so it’s worth having a look to see if you can use this strategy.

How To Be An Opportunist
This strategy can be used by any business owner, as long as they
deeply understand their audience. If you know who they are and
what they care about, it’s not hard to work out what topics to cover.
Here are a few specific ways you can do it:

Google AdWords Keyword Planner

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 1. Visit the Google AdWords Keyword Planner.
2. Enter some keywords that describe the sort of content
you want to create—for example, I’ll enter “Craft Beer” if
I am working on Black Hops Brewing.
3. Click “Get ideas”.
4. Click the “Keyword Ideas” tab to just see the individual
keyword ideas.
5. Use the “Keyword Filters” on the left to only show
keywords with a certain amount of searches. I generally
look for keywords with between 200-500 searches for a
new site, or more for an established site. In the example
above I can see quite a few keywords in the 1,000-2,000
searches range, including keywords like “brewing
equipment”, “homebrew recipes”, “best craft beers”, and
“craft beer festival”. All of these would make a good
starting point for some content.
Creating content using those keywords doesn’t mean you will
automatically rank well in Google for the keywords, but it does tell
you that they are topics people care about.

Google Trends
Google Trends is great if you already have some idea of what you
are looking for. You can use it to see very quickly what the hot topics
are right now.
For example, let’s look at a few different beer styles with the idea
that we’d write a post about how to brew a certain beer style. I
know the main styles already, so let’s put them into Google Trends
and see what comes up.

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Looking at this chart, I would opt to write a post about how to brew
a Saison, because it’s a gradually rising trend. If you can find a trend
that has a sharp, recent rise, that could be even better.

BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is another great tool that finds content popular in your
industry right now.
All you have to do is enter the topic, and it will show you a bunch of
posts that have done well in your industry.
Again using the craft beer example, here are the results.

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You can learn a lot from content listed here. One easy option is to
apply the content ideas to your location. For example, since Black
Hops Brewing is only in Australia, I could go with any of these
topics:
1. 6 Australian beers you should stop drinking
immediately.
2. The 12 most hipster breweries in Australia.
3. Our list of the best Australian craft beers of 2015.
4. VB sales decline, Australians now drink more craft beer
than VB (if this was actually true).

Competitor Analysis
Another way to build on something that’s working is through
borrowing ideas from competitors. Generally, I don’t choose a direct
competitor but rather someone in a related industry.
So for my example, let’s take the wine industry. I choose two
popular wine blogs in Australia:
1. Vinomofo
2. The Wine Wankers
3. From there, I can look for what content is either doing
very well or is interesting in some way. You can do this
one of two ways.
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First, you can look through the blog and see if they have anything
that shows you their popular posts. A lot of blogs have something in
the sidebar for this. In our case, The Wine Wankers have a sidebar
widget that says “The Trendy Stuff”. I can use that to see a bunch of
interesting articles that could apply directly to craft beer. The top
one is “A great collection of wine infographics”, which is a post that
just embeds a bunch of infographics related to the wine industry.
We could easily do the same thing for beer.
The second way you can find the top articles is to put the site into
BuzzSumo. When I do that with Vinomofo, I get some interesting
articles.

The two that stand out to me are “The Mofo Guide to Ordering Wine”
and “5 Things To Do With Unwanted Wines”. A guide to ordering
beer would probably be quite funny since the craft beer industry is
still in its infancy in Australia. The idea of your beer order being a
tough decision would make a good hook for an article.
The “5 Things To Do With Unwanted Wine” article is an
entertaining, BuzzFeed-style listicle. We could do something similar
with beer, and it probably hasn’t been done, e.g., “Pour it into a
Budweiser bottle and give it to your non-craft, beer-drinking
friends”.

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Resource Jacking
The final way you can go about creating content that is trendy right
now is through utilizing the resources of much bigger companies.
BuzzFeed is a perfect example.
At the time of writing, the company is valued at close to one billion
dollars, employs 700+ people, and gets 150 million unique visitors
per month.
A company like that knows a lot about content. They have people
who live and breathe split testing headlines, they have their finger
on every pulse, and they can create content that impacts people
within minutes of spotting a trend.
So why not use what they have and learn from them? Examine what
content is currently getting a lot of attention, and see how you can
apply that to your own content. Look at what headlines they are
using right now, what media they are using, etc. You can do this with
direct competitors, companies you look up to, or media giants like
BuzzFeed. Anyone bigger than you, with more experience and more
money, leaves a good trail of what they have learned spending their
money.
BuzzFeed also has a whole bunch of categories—for example, food.
One look at the most popular posts in the Food category gives me a
stack of content ideas for my craft beer business.

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How about:
• 12 beers that are so perfect it hurts.
• 18 horrifying facts about mainstream beer consumption.
• 12 craft beers that are almost too crazy to be true (look
at some wild beers like some of the ones done by the
Brew Dogs TV show).
With these ideas alone, our blog is starting to look pretty
interesting!

The Reporter
Jason Calacanis is the guy I think of when I think about journalism
and startups. He got started in the early days of the web when he
created a magazine about startups in New York called Silicon Alley
Reporter.
When blogging was becoming prominent in the 90’s, Jason hired the
world’s best content creators and built a network of news blogs
called Weblogs Inc. The network included sites like Engadget and
Autoblog and was eventually sold to AOL for around $30 million. He
didn’t stop there. In the years since, he’s embraced a bunch of
different projects all around the idea of reporting on the news in
unique ways.
• This Week in Startups is one of the original and most
well-respected podcasts on technology news and
startups. Jason hosts the show with an award-winning
team, and it generates half a million dollars in
advertising revenue per year. His news roundup
episodes bring in journalists and startup founders to
discuss the week’s news in tech and startups.
• The Launch Ticker is an email which summarises startup
news and contains comments from industry
heavyweights.
• His app, [Inside], is a curated summary of news stories
from around the world. You can vote up, comment on, or
share the stories, all of which impacts on what other
people see in the app.

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 • He writes a weekly email and regular content on his site,
often opinion pieces about a news item in the industry.
• He created and hosts the world’s largest startup
conference, LAUNCH Festival, where he showcases the
latest emerging startups.
Jason has always been passionate about reporting on the news and
providing his own opinions. Being a startup guy means he’s been
able to evolve the way he executes that over time. He knows the
news is always going to be interesting and is constantly looking for
innovative ways to both deliver it and monetize it.

How To Be A Reporter
The first question here is: can you report on the news in your
industry in a way that other people aren’t doing? Perhaps the typical
news is bland, boring, or nonexistent. Or perhaps you have
something unique to offer, like your style or the delivery format.
As a business owner, you can report on the news in your industry in
a number of different ways.
Here are a bunch of ideas:
• Podcast – Grab some other industry experts and jump on
Skype to chat about what is happening in the industry.
Use Pamela for Skype or Ecamm Call Recorder to
record the call, publish it on your blog, and submit the
feed to iTunes. I have a podcasting guide linked up at
http://contentmachine.com/resources that will help.
• Video – Do the same thing as Podcasts, but use Google
Hangouts or YouTube Live and publish the video to
YouTube.
• Roundup post – A roundup post is where you summarise
what other people are saying in one of your own posts.
It’s easy to do with news. Visit the top news sites in your
space and write a summary of the top stories for your
own audience.
• Publish an opinion piece – If you have a strong opinion
about something that is doing the rounds at the moment,
write something up and publish it. Medium is a good
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 platform for publishing high quality, original content like
this.
• Email – Do a weekly email summarizing what’s
happening in your industry.
• Publish some original journalism – Probably not the
easiest thing to do, but original journalism certainly can
get a lot of attention if it’s done well.

The Artist
You don’t have to go far these days to see the impact that visuals are
having on online content.
1. Images on Facebook get 54% more “Likes” than text
posts.
2. Photos on Twitter have a much higher “Retweet” rate
(35% according to one study, 150% according to
another).
3. The image-based social networks Tumblr, Pinterest, and
Instagram are the fastest-growing social platforms in the
world (faster than Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn).
The fact is, people love images. The problem is, it’s hard to come up
with high-quality images if you aren’t a designer yourself. For that
reason, they often aren’t done well, which creates a great
opportunity.
Frank Body has done a remarkable job of using visuals to blow up a
multi-million dollar business out of thin air. Well, not air, but unused
recycled coffee beans.
In early 2013, a regular customer walked into a cafe in Melbourne
and asked for some used coffee to be used as an exfoliate. Steve
Rowley, the owner of the cafe, naturally saw this as a business
opportunity. Who wouldn’t?
Speaking with his partner, Bree Johnson, and her business partners,
Erika Geraerts and Jess Hatzis of marketing firm Willow and Blake,
they decided to research the availability of coffee scrubs online.
Apart from DIY recipes, there was no business marketing such a
product, particularly through visuals. They had worked in other

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industries using visual marketing on Instagram and achieved
dramatic results.
Steve also called on the help of friend Alex Boffa. Conveniently, the
group was travelling to Bali, where they were able to try coffee
scrubs at the local resort spas. After further research they realized
that they had to use fresh coffee grounds to maintain the caffeine
content, but that some of the potential benefits of using coffee
included treating skin conditions such as acne, cellulite, psoriasis,
and stretch marks.
What started off as a fun trip quickly turned into a booming
business. Four months of product development spent trialing
different oils and complimentary exfoliates resulted in their original
scrub. With the help of branding agency For The Love And Money,
the team created the Frank Body Scrub and brand.
They set up an account on Instagram and promoted the hashtag
#thefrankeffect, and customers from all around the world began
sharing their pictures.
This was the result of a fairly aggressive social media and PR
campaign, utilizing bloggers and Instagram personalities to share
their product with various networks.
At the time of writing, less than two years after launch, their account
has over 600,000 followers. They have sold products to thousands
of customers around the world and are likely to pass $20M in annual
revenue for 20153.
It’s a remarkable story and obviously a viral success that is never
easy to replicate. However, it really demonstrates the power of
visual marketing on modern social platforms. Pictures of women in
the shower covered with coffee grounds is content marketing. As it
turns out, extremely effective content marketing.

How To Be An Artist
Utilizing the power of images could mean adding some images to
existing content, or it could mean creating brand new, image-heavy
content.
Here are eleven ways you can go about ramping up your image
content.

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1. Screenshots
If you have any kind of software-related business, screenshots are a
super easy way to add visuals to your content. Skitch and Jing are
great tools for creating screenshots.

2. Charts And Graphs

People love charts, and with tools like Google Docs, it’s simple and
free to come up with intelligently designed, interesting charts. We
use them in our monthly report posts on our blog. I also use them
regularly when I present at conferences. Flowcharts are another
good way to show ideas, and Lucidchart is a handy tool for creating
them.

3. SlideShares
SlideShare is a site for uploading visual presentations that is
definitely worth a look. SlideShare is its own platform with its own
visitors, so you can reach a new audience. You can also embed
SlideShares in your own site, making your blog posts that much
richer. It’s also a great option for repurposing content. You can pick
any content you’ve written or spoken about before, redo it in
PowerPoint, and make it into a SlideShare.
Gary Vaynerchuk has some great examples up on his account. Just
remember that there’s no audio, so the best SlideShares will have
just the right amount of text with strong images, all to give the slide
context and entice the visitor to keep clicking through.

4. Custom Illustrations
Custom illustrations can be a great way to differentiate your content
from the crowd. Big budget publications like newspapers do it, but
the average business isn’t that far along.
You can use illustrations for featured images or elements within
posts. Help Scout and Groove are both great examples of this. Both
stand out above the noise because they “look” completely different
to everything else out there.

5. Screenshares, Webinars, And Video Courses

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If you have an educational focus for your content, screenshares and
videos are a great way to get the learning across. Video training
platforms like Udemy and Coursera are exploding and the technical
barrier is being wiped away.
All you need to create a decent screenshare video is a USB headset
and screen capture software like Camtasia or ScreenFlow. Video is
more difficult, but if you can do it well, it helps elevate your
authority to a new level.
Marie Forleo is a great place to get inspiration when it comes to
doing online videos well.

6. Visual Social Apps

Emerging social visual platforms like Vine, Periscope and
Instagram have created a huge opportunity for people willing to
create great content that engages people.
On these platforms, there are plenty of examples like Frank Body
who have built a huge community and leveraged that community to
create a great business. Video is also exploding in popularity on
other social networks like Facebook and Twitter.
For some people, it might not be the right platform. But if it’s a good
fit then it can be extremely beneficial.

7. Infographics
Infographics give you a few benefits over traditional content. For
starters, not many people are doing them well. So if you can, then
you will stand out. You can also post them on image-specific
platforms like Pinterest and get your message out to new audiences.
Furthermore, you’ll have created an embeddable resource which
other people can either link back to or embed directly, thereby
getting more eyeballs on your content and generating backlinks.
There are three main ways to create an infographic:
1. Use an infographic builder like Visme or Piktochart.
2. If you have reasonable image editing skills, you can buy
Infographic elements from sites like ThemeForest and
customize them yourself to create your own infographic.

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 3. You can pay a designer to build a custom infographic.
You can find affordable designers on 99Designs and
high quality designers on Crew.

8. Quotable Social Images

Another easy way to add images to your content is to create
quotable social media images. Canva is a great free tool that lets you
create them with very little graphical expertise. These can be used
to improve existing content or simply work as stand alone images
on social networks like Facebook, Pinterest, or Instagram. You can
even build great-looking social media quotes directly on your phone
using apps like WordSwag.
Here are a few simple ways to do it:
• Create a personal image. Use an image of yourself and
one of your own quotes.
• Quote a guest or author. This is useful if you have had
someone on a podcast or mentioned them in a blog post.
• Ask a question. What would someone ask that your
content can answer? Use an image to ask the question
and prime the visitor for the problem you solve or for
starting a conversation.
• Show a stat. If you have simple statistics that you want to
stand out in your article, place them in an interesting
image.
• If you want to post general quotes, put the word into
Pinterest and see what images come up. Some people re-
post other people’s images, while many more re-brand
the quotes while making sure to mention the original
creator.

9. Memes
Memes are a little different than a quotable social image and have
potential for viral sharing. Memes are usually funny, ironic, and
leverage pop culture.
BuzzFeed articles typically feature lots of these, and they tend to be
funny and quick to skim through and get the gist of.

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Meme Generator is one of many sites and apps you can use to take
popular memes and add your own text. Be sure this imagery is
appropriate for your audience.
Remember to make sure you fully understand the meme and use it
in the right context. People will be very quick to jump all over
someone using a meme in the wrong context, and you will look out
of touch.

10. Animated GIFs

Animated GIFs and autoplay videos stand out as a big trend at the
moment. GIFs are being used regularly on websites now for things
like showing you how to use software.
GifGrabber is a simple tool for putting together animated GIFs for
software usage.
BuzzFeed uses funny animated GIFs on a lot of their posts. Social
networks like Instagram and Facebook are now autoplaying videos
without sound. Even if you don’t like it, I’m willing to bet you watch
more videos on Facebook than you used to!
A really simple way we’ve used these in our content is by animating
the charts in our monthly reports. It adds a bit of interest to the
report, and we can convert that to a video file for Facebook so
people can see our growth chart going up directly on the page.

11. Interactive Visuals

Adding interactive elements goes a long way towards capturing the
attention of your audience. They will likely get hooked on the
functionality of the interaction and stick around to consume the
content.
A great example of an interactive piece of content is Matthew
Daniels’ Rapper Vocab chart.4 It counts the number of individual
words used by the major hip hop artists and plots them on a chart.
You can mouse over the artist to see their name, so it also has a neat
interactive element. This got the world’s attention in 2014 and so far
has amassed just under half a million likes, comments, and shares on
Facebook. 5 6 7

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How Are You Going To Differentiate?
I hope this chapter has given you a few ideas about how you might
stand out from the competition. Perhaps you are going to run with
one of these strategies; maybe you will combine a few of them; or
maybe you’ll come up with something yourself. You might want to
try a bunch of them and see what gets traction.
Whatever you do, don’t ignore the differentiation piece. It could be
the difference between creating content with no traction for years
versus blowing up an audience overnight.

It’s Now Time To Build The Machine

You now understand the fundamentals and you are ready to go with
content ideas, a strategy, and a point of difference.
You are ready to build the content machine and create a scalable
system for creating, managing, and growing your content marketing
efforts for the purpose of growing your business.
In the next chapter we will build your content machine.

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Notes
1. Pat Flynn, “SPI 071: Successful Start Ups, Millions Lost and Everything In-Between:
Inside the Mind of Noah Kagan from AppSumo,” The Smart Passive Income Blog (blog),
June 19, 2013, http://www.smartpassiveincome.com/spi-071-successful-start-ups-
millions-lost-and-everything-in-between-inside-the-mind-of-noah-kagan-from-
appsumo/.
2. Ibid, “The Art Of Online Apologies And Why Elizabeth Lauten Failed Miserably At
Hers,” Shattering Glass, Forbes online, last modified December 1, 2014,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/elisadoucette/2014/11/30/the-art-of-apologies-and-
why-elizabeth-lauten-failed-miserably-at-hers/.
3. Mat Beeche, “After only 18 months in business Frank Body will likely exceed $20
million in revenue this year,” Startup Daily, last modified February 25, 2015,
http://www.startupdaily.net/2015/02/18-months-business-frank-body-will-likely-
exceed-20-million-revenue-year/.
4. Matthew Daniels, “The Largest Vocabulary in Hip Hop,” last modified June 2014,
http://rappers.mdaniels.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/.
5. Simon Rogers, “What fuels a Tweet’s engagement?” Twitter Blog (blog), Twitter, Inc.,
last modified March 10, 2014, https://blog.twitter.com/2014/what-fuels-a-tweets-
engagement.
6. Belle Beth Cooper, “How Twitter’s Expanded Images Increase Clicks, Retweets and
Favorites [New Data],” Buffer Social (blog), Buffer, last modified November 13, 2013,
https://blog.bufferapp.com/the-power-of-twitters-new-expanded-images-and-how-
to-make-the-most-of-it.
7. Ingrid Lunden, “Tumblr Overtakes Instagram As Fastest-Growing Social Platform,
Snapchat Is The Fastest-Growing App,” TechCrunch, AOL Inc., last modified November
25. 2014, http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/25/tumblr-overtakes-instagram-as-
fastest-growing-social-platform-snapchat-is-the-fastest-growing-app/.

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Chapter 5: Scale: Building The
Machine
You’ve come a long way! Understanding the fundamentals puts you
miles ahead of the competition right from the start. Focusing on
creating high-quality content establishes you as an expert worth
following. Finding a differentiator will help you get noticed.
The final piece is figuring out a way to build a business off the back
of this content, then growing and sustaining the strategy in the long
term. I call this “Building The Machine.”

Design And Conversion

If you are going to run with content marketing as an important
strategy in your business, then design and conversion are critical
components. Design will impact everything you do, and if you have
bad design, you will never know. It will never show up in Analytics.
People will never tell you. They will just dismiss you as not being
legitimate or serious.
If you have an established business, please don’t underestimate the
importance of design. Employ a designer or pay a high-quality
design firm to make sure whatever content you do is well designed.
If you are just getting started, stick to my seven rules for hacking
design early on:
1. Use a nice theme and don’t touch it.
2. Remove anything not completely necessary.
3. Make alignment and padding symmetrical.
4. Look down to the single pixel level (every last detail
counts; one pixel out could mean visitors not “feeling
right” about your site).
5. Benchmark off the best, but don’t ever copy.
6. Don’t have a logo unless you can afford a good one.
7. You aren’t a designer, and neither are your friends on
Facebook. Get design advice from design experts.

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Your site should also be set up for conversion. This is a concept
closely tied to design. A well-designed site will mean a site that looks
good, will work for its intended audience, and converts well.
Most people see conversions as something that can be easily
measured. I don’t. You can measure how many people opt in to your
aggressive pop-up, but you can’t measure how many people won’t
trust you, because you are taking before you are giving.
If you focus on quality, your well-designed brand, and trust, you will
convert visitors into customers over time. If you try to do it
prematurely (with excessively aggressive tactics like overzealous
pop-ups and exit scripts), then your conversions on Analytics might
go up, but your long-term brand will be damaged.
There are three different ways to create these conversion funnels
which I’ll address now.

Defining Your Funnel

I’ve mentioned a few times that I want you to think of yourself as a
content marketer and not a blogger. That’s how important it is.
Marketers need a funnel. A funnel is a way to transition the broad
members of the community down to a smaller group of customers.
Put another way, how does someone go from a blog reader to a
customer of your product or service? This is where the monetization
logic is put into practice.
The way you design your funnel will impact every aspect of your
content.
There’s no “one size fits all”, but I’ve found three popular options
that work well.
1. The email funnel
2. The product funnel
3. The content funnel

The Email Funnel

Neil Patel of Quick Sprout creates great content. But he’s a busy
guy, and it’s just him, so he’s lucky to do two or three posts a week.
Instead, he goes in hard for the email opt in.

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He’s got huge pop-ups that cover the whole site and force you to
click “No, I don’t want more traffic” to close them. He’s got sidebar
opt ins, mid-post opt ins, and an exit script that will create an opt in
pop-up form when you try to leave the page.
Typically when sites are direct with email opt in, they are also quite
direct with the emails themselves. Once you sign up, you get regular
emails (sometimes daily or even more often) that try to deliver you
more good content but also try to frame you up for purchasing.
This is one way of funnelling visitors down, and it works well for
Neil.
If you want to look at this strategy, SumoMe, OptimizePress, and
LeadPages are the two leading tools for building email opt ins.

The Product Funnel

The product funnel is where the main call to action on the site is
using your product. Email opt ins are nowhere to be seen. If you like
the content, your only option is to visit the landing page and sign up
for the service.
This tends to be the default position people take. When they start a
blog they’ll fill the sidebar with product information, and they’ll
keep the standard business menu across the top. This is generally a
mistake, because content marketing is about creating value for
others. It’s hard to do that when you are so focused on yourself.
However, there are ways to execute this well. It works very
efficiently with free software and tools, because people love signing
up for those, and you are also building an email list when they sign
up.
Buffer is well-versed in this method. They have a big banner across
the top to sign in with Facebook or Twitter. The site has a scroll opt
in down at the bottom that asks you to “Schedule your first post”.
They also give away documents and resources completely free with
no email opt in. Just with a simple note at the bottom says, “Save
time on social media with Buffer. Schedule your first post now!”
They also do a great job with the content itself. By using the product
funnel, you can intertwine your product with your content. You can
get customers to help you with content, release case studies, do
product demonstrations, and much more. As long as this content is
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“good content”, then it can be a smart way to regularly mention your
product without coming across as a salesperson. Buffer has a big
content team that does all of this and more on a daily basis.
As a service, Buffer has a very broad audience: virtually anyone with
a business who uses social media. That means almost everyone
reading their blog is a potential customer. So this product funnel
works quite well.
Once you’ve signed up for the app, there is also a sophisticated email
sequence that occurs, but it’s nothing like what you’d get from a
more direct email funnel.
Since this structure generally works when you have a significantly
broad product and low-friction signups (like a free software
service), it’s not the best option for most people.

The Content Funnel

The content funnel is my personal preference. It aims to build an
email list, but it also favours content and brand over email opt ins. It
requires you to create a lot of content, but that shouldn’t be a
problem after powering through chapter three.
The content funnel works as follows:
1. You create a lot of great content and give the vast
majority away on your site publicly.
2. You create a few bigger pieces of content, some of which
you give away on your site publicly and some of which
you put behind an email opt in.
3. When someone signs up for the emails, you have a
sequence that sends them more valuable content and
segments them to make sure the suitable ones are
pitched on your business. It’s not a heavy pitch; it’s just
enough to make sure you’ve done your job in ensuring
that your most engaged audience understands what you
do.
This is what we do at WP Curve. We put most of our content out in
blog posts freely available on our site. Sometimes we’ll support
those blog posts with Google Docs, frameworks, ebooks, and
downloads that keen readers can grab. We also occasionally ask for
their email through a landing page or opt in at the end of a blog post.
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With larger projects where trust is a must, we’ll just give it all away
publicly with no email opt in. That is what I do with my books. All of
the frameworks, downloads, and resources for this book are freely
available at http://contentmachine.com/resources. This builds
trust, and people are more likely to get behind the project and share
it.

Relevant Lead Magnets

One of the easiest and least intrusive ways to get people onto your
email list is using post-specific lead magnets. Conversions are all
about relevancy. Having a blog post about website speed followed
by an opt in for “Download my weight loss ebook” will not convert
well, regardless of how well-designed it is or how aggressive you are
with the opt in. However, if you put an opt in for a downloadable 14-
point website speed check at the end of the post, it will convert very
well.
You can do the same thing with scroll opt ins, landing pages, pop-
ups, sidebar opt ins, or any other kind of opt in form. The key point
is making the lead magnet relevant to the post.
Of course, it takes a bit of effort to add a different opt in to every
post—not to mention setting up the website and email sequences to
support providing the lead magnet. I think the best way to do this is
by checking your top posts and making sure all of them have post-
specific lead magnets.
If you don’t have many posts just yet, you can go on gut feeling and
add them to the posts you think will be winners. If you’ve built up a
good library of content, I’d suggest automating this with Zapier:

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The basic idea here is to use the “Schedule” zap to automatically
create a task for your admin team. I have a team of Virtual Assistants
in the Philippines who look after these things for me. I use Trello to
manage our tasks, but Zapier integrates with lots of different tools if
you aren’t a Trello user.
This is how the “Zap” works: every month the admin team is
reminded to look in Google Analytics under Behaviour/Site content
at a year’s worth of data to see the top 25 posts. They manually
check through each post to see if there is a post-specific opt in at the
end. If they don’t find one, they will contact our content marketing
manager and recommend that we put one together.
To collect email addresses you can use an email marketing tool like
MailChimp or Infusionsoft (I use both), and an accompanying
plugin like OptinSkin or LeadPages.

Five Must-Have Sequences For Content

Marketers
Once you have email addresses, you need to do something with
them. Here are five sequences that I’ve used to get the full benefit
out of obtaining an email address.

1. Content Drip Or Weekly Email

If people have opted in to hear more from you, you first need to
make sure they will actually hear more from you. I like the idea of
doing a weekly email, because the content is always fresh and
people feel much more part of the community when they are
engaging in up-to-date content.
Sending a weekly email can be consistently time consuming. So if
you don’t have time, or you prefer, set up a content drip sequence.
A content drip sequence is a series of pre-written emails that will
send out useful content to the person on a set schedule. I try to be as
generous as possible with the content without being blatantly sales-
y. The goal is to build trust and build up desire for your
product/service at the same time. You can do this via an automation
in MailChimp, or a sequence in a program like Infusionsoft. When

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the time is right in this sequence, you may want to pitch your
product or service.
Another good method to drip content is to offer an email training
course as the opt in lead magnet on your site. This sets up the visitor
with the expectation that you will be emailing them information
over the coming days or weeks.

2. Content Suggestion Sequence

I like to have one simple email that gets sent to subscribers asking
them what they would like to hear about. If you are using content in
your business and you want it to get traction, you need to learn what
people want. So what better way than to ask them? When someone
subscribes to your list for the first time, have your system send them
a simple email that just asks them what topics they are interested in
hearing more about.
If you let people reply to your emails, then you actually read and
reply back, you will build a legion of close fans. Often people will ask
for something that you’ve already covered, but they didn’t know.
That’s a great opportunity to be helpful, point them to it, and build
that trust further. If they suggested something you hadn’t thought of,
then add it to your ideas list.

3. Pitch Sequence
At various stages in your campaigns, you might find a good time to
pitch someone on your service. But what if the person has
subscribed to four or five of your campaigns, and they are heavily
engaged with your message already? It wouldn’t be productive to
constantly pitch to them.
To ensure I’m not pitching the same people over and over again, I
like to have a pitch sequence. I use Infusionsoft, which makes this
sort of thing pretty easy. At one stage during a campaign I will tag
the visitor to be pitched. This is automated inside Infusionsoft.
They will then enter the pitch sequence, and the first step of that
sequence is to remove them if they’ve been pitched recently. That
timeframe will depend on your business—it could be weeks or
months. If they aren’t removed, they are pitched on your service and
tagged so they will be removed next time if they enter the sequence
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again. I also exclude current customers—you don’t want to be
preaching to the converted.
You can get as sophisticated as you like with this. With more
advanced CRMs like Infusionsoft, you can “lead score” and only pitch
people when they hit a certain level. For most small businesses, just
a simple pitch sequence is a good place to start.

4. Cart Abandonment
One very easy sequence you can add to any business is a cart
abandonment sequence. This is a bit outside of the content
marketing topic, but because it’s such a simple high-impact task to
perform (and many people don’t remember to do it), I thought I’d
mention it.
Through this sequence, you email people who went some way
towards purchasing but didn’t finalize the transaction. This could
mean the actual shopping cart software has steps, and the customer
completed step one but did not make it to step four. Regardless,
your process for signing up customers should involve a form where
the first field is an email address. If people fill in the email address
but not the rest, then they are ripe for a cart abandonment email.
You can send this even if they don’t save the form if you set it to save
the email dynamically as they fill it out. Once their email is entered
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they are tagged for the sequence, and if they don’t complete the
purchase, they receive an email notification .
The email is very simple—it just says something like what I’ve put
below. If your product or service is image-central, then include some
nice images to entice the person back.
We noticed you visited [site] but didn’t complete your order.
We don’t want you to miss out, so if you want to finalize your
purchase, please click here to return to the site.
If you are having any issues with the checkout, please reply and we
will help you out.
Looking forward to working with you.
[company name]

5. Problem Based Conversion Sequence

When someone buys from you it’s generally because your product
or service solves a problem for them. However, it may not be the
same problem for everyone, so it’s a good idea to dig into what these
problems are and exactly how you solve them. Once you understand
that, you can then have sequences that pitch your product or service
around solving these specific issues.
For example, with WP Curve, we solve hundreds of WordPress
problems. But for most people, they will sign up for one of six
reasons:
1. Their site is slow, and they want us to make it faster.
2. Their site is not secure, and they don’t want to be hacked.
3. They want someone to maintain their site proactively, so
they don’t have to worry about the technical issues.
4. They want to rank better in Google, so they want the
simple SEO factors under control.
5. They want to convert more visitors to email subscribers
or customers.
6. They want more traffic for their site / blog.
These problems become your major topic areas. For each one you
put together:
1. A banner ad you can use to market your services to these
people based specifically around that topic, i.e., “A faster

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 site means higher Google rankings. Join WP Curve to
speed up your site for as little as $79”.
2. An email sequence you can use to email people who are
interested in this line of content. Use a simple sequence
that sends them some interesting info and has a specific
call to action based around that topic.
3. A lot of content on your site that discusses that exact
topic.
You then do two things on any of the posts on your site that discuss
those topics:
1. You use a service like AdRoll or native Facebook
Retargeting to add a specific tracking pixel to that piece
of content. When they visit other sites around the web,
they will see that specific ad, as opposed to a generic ad
for your service.
2. Put together a category-based lead magnet, so any time
you create content around that topic, you have a call to
action that gets people to opt in. They are then put on the
sequence in step 2 above. You can either do this
manually or using a plugin for putting certain lead
magnets on every post within a certain category on your
site.
To ensure you aren’t constantly pitching to potential customers, I
would also put some limits on it. For example, create a monthly limit
that no one is pitched more than once during that month.

Manage Influencers
I would not have been noticed at all if I hadn’t worked from day one
on engaging influencers. It’s extremely hard to get noticed. Even if
my content was great, I still needed to get it in front of the right
people.
In chapter three, we identified influencers as part of the content
strategy. But what about long term? How do you build up a
relationship with them and maintain that to keep it strong? This
needs to be built into your ongoing processes or into your values as
a person.

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For me, it wasn’t a structured process so much as just a general
approach which said, “Any time I can help out an influencer or give
them special attention, I will.” Of course, any time I can help out
anyone I generally try to. That is, perhaps, the better way to think
about it. But I’m only human and I won’t lie: when I see an
opportunity to help an influencer, I do give them special attention.
It started out with mentioning people in my blog posts and linking
to their sites. I would then ask them to be on my podcast, which they
generally would, and that would be a great way to break the ice and
get to know them.
I’d comment on their blogs and stick up for them online. I’d look for
any way to help, and I’d support whatever they were working on at
the time.
Over time I was noticed and gradually started seeing benefits. I was
mentioned in podcasts or on other blogs. I was invited onto other
podcasts to be interviewed or invited to conferences to present. Big
name influencers shared my content, and I then had a bit more
leeway to email them and ask them for a hand.
This was also aided by the fact that I was creating high-quality,
differentiated content that they were comfortable putting their
name behind. If I was just churning out short, low-quality posts on
broad topics, they may have known who I was, but they wouldn’t be
comfortable helping me or promoting my work.
In some cases I really went out of my way to build a relationship
with an influencer, like offering to build their website for free or
flying interstate to have lunch with them.
These things do take time, but I eventually got to a point where I had
a big list of people who I would happily email and could directly ask
for their help. I will email all of them when I launch this book, in fact,
and specifically ask them to share it. Some will, some won’t, but
most will read my email and consider it. This has turned into some
very tangible partnerships for my business and a huge boost for my
content.
I’d love to reveal a list of steps for this, but I don’t think that’s really
how influencer outreach works. You just give, give, give, and then
when you think you’ve given too much, you give a bit more.

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Sometimes when you feel like it’s all for nothing, they will surprise
you with something big. That’s happened to me more than once.
If it suits you better, you can take a more structured approach,
where you or your team have certain tasks to perform regularly for
your influencers.
Here are a few ideas to run with:
• Comment on their blog, and be positive. Constant
negativity will kill your reputation. The occasional
challenge is fine, but watch out for unproductive
criticism.
• Include them on your own blog when you do expert
roundups, or link to them as examples. When you
promote the post, be sure to let them know (this is part
of the content promotion process we will run through
later). I like to link back to their specific posts rather
than their homepage. If they use WordPress and they
have the trackbacks setting on, it will email them and tell
them that you have linked to them.
• Follow them on social media. Consider coming to their
aid if haters do their thing. Be active in sharing their
posts.
• Give them free services or products from your business.
If it’s relevant, then everyone appreciates this.
• Invite them on a podcast to help spread their message.
Ask them if there’s anything else you can help with.
• Offer to help them with something that’s in your area of
expertise. I’ve had people offer to help me for free on
projects who then became staff members and business
partners.
• Make an effort to visit them if they are in town. I’ve flown
interstate specifically to meet people before—it’s well
worth it in the end.
• Email your list with some useful content or info on their
service. Let them know to expect a bit of extra traffic.
• If they have a podcast, leave an iTunes review. If they
have a book, leave an Amazon review. I wouldn’t hesitate

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 emailing them to thank them and point them to the
review.
• If they ever publicly ask for help for anything like a
survey or a social share, jump on it.
• If they have services or products that you could benefit
from, then sign up and become a customer.
• If they have an online community (free or paid), sign up
and be a good community member who adds constant
value and asks for nothing.
Over time you can test the waters with some sort of more
formalized partnership. For example, perhaps you can create an
ebook together or promote each other to your respective audiences.
These guys are busy, and it takes a lot to get their attention. Make
sure you are looking at it from their point of view, and don’t be
annoying.
Here are a few tools you might want to use to help with this step:
• Inkybee is a tool for reaching out to other influence
content creators in your niche.
• Klout displays a 0-100 influencer rating in Twitter next
to people who engage with you. If you see someone with
a high score (65+), you might want to pay them extra
attention.
• Mention will tell you any time you are mentioned on the
web. If an influencer mentions you, you might want to
thank them and give them extra attention.
• Little Bird can provide you with lists of influencers in
your niche.
• Followerwonk is another tool for providing lists of
influencers on social media.

Build An Ambassador List

When I finished The 7 Day Startup, I chatted with Tom Morkes, who
would ultimately help me with marketing the book. The first thing
he told me to do was create an ambassador list.

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I knew I had a bit of a community with my content, but finding
people to actually advocate on my behalf? That seemed like a bit of a
stretch.
I thought to myself, “I’m not sure I’m a big enough influencer for
people to want to sign up and be an ambassador.” I was wrong. It
turned out there was a hidden contingent of people in my audience
that were more than just community members. They were people
who legitimately wanted to help my project succeed.
I emailed my list and asked them to join the ambassador list, and I
had 500 people click the link to join within a few days.
Tom then said, “The first thing we need to do is create a Facebook
group, so we can fire up the ambassadors.” Again I thought the
conversion of list subscriber to Facebook would be tiny, but I took
his advice. I emailed them with a request to join the Facebook group.
I also updated the ambassador sequence, so future people would be
emailed automatically requesting they join, and after they said yes,
they’d be then asked to join us on Facebook. Around 350 of the
ambassadors joined the Facebook group in the next few days. I was
blown away.
When it came time to launch the book, we called on the
ambassadors for help. They jumped to action, sending out tweets
about the book, writing reviews on Amazon, and telling their friends
to grab a copy.
After the first week the sales page had over 350 tweets, and within
two weeks there were over 100 five-star reviews on Amazon.com
(and more in other countries). It was an amazing response and took
me by complete surprise. In the months since, the group has grown
to thousands of people, and they jump to my aid any time I need
them. Of course, it’s not a one-way street—I help them out in return.
For Content Machine, I started a new ambassador group much
earlier (six months before the release date), and at the time of
writing already has over 1,000 members. (If you want to join the
new group, you can type ‘Content Machine’ into Facebook or visit
http://contentmachine.com/resources for the link.)
After this experience, I realized I probably should have been doing
this all along for my content. There are some people who want to be

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passive consumers, but there are a lot of people who want to do
more.
I’d never considered creating a formal “ambassador” list or a
Facebook group just for my content, but why not? It’s a win-win. The
members of the group are super fans, so they are eager to help. A lot
of them are at a stage in their business where I can help them, so I
regularly go in and offer to review people’s sites or answer
questions. It’s very low friction to join and doesn’t cost you anything
other than some time.
Here’s how to do it:
When someone signs up for emails on your site, send them an email
that explains your ambassador list. Here’s some copy you can use as
a starting point:
Hey [name],
I’m excited you joined my email list. I’m a passionate
entrepreneur like you, and I love to help others and share what I
know.
I wanted to let you know about a special group of people in my
audience called the Ambassadors. My ambassadors help me
when I need the power of a group—for example, with sharing
an upcoming book or project. In return, I give them special
attention and often help them out for free with their business.
If this sounds like something that would benefit you, simply click
this link, and you will be immediately added to the list. I will
send you another email with more info if you sign up.
I hope you join me!
If you have any questions, please just reply to this email. I read
and respond to any I receive.
Thanks,
[Your name/signature]
If you use a tool like Infusionsoft, you can tag people who click on
the link. If you use a simpler tool, you might need to get your
developer to add them to a new list or just direct them to a different
opt in form. Or, even simpler, you can bypass the email list and just
start the social media group. That is what I did for Content Machine,
because I got so much traction on Facebook.
If you go with the email list, after they join, send them this:
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 Hey [name],
Woo hoo, I’m pumped you decided to join the Ambassador list! If
you need my help with anything, please just ask.
When I need a hand from you, I will send an email, and I hope
you’ll jump in to help out. We’ve also put together a Facebook
group, so we can all hang out and assist each other with smaller
tasks.
Click this link to join the Facebook group.
If you aren’t on Facebook, that’s cool—we can just stick with
email.
If you have any questions, let me know!
Talk to you soon,
[Your name/signature]
Facebook groups are significantly more powerful than I thought.
Emails tend to be pretty formal, so I don’t want to stretch the
friendship and email people constantly. But our Facebook group is
packed with conversations all day, every day. There’s a huge active
support base right there ready to help, and whenever I have free
time I hop on Facebook and dive in.
I highly recommend you do this as soon as you start with content
marketing. Over time you will build a loyal fan base, and you’ll have
a huge advantage over your competitors when it comes to sharing
and promoting content.

Content Creation Style Guide

It’s essential that you have a process for creating high-quality
content. This could be one that you work through yourself, one that
your team follows, or one that you send to external content writers.
This has been a huge asset to us. When we first started accepting
guest posts, it was a total mess. Everyone was at a different level,
and it ended up being more work for us to get a guest author’s post
right than it was for us to do our own.
The style guide became our number one asset in successfully
implementing a process where around half of our content is now
written by external writers, and the quality is just as high.

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Here is an example of one you can use. I’ve also provided this at
http://contentmachine.com/resources if you want a downloadable
Google Doc to use yourself.

Our Audience
Put in a description here about your blog, your audience, and what
they like to see. It could include something like:
“Our blog is focused on online marketing and growth. Readers are
generally business owners looking to improve their sales or lead
generation. We pride ourselves on content that is practical, backed
with details (charts, screenshots and other companies doing X), and
uses simple, conversational language.”

Checklist For Content Value

This checklist should mirror the high-quality content standards you
created earlier in this book. It could include the following
parameters:
• Useful? Does it have utility? Tip: Write to solve an issue
or pain point for a single, specific person.
• New idea? Is it a new spin on an old idea or a brand new
idea altogether?
• Valuable? Will a reader get value from it?
• Actionable? Are there action steps a reader can take?
• Shareable? Is there an incentive for readers to share it?
• Eye-catching? Does the headline make you want to read
it?
• Flow? Does the content flow and read well?
• Entertaining? A few chuckles are a bonus.
• Long and detailed? Developed content generally goes
best with our audience.

Format
We require people to send drafts as Google Docs before putting
them on the site. Google Docs makes it really easy to have multiple
people working on a post at once.

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Text Style Guide
This is where we put general conventions used on our site.
Examples could include:
• Numerals (1) instead of numbers (one).
• Sentence case title headings (only capitalize the first
letter in the first word).
• Use H2 subheadings (not bold).
• A minimum of three images per post.
• Single spaces after full stops.
• Links always open in a new tab.
• Related article links have “Related” in bold with a colon,
followed by a link to the article, e.g.: Related: 12 ways to
increase engagement through visual content.
In relation to the conventions for numbers and sentence case, we
use numerals in all our posts. Similarly, using capitals for all words
in a heading is more accepted. I’ve used those conventions in this
book, but generally with content I like to be less formal and use the
ones above. This is personal preference, and you can use whatever
conventions you prefer.

Image Style Guide

Here is an example of requirements you might have in the images
section:
No Stock PhotosWe like to avoid stock images whenever possible.
Proper Image File TypesUse this to determine which file type is
appropriate for the images in your post.
JPEG – Good for photos of people or places or things, bad for
screenshots of apps and websites or text.
PNG – Good for screenshots of apps and websites with
gradients. But can be problematic for file sizes.
GIF – Good for flat images with no gradients. Watch out for
small images inside a screenshot like a chat avatar or a gradient
like the top bar of a browser.
Full Width Images
Here is an example of requirements for image file sizes. These will
depend on the theme you use on your site and other factors.

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All images must meet these exact requirements. If you aren’t confident
about optimizing and uploading the images, please send them through
to us, and we can do it for you.
All wide images to be exactly 640px wide, which means they will be
full width on the site. Ideally they will be exactly 300px high, but if
that doesn’t work you can make them higher in increments of
100px.
If the image doesn’t suit full width, then make it 250px wide, and we
will right align it. Ideally make it exactly 250px by 250px, but if it’s
more of a portrait and doesn’t work as an exact square, then you can
set the height to 350px or 450px.
Try to keep all full width images under 70kb, but make sure they
aren’t blurry or pixelated.
Try to keep all 250px images under 40kb, but make sure they aren’t
blurry or pixelated.
Use .JPG for photos and medium-res PNGs or GIFs for flat vector
images.
Images should have either no border (in which case we will apply
one automatically), or if they have a white background they can
have a non-rounded 1px border with color #CCCCCC.
Don’t hyperlink images in WordPress, and no left/right alignment or
resizing.
Featured Image
If you use featured images in WordPress, add the requirements
here. Examples could include:
Each post has a featured image.
Make the featured image exactly 120 x 120px.
If it’s a white background image, add a 1px border with color
#CCCCCC.

Excerpt
Ideally, your blog homepage will show a custom excerpt of the post.
Allowing WordPress to automatically use the first few sentences
from the post can be a mistake. Your first few sentences might fit
well in the context of the full piece, but they may not provide the
best summary to entice readers to click a shared link. Instead, use
the WordPress excerpts area and create a few sentences that really
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excite the user to click through to read the post. Here is an example
guideline for excerpts.
The excerpt should be two sentences separated with a full paragraph
space. The sentences should be long enough to take up two lines each.
The excerpt should introduce the reader to the blog post and entice
them to read on.

Editing Notes
Here we generate practical editing notes and list other things to look
out for. Examples could include:
When reviewing after first draft, keep an eye out for:
• Filler words like: I think, etc, things, stuff.
• Long sentences with no punctuation.
• Long paragraphs that aren’t broken up.
• Waffling or off-topic sentences.
• Double check links.
▪ Make sure links work.
▪ Make sure they open in a new tab.

Inside WordPress
These tasks have to be performed by guest writers once the post is
ready to be published. We generally give them a separate template
to fill in which asks these questions. I’ve provided a document
template up at http://contentmachine.com/resources that you can
use. Here is what we include:
Put this information in a separate document with your final article.
1. SEO Meta description (less than 156 chars).
2. Focus Keyword.
3. Post Tags.
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 4. A link to a dropbox folder with your images.
a. Please save your blog post images in this folder in the
dimensions listed below.
b. Include a featured image.
c. Include a large photo of yourself to use for social
sharing (we’ll put a quote from the post on the
photo).
5. Title of each image.
a. Name the image with keywords spaced with
underscores (Monthy_Income_Chart).
6. A brief, two-sentence excerpt to entice readers.
7. One or two tweetable quotes from your post.
8. An author bio if this is your first submission.
We will talk more about using these guidelines with guest writers
later in this chapter.

Create A Monthly Feedback Loop

As a creative person, you might struggle with the balance between
what people want to consume and what you want to create. If you
are in content marketing for the purpose of building a business, then
you need to follow what is doing well. As I’ve mentioned throughout
this book, the number one reason content marketing doesn’t work is
that the content is simply not good enough. When you follow what
works, you get closer to something that is “good enough” for your
audience.
A really easy way to manage this is by doing a simply monthly check
up. I schedule it in Zapier and have my content marketing manager
fill in the report.
Here are a bunch of things to include in the monthly report. You can
also download a Google Doc template for this up at
http://contentmachine.com/resources.

10 Pieces Of Content Created

I like to set a goal each month to create a certain amount of content.
I wasn’t too worried about this when I was doing content for myself,

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but it’s a good metric to have in place when you hire a content
manager. Ten pieces of high-quality content per month is a
reasonable output for a full-time content manager.
This assumes they are highly-researched, detailed, long, and high-
impact posts. It should also give them a bit of time to work on more
strategic things like managing lead magnets and email sequences.
In our business, we have the content manager do six posts and
oversee four posts by external creators.

On Track For Traffic Goal (5% Growth)

Traffic should grow over time if your content is high quality. Google
will start ranking the site, people will start linking to it, and
influencers will start sharing it. Five percent monthly growth is
aggressive but achievable, particularly early on.

On Track For Email List Goal (5% Growth)

If you are using the content funnel you want to build an email list—
but not in a super aggressive way. If your traffic is growing by 5%,
you should reasonably expect to grow your email list by 5% as well.
This goal forces you to focus on working on lead magnets and email
as well as doing new content.

One Breakout Sharing Hit (50+ Tweets)

We like to see at least one post become a breakout success during
the month. We’ve defined a breakout hit as 50+ tweets. This is 50
real people sharing it. No auto-follower nonsense here. But look at
your own results and determine what represents a breakout hit for
you.
We regularly exceed this goal, but it’s good to keep track and
determine when content really is getting noticed. Ideally I’d love to
see all 10 posts get more than 50 tweets.

Content Strategy Update

It’s a good idea to review your content strategy every month and
ensure it’s all still making sense. Is it working in practice as well as it

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should in theory? Do you need to tweak some elements to further
cement your differentiated position?

Key Relationships Update

Revisit your list of key relationships and look at any events that
happened during the month. Did you get some good support from
one of them? Has one of them gone quiet? Look at Google Analytics
and see who is sending you traffic. Do you need to reach out and
thank someone who has supported you? Do you need to update the
list with new influencers? It pays to keep this list healthy and up-to-
date.

Key Audience Comments

It’s also good to take note of comments that prove your content is
resonating. Document a few of the best comments from the month
and note what makes them the most significant. Look out for
evidence that people are really relating to your content or really
using what you are putting out.

Content Promotion
We all dream about being able to create a piece of content and have
it automatically explode and go viral. This won’t happen to most
people, and even relatively successful blogs still have to spend some
time on content promotion.
Early on you might be a lot more actively involved, but you can taper
it off as you grow.
There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of things you can do
to promote your content. What I find works is a simple procedure
that an admin person or virtual assistant can follow and apply to all
content. Then, for special content, you might have extra rules that
you kick in for additional traction.
Here is a simple framework for promoting content. You can
download the process at http://contentmachine.com/resources,
and you can also check out a plethora of further resources related to
content promotion. The process comes with a “procedures”

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document and a template for you or your team to utilize in every
post. Here is a general description of what is included.

Lead Magnets
If you think it’s going to be a popular piece of content, you might
want to make a post-specific opt in. Remember: if you have set up
the monthly check for your admin team, it will be picked up in
Analytics anyway if it’s a big hit. But it doesn’t hurt to set this up
from the start for important evergreen topics.

Check The Retargeting Funnel Category

Remember the retargeting funnel. If you’ve set it up properly, it will
automatically retarget people with ads and emails if you post
content in certain categories. If this is a major piece of content, and
it’s based around your core topics, then remember to add it to the
necessary category to ensure people get retargeted.

Graphic Creation
Take a quote from the piece of content and find a related image. Use
Canva or WordSwag to create two different images (you can get the
image from the post or a background from these sites) with the
quote for the blog post.
In our business we have the admin team do this task and get
approval from the content manager on which image to use.
You can use these images on social media channels like Facebook or
Instagram.

Create Click to Tweet

We choose a quotable phrase from the post to use as a “Click to
Tweet”. You can create one by logging into Click to Tweet with your
Twitter account and following the steps to create the link. Make sure
you include a link to your post in the actual tweet. That’s a rookie
mistake I’ve made more than once!
We then add the “Click to Tweet” into the actual post in the
following format:
“Here is the body text for the tweet” CLICK TO TWEET THIS

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Mentions Tweets
If we have mentioned someone in the article, we want to draft some
“mentions tweets”. Log into your Twitter client of choice (I’d suggest
Twitter itself, or Hootsuite or Buffer) and schedule tweets with
three people per tweet like:
Mentions in [post name] on [main topic] [@guest1] [@guest2] and
[@guest3] [link]
I don’t like to overdo these, so I wouldn’t constantly do them for the
same person or do them for more than a few people for each post.

Scheduled Tweets
We also schedule a bunch of tweets for each piece of content. We
come up with a few different tweets based on the content and
manually post them at intervals after the content is published. We
use Hootsuite to schedule the tweets, but you can also use Buffer to
auto-schedule them.
I don’t like to be too aggressive with this, because I think it’s
annoying to see constant tweets about the same topic. I unfollow
most twitter accounts tweeting like that. Normally we will only have
three to four tweets for each piece of content, but in rare cases you
might have more, so I’ve provided for more below.
• Quotable from click to tweet: When the post is published
• Tweet 1: Four hours after the post time
• Tweet 2: Post time + one day and one hour
• Tweet 3: Post time + seven days and two hours
• Tweet 4: Post time + 14 days and three hours
• Tweet 5: Post time + eight hours
• Tweet 6: Post time + two days and nine hours
• Tweet 7: Post time + 11 days and eight hours
• Tweet 8: Post time + three days and two hours
• Tweet 9: Post time + 12 hours
• Tweet 10: Post time + five days and 30 minutes
• Tweet 11+: Auto-schedule (for any more tweets we
would just use the auto schedule feature)

Facebook Page

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We also post our articles to Facebook. Sometimes I will post it to my
personal account or to one of the groups which typically gets a lot
more traction. We also paste the images and links to the main WP
Curve Facebook page. While our actual page doesn’t get a huge
amount of traction, Facebook is still our number one social referrer,
so we don’t underestimate it.

Google Plus
We don’t have a Google+ page, only my personal account. That
means we can’t currently auto post to it from Hootsuite or Buffer, so
we do it manually.
• Visit Google+.
• Paste the link into the “Share what’s new” box. It should
automatically pick up the title and the image.
• Click Share.

Social Media Groups

If you are active in social media groups that allow sharing your own
content, you can also post the articles to those groups. Forums are
the same, although often forums will discourage members from
blatantly posting their own content.

Content Submission Sites

There are also lots of sites that exist solely for people to submit and
even “vote up” content. We keep a list of these sites, and when we do
new posts, we log in and add our content. It is always better to be a
good community member if it’s a community site, so make sure to
pay attention to other relevant pieces that are shared and upvote
them as well.

Anything Post-Specific
The promotion steps above are intended as general steps to take
with every piece of content. Often the best way to promote content
will relate specifically to the content itself. We’ve had quite a few
instances where we’ve done one small thing that has had a huge
impact on the success of a post.

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I wrote one post about Google Analytics reports, and we tweeted the
official Google Analytics account to let them know. The next thing
we knew, they tweeted it out, and the article quickly garnered more
than 800 shares and thousands of views.
A similar thing happened when we wrote an article about monthly
reports and included Buffer in the article. We tweeted them to let
them know, and they added it to the “Content Suggestions” section
in Buffer. The article ended up getting over 1,100 tweets—five times
more than any article I’ve ever done on the site.
There are also other types of content that I often feel much more
confident asking people to share. For example: we ran a content
marketing survey, and because it’s good for the industry, I had no
problem asking a bunch of big online influencers to share the
survey. We went from 18 completions to 51 completions in one day
when influencers like Neil Patel, Hiten Shah, and Rob Walling shared
the survey.

Paid Promotion
You can also use paid promotion to boost your content. A few simple
options are:
1. Paid Facebook ads. Either use the ultra simple”‘Boost
Post” or a more complex ads manager.
2. Paid Twitter promotion.
3. Outbrain recommended articles network.
It’s very difficult to determine the return on investment in paid
content advertising. We don’t do a lot of it, but it’s an easy way to
give something an extra boost.

Anything Else?
There are thousands of articles online dedicated to promoting
content. I suggest starting with a simple process like the one I’ve
presented here. Read up on some other options as well, and learn
what works for you.
The important part is: don’t forget to do it, and don’t be too
aggressive or spammy with your promotion methods. Keep in mind
that you will probably have to do more of this early on, then less as
you get more established.
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Build The Team
Ultimately, to build a long-term content strategy that grows and
prospers, you will have to build a content team. I’ve talked already
about the importance of administrative staff or virtual assistants in
a range of processes surrounding content marketing, but these are
the two essential general roles of an effective content team: a
Content Marketing Manager and Content Creators.

Content Marketing Manager

The Content Marketing Manager’s job is to oversee your entire
process of creating, publishing, and promoting content. In our
company the Content Marketing Manager is supported by a team of
admin staff and an external team of guest writers (Content
Creators).
The Content Marketing Manager writes some of the content using
the procedures in this book and also oversees the process of
working with the guest writers.
The ideal person pays strong attention to detail, is friendly and
personable with your audience, and can focus on creating long and
high-quality content based on your guidelines.
As I mentioned before, I set some simple goals for our Content
Marketing Manager:
1. 10 posts published per month.
2. One breakout hit of 50+ tweets per month.
3. A 5% growth in traffic each month.
4. A 5% growth in email opt in conversions.
Generally, our Content Marketing Manager will create six posts, and
guest writers will create four. However, from time to time I want
more attention given to things like lead magnets, so we will get
more guest writers to help out that month.
Our Content Marketing Manager also sends the weekly email, which
tells our audience about one piece of content for that week. We will
usually pick the one we think has maximum chance of getting
traction.
If your processes are structured well enough, then managing
content marketing in this way is a trainable skill. As long as the

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person has a good attitude and the ability to focus and produce high-
quality content, then you should be able to train up someone who’s
just getting started in the industry to do this role.

Content Creators
You also need people to create the content for you. Your Content
Marketing Manager will do some of it, and you or your team may do
some of it as well. I like to work with guest writers, because it’s easy
to scale up and down as we need more or less content.
The best way I’ve found to work with external content creators is by
first choosing high-quality writers and then presenting very clear
processes for working with you.
We’ve already been through using style guides for your content to
work with external writers. Generally the way we manage guest
writers is to have a pool of, say, six to eight regular writers and have
a set of ideas that they can run with. Some writers will take those
ideas, and some will come up with their own.
We use Trello to hold all of the ideas, and writers assign themselves
to an idea if they want to take it.

There are a lot of places you can find freelance writers to help out.
Our best method was finding people through our own audience and
people who have written guest posts for other blogs we like. Those
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people are often the best because they don’t need fundamental
training about what high-quality content is.
The main key here is to not accept content that doesn’t match your
standards. I’ve turned down content from some of my mentors that I
thought wasn’t high enough quality for our site. Sometimes we’ve
rewritten posts and turned them into co-written pieces if we
couldn’t get what we wanted out of the guest writer. In the end, it’s
your audience and your responsibility to make sure the high
standards are maintained.
Some guest writers will nail it straight away, and some won’t make
the cut. Keep an eye on who is getting traction and who isn’t.

Almost There
Well done—you are almost there! In the last chapter, I’ll quickly
summarize the lessons to set you on your path of content marketing
success.

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Epilogue: Where To Go From Here
Wherever you are in your content marketing journey, I hope you
have taken away something valuable from this book.
You are so lucky that you are smack bang in the middle of a time
when it’s possible to build a seven-figure business without spending
a cent on advertising. That’s pretty awesome, and the fact that your
competitors probably haven’t clued in on this chance yet is even
better.
Remember to value quality over quantity. Your content doesn’t have
to be Red-Bull-sideways-driving video level, but it has to be high
quality. You get there by understanding the fundamentals, playing to
your strengths, and being in tune with what your audience wants.
To build a real content machine you have to nail content quality,
differentiation, and scale. Constantly monitor your progress and
revisit your strategy if it’s not working. Something will stick if you
give it time and commit to the “content marketing leap of faith”.
Make sure there is a logical step between your content and your
business and don’t forget your business fundamentals. Great content
can’t help grow a fundamentally bad business.
Remember that things don’t scale without automation and
delegation. Use the resources and frameworks in this book to make
your life easier and build a content machine designed to scale. You
can download free documents from
http://contentmachine.com/resources on anything from generating
ideas and developing them into content items, all the way through to
writing style guidelines and content promotion lists.
Most of all, enjoy creating your content, telling your story, and
building your community. You are doing a good thing by helping
people and adding value to the world.

Be Part Of The 5% That Gets Shit Done

I’ve noticed one common trait in every successful entrepreneur I
know. It’s something I don’t see in the rest of the population, and it’s

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what makes them entrepreneurs. It’s their relentless focus on
delivering something. Getting shit done.
Ninety-five percent of people will happily read a book, maybe even
take notes, but they don’t measure themselves based on what they
deliver. They won’t change anything.
Five percent of people do. They are the entrepreneurs. It’s not
enough for them to read a book. It only matters when they deliver
something as a result. Maybe it’s implementing a new content
strategy, testing out a new type of article, or brainstorming some
new ideas for their blog.
If you DO something after reading this book, then I’ve succeeded. If
you don’t, then I’ve failed.
To make this happen, I’ve created a completely free Facebook group
called The 7 Day Startup Group. It’s filled with entrepreneurs and
content creators who are actively building their content machines.
We have thousands of members, and every day we discuss
strategies from my first book and this one, and we help each other
build our content machines and grow our businesses.
One of the biggest topics is how people are approaching social
media. It changes so often that including it in the book would have
made this content redundant in a few months. There are, instead,
daily discussions in the group on best practices for social media.
Type ‘7 Day Startup’ into Facebook, or visit
http://contentmachine.com/resources and join us in building your
content machine today. Tell us what one thing you actioned in the
book and become part of the 5% of entrepreneurial content
marketers who are getting shit done.

Do You Mind Helping?

I put a lot into this book, including quite a bit of my own money. If
you got something out of it, I would absolutely love it if you could let
the world know. There are two easy ways to do this.
First, if you could leave a review on Amazon, it really helps with
rankings and sales. You can do that by first visiting
http://contentmachine.com/amazon or searching for “Content

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Machine” on Amazon, and then writing a review. Even a quick note
is fine and certainly appreciated.
Second, you can help by sharing http://contentmachine.com with
friends or on social media with the hashtag #contentmachine. I like
to share things that add value for my audience when they pop up, so
I’ll be watching this hashtag closely on Twitter and Instagram.
I’d also love for you to stay in touch with me. The best ways to do so
are:
• Jump on my weekly email list at http://dannorris.me. I
read and reply to all of my emails.
• Friend or follow me on Facebook at
http://facebook.com/dannorrisinformly. I’ll accept all
friend requests until I reach the limit.
• Follow me on Twitter, Instagram or Periscope at
@thedannorris.

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Acknowledgements
Bret Thomson ran into me in the office and said “You should write
a book about content marketing”. Thanks for the idea Bret, here it is!
My co-founders are the reason I’ve been able to create the
businesses I have. Thanks to Alex (WP Curve), Luke (Helloify), and
Eddie and Govs (Black Hops Brewing).
Elisa Doucette and her team at Craft Your Content edited the book.
Believe me—that’s no easy task!
Derek Murphy designed the cover, and he also bought me a shirt
that says “Published Author”. Haha, what a legend. Check out
Derek’s work at CreativIndie Covers.
Chris O'Byrne from JETLAUNCH formatted the entire book for me
and made it sexy for Amazon.
Tom Morkes is a book-marketing and self-publishing legend and
all-around hustler and good bloke. He led the marketing for this
book and my first book and if you are reading this, he did a good job!
Kyle Gray, my Content Marketing Manager at WP Curve, has
contributed a lot of content to this book and helped me review and
improve it. He’s also been active in the 7 Day Startup Facebook
group and has implemented a lot of these ideas for WP Curve, as I’ve
written the book. Thanks Kyle, I really appreciate it, mate.
Thanks to all of the entrepreneurs and groups who have inspired me
over the years including: Brendon Sinclair, Adam Franklin, Toby
Jenkins, James Schramko, Chris Ducker, Neil Patel, Hiten Shah, Joe
Pulizzi, John Lee Dumas, Lewis Howes, James Altucher, Jason
Calacanis, Noah Kagan, Dan Andrews, Mark Manson, Elisa Doucette,
Kathryn Minshew, Alex Turnbull, Taylor Pearson, Tim Reid, Ross
Beard, Greg Ciotti, Clay Collins, Chris Hexton, Wade Foster, Marcus
Sheridan, Joel Gascoigne, Kevan Lee, Peep Laja, Justin Cooke and Joe
Magnotti, Jason Cohen, Rand Fishkin, Rob Walling, Josh Pigford, Tim
Conley, Jake Hower, Kevin Rogers, Seth Godin, Alex Blumburg,
Darren Rouse, Troy Dean, Rob Walling, Tim Ferriss, Pat Flynn, Mike
Taber, Belle Beth Cooper, Natalie Sisson, Erica Douglass, Sean Ellis,
James Farmer and the team at WPMU, Aaron Agius, Nikki Durkin,
Brian Casel, Ed Dale, Laura Roeder, Joanna and the team at

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CopyHackers, Matt, Joelle and the team at How to Build a
Rocketship, Andrew Warner, Trent Dyrsmid, Damian Thompson,
Gideon Shalwick, David Nihil, Kevin Rogers, Matt Ruby, Gary
Vaynerchuk, Marie Forleo, Ana Hoffman, Allan Branch, Robert
Gerrish and the team at Flying Solo, Corbett Barr and the team at
Fizzle, Brian and the team at CopyBlogger, Des and the team at
Intercom, Greg and the team at Help Scout, Georgina and the team at
Unbounce, Renee and Heather at Onboardly and Mat and Tas at
Startup Daily.
A special thanks to the members of the Facebook group who have
been an awesome support to me while putting this book together.
Finally, thank you for reading the book and undertaking a type of
marketing that adds value to the world.
Happy creating. :)

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 Bibliography
“2013 Search Engine Ranking Factors.” Moz. SEOmoz, Inc.
http://moz.com/search-ranking-factors.
Amazon. Amazon.com, Inc. http://Amazon.com.
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