A Content Strategy (CS1)

I am going to be really honest when I say, I hate first thinking about content strategies when starting a new online venture. It comes dangerously close to being SEO, and I absolutely hate SEO!

Fortunately, a content strategy does not need to have too much to do with SEO, and I would find it very hard to build anything without one. A content strategy is basically a process that gives you two fundamental things:

1) An idea and a vision of what the user is going to read, see and experience on your website (a marketing/sales funnel)

2) An early indication of the work you are going to have put in.

As usual, I am trying to keep this process simple and short. The more time I put into “strategy, planning, analysis, research etc” the less time I actually spend doing anything that is going to make me money!

Step 1: Identify a Core Problem

Having selected a niche, I now want to find one of the biggest, most common problems that is experienced by people. I call this the “Core problem”. It is effectively a problem that many people are seeking to solve, and its often a very popular talking point among people who are interested in this niche.

An example of a core problem would be “Getting a six pack” in the weight loss World. It seems almost universal that anyone looking to improve their body or lose weight wants to attain a six-pack. You don’t have to spend more than 5 minutes looking into this niche to realize that this problem alone is a huge micro-niche worth many multiple millions of dollars.

To find a core problem in your niche (and there are usually more than one in each niche) simply follow the next 5 steps:

1) Head on over to the Google Keyword tool and do some good old fashioned keyword research. Is there a set of keywords that keep appearing in your searches? any recurring themes? Dig a little deeper until you feel like you might be getting close to something.

2) Head on over to some big forums in your niche. Simply “Google” your keywords and then put the word “forum” after them. This should bring up a list of popular, related forums. You could also do a search on Big Boards (a directory of niche forums).

Go to the forums, and read through some of the most popular forum posts. To do this quickly, in a lot of forums, you can simply click on a link at the top that says “Number of views” or “number of replies”. Once clicking this, it should display the forum discussions with the most discussed and viewed discussions at the top of the page.

Quickly scan through the titles of those topics, click into the discussions and look at the kinds of questions being asked.

3) Visit popular niche blogs (again, a Google Blog search) can help with this. Look at some of the most popular blog posts, look at their posts that are attracting a lot of comments and notice the kinds of questions being asked again.

4) Visit the clickbank marketplace, and type in the keywords of your niche. Visit some of the sales pages there, and note down some of the problems that the products promise to solve. If there are a few problems that seem to be mentioned on several sales pages, again, you are on your way to discovering some of your niche’s core problems.

5) Repeat the above step on Amazon, looking at books and magazines in your niche. See what claims they make, and what issues they claim to address. Notice the themes, take notes.

Once you have done all this, it should be VERY easy to identify a number of core problems people in your niche are experiencing.

Step 2: Offer a Core Solution

You want to create some content around this problem, and provide a workable solution to your readers. You want to give them this advice for free. If you are a blogger, this might be in the form of an awesome post that sucks visitors towards your blog! Because I am going to be using an email/newsletter format, I am going to be writing a short report that I will be giving away as a bonus when people sign up to my free newsletter.

The report doesn’t have to be massive, but as a minimum, I would be looking at around about 12 pages of solid content.

Step 3: Write Some Relationship Content

Using the information and market research you did when choosing a niche and finding core problems, you want to write 5-7 pieces of content. For this part of the exercise , you want to make sure that the content is solid and your readers get value from it.

Because I am focussing on email marketing, I will be using these 5-7 mini-articles in my auto-response sequence. I will also be including promotions of affiliate products and any producst i create at the end of these emails. Out of 7 of these messages, I will probably promote around 3 times.

Whilst I want to make money as soon as possible, I also want to build a relationship with my audience. This free content is designed to do exactly that as it’s primary objective.

Step 4: Deploy a Full Website

After completing the 4 steps above, I will have created a free report and some follow-up content which I can use to promote products. I would setup a single-page website (with that single page being a squeeze page) and drive traffic to it using free and paid traffic methods.

Once that side of the venture is up and running, I would then be looking to expand the amount of content I publish and establish a much larger “web presence”. It is at this point that I would create a full website, with about, home, contact, blog and product pages. I would be posting new content to the blog, and using some re-written versions of the email content to get me started.

I will build the blog/website with social media functionality (so people can like, tweet or stumbleupon my posts) and also make sure I have commenting features setup to increase reader engagement with the content.

I would then use my new and relatively small email list to generate the initial comments and “buzz” on the blog by sending out an email announcing the launch of my new website.

Step 5: Deploy Social Media Assets

I hate social media with a passion. But I could never neglect social media as a marketing tool. I would setup a Facebook and Twitter profile for the site, and devote a little time to trying to gather a following there. I would also set it up so new blog content automatically posted on these profiles.

Until I was making good money, and I could afford to spare the time, I wouldn’t put any more work into my social media presence.

Conclusion

The above five steps roughly outline the approach I am going to be taking with this case study and similar projects. I am starting very simply with a single, basic sales funnel which is based on giving away great content to my subscribers. From there, I would then begin to grow my brand and web presence by building a website, social media profiles and posting more content that my readers will enjoy.

This rough outline will provide me with an adequate platform from which to launch my business from.

I hope this has been helpful to some of you starting out building your first email lists and online businesses. If you have any questions at all, or you want to make your own suggestions, then please, please, please share them in the comments section below. I’ll talk to you soon.