Imagine this.

You’ve bought yourself a gym membership and every day you turn up at the gym to get lean. You don’t just want any old physique, no, you want the popstar special.

Lean and trim, something that consistently receives those “ooooh’s” and “ahhhh’s”.

But after 12 months of turning up, it’s safe to say that the results have been lacklustre.

You put the work in (or at least you thought you did).

You turned up at the gym (there was never any doubt of that).

Yet your results just don’t show that popstar physique.

Why?

Simply put, there’s a big difference between turning up and putting the work in and actually doing the work in a way that’s going to deliver the results.

If you do it yourself then you have to figure things out:

• What workouts will I do?
• How many reps do I need?
• What should I eat?
• How many times should I go?
• How do I continue to motivate myself?

It’s not to say it’s impossible to make it work, but you’ve got to figure it all out.

It’s the “figuring things out” which takes far more of your time.

Now let’s repaint the scenario, Imagine if you’re working with a popstar trainer.

There’s no more guesswork.

You’re immediately doing a program that is known to have proven results and you’ll be guided all the way through it. (hell, you’ve probably got someone cooking your meals too).

The difference?

Well now with your popstar trainer you look in the mirror and you see it. Finally!

Rapidly the weight drops off.

You feel stronger, fitter, and faster.

There’s no thinking anymore, all you need to do is turn up because your popstar trainer is going to tell you exactly what to do and you just have to stick to it!

You’ve got momentum and the results are showing.

So what’s my point, how does this relate to content?

Because it’s no different.

Too many businesses are pushing content to their site (aka you’re turning up) because someone told them that content marketing was a necessity for their site to grow.

Yet they aren’t doing it in a way that’s going to actually get any results. (aka you’re lifting weights but not seeing any changes).

It’s going to be high effort, low reward all the way until the point where you’ll probably just give up and ignore it (aka no more gym time).

So if you’re pushing content, and you have been for a while, then I want you to step away from the keyboard and take a break for a second.

I’m here to be your content version of a popstar trainer.

Why Content Marketing Sucks (At Least for Now)

I don’t know about you but it’s safe to say that I have a love-hate relationship with content marketing.

I love it because I’ve seen proven examples, time and time again, of how content can be a huge impactor on my business and client’s revenue.

But on the other hand, it’s time-consuming and the process of coming up with everything:

You think about the topic.

You start writing it or working with someone to write it.

You spend time formatting it.

You spend time proofing it.

You spend time adjusting it to sound more correct.

You spend time publishing and marketing it.

It’s exhausting don’t you think?

I’m tired just at the thought of all of it.

So let’s talk about your common excuses.

I know you’ve been saving them and you’re just begging to say them to me.

Dealing With Your Own Excuses

Clients often hate content marketing (amirite?).

They love the thought of traffic flowing like waterfalls and their website and leads raining from the heavens but they just don’t want want to lift a finger to go and it.

It’s the whole gym mentality again, people want to look their best but exercising, eating well and working out every day is tough so sometimes it’s easier just to let it slide.

When it comes to content, business owners have little to no time for it and just bringing up the topic almost always ends up in the same conversation.

• Our business and industry are boring, nobody wants to read a blog on it.
• I don’t have time to write anything
• I don’t know what to write about
• We’ve tried content before and it has never worked.
• Everybody has written about it before, what else can I add?
• I’m a bad writer
• Do blogs even work anymore?

Just like working out, it’s a real mental game to work out every day but when you have the right program for you and the commitment then that’s when you really start to shine.

In fact, you might have noticed how it’s far easier to work out when you’re seeing results. You have momentum.

Fortunately for you, if you don’t like doing content yourself then you can hire someone to help.

Imagine being able to hire someone to left weights or get on the treadmill for you.

So you can make it easier for yourself but you’re not off the hook.

Why Content Marketing Actually Works

I’ll be the first to say that I’ve easily generated six figures worth of revenue (maybe seven!) from the content that I’ve created.

While it might not be something that generates leads every day, it’s costing me very little to create and maintain and therefore my returns are still significant.

It’s not set and forget, you need to maintain it.

But it provides an opportunity to invest time and money upfront in return for exponential growth in traffic, leads and sales down the road. Think about it like superannuation, your future self will thank you.

Here’s an example of one of our legal clients and the impact on their traffic with content marketing being executed successfully.

Content Marketing vs Paid Advertising

Content is different to paid traffic.

Paid traffic turns on immediately and can generate leads almost immediately too.

I’m a big fan of it.

But every lead is going to cost you a specific amount of money.

Content, on the other hand, starts off with an investment of time or money and then when executed effectively, traffic and sales will start to flow in the future.

I often see 2-3 months of latency before the content starts to get traffic and it can depend on how much you market it and the strength of your brand.

With content, the more traffic you get the more leads and sales you’ll potentially get too.

And because the leads are organic it means that your leads can become exponentially cheaper over time. It’s not that the lead is free, but the cost per lead will get significantly cheaper over time based on your initial investment.

For example, ten paid leads might cost $50 (just as an example).

It’s very hard to get it any cheaper than what the market is willing to pay for that lead. Trying to get $5 leads in Google Ads can be tough, you can only lower it so far.

With content, if spend $1000 on a content piece (just as an example), you could easily get 20 leads over the next 12 months making your cost per lead only $50 too.

The difference with content, when compared to paid, is that your content piece might rank well for the next few years so if you get 40 leads over two years then your cost per lead could be as low as $25.

If you get a huge influx of leads (because you followed this guide) then you’re well and truly in front.

Some may also add that organic leads are more informed and of higher quality simply because they’ve had to consume content before having an initial conversation.

I’ll let you decide on that.

Writing Content Yourself vs Hiring a Writer

Doing It Yourself

Doing it yourself can result in great content. You know your business better than anybody else right?

But not everybody is a great writer and it can take a lot of practice to get stronger at it.

Writing is also very time-consuming.

It’s likely that one article has taken me 10-15 hours or more of writing and this is actually my second time refreshing it.

Most business owners won’t see the value in spending their time that way unless they can see the impact on their revenue as I already have.

But it’s likely that you won’t see the latter (revenue) unless you’re able to drive real value into your articles. So it’s back to the chicken and the egg scenario.

The real advantage I see in doing content yourself is your advice is your experience. That’s the value that only you can provide which is going to resonate most with your prospective clients.

If you want content that generates leads and sales then you need to give them value and value typically comes through training and education and as a business owner you’re the one best positioned to do that.

An external writer will struggle because they simply don’t know the industry as you do.

Give your readers something they haven’t read before. Something they can take real value away with them. If you do that, they will have a much higher chance of converting.

It’s challenging, but not impossible, to have a writer doing that for you but let’s talk about the pros and cons of a writer.

Doing It With a Writer

Using a writer can be great.

They come up with the topics, they can research the article and its sub-topics and they can even write the entire piece for you. Happy days.

But it’s challenging to find good writers that also understand SEO.

Most of them will write and write and write while completely ignoring whether it’s actually an optimised piece of content.

Is it actually going to rank for anything? What’s the point of it if we aren’t considering that?

On the other hand, you’ll find plenty of writers that can create “SEO-optimised articles” but then you’ll see the other side.

Writers are far more concerned about SEO optimisation rather than writing something entertaining and of value to their audience.

What’s the point if your traffic just disappears the moment it reads your intro? What’s the benefit if your content is just regurgitating the thoughts of everyone else?

You’ll never get the chance to generate any revenue.

The large majority of the content I’ve seen written by external writers is a complete waste of time.  Google is easily able to weed out low-quality pieces and it will never see the light of day.

It’s just a regurgitated mess.

A writer doesn’t know the industry as you do. So it’s hard for them to deliver any value or to educate without just saying what everybody else has already said.

So how do you make content work with a writer?

Unfortunately, you or your team need to be involved. Sorry to bring the bad news.

How can you get them what they need quickly?

• Create short loom videos and show them how things work in your own words.
• Create voice memos, maybe on your way to work, and let them convert that into written words.
• Review their pieces, and change the wording when it’s incorrect or off the mark.
• Tell them about customer stories and conversations you’re having with your customers.
• Get any videos you’ve created transcribed into text for them to use.
• Proof and edit the content with them, making sure everyone is on the same page.
• Let them hear how you say things so they can write them in the same way.

The above are just some of the ways you can get the most out of your content writers.

Stand for Something

The problem with most content is that it’s highly generic.

You’re too scared about giving an opinion in case it reflects badly on the brand. Perhaps you haven’t even considered that your opinion is important?

But these days we’re living in an attention economy and if you’re not able to gain attention then don’t expect any new leads or sales from it.

Attention is gained by entertaining or educating in most cases and if you can get both of those then you’re onto something special.

I don’t want you to take the Andrew Tate or Kanye West approach.

Even though they are both great at getting the attention it often ends in a backlash from the media which you don’t want.

You just want to make sure that you stand for something. It’s time to stop sitting on the fence.

Start by thinking about what you dislike in your industry.

Tell it how it is.

Don’t try to sugarcoat it until it becomes some corporate fluff piece.

Think about what your prospective clients are consistently getting wrong.

And then make a stand about what you believe in and how you believe it needs to be done in order to get the desired outcome.

For example, I know for a fact that it’s nearly impossible to do well-written content for under $100 dollars. So if you’re getting articles written at this price then I’d really think you should stop.

This is what I call, making a statement.

From today onwards, you have one mission, stop repeating everything your competitors are saying and find your own voice.

Optimising Your Content – Agency vs Software

Creating the content is the first step, and optimising it is the second.

We now know that many writers don’t have a good handle on search optimisation.

We also know that most business owners don’t have a good handle on search optimisation.

So your only remaining choice is to use software or to work with an agency to drive higher levels of optimisation.

Using an Agency

To be honest, a lot of agencies don’t offer content mainly because of all the reasons I’ve given above.

Content is tough, it’s not something that’s easily productised to a high level and can often create a lot of back and forth between agency and client trying to get it right.

Agencies want high margins and that typically doesn’t involve content despite it being a huge part of search optimisation.

I will say that if you’re doing SEO and you’re not getting content then I think you should revisit your engagement. (see how I’m making a statement again)

Google wants quality and relevant content so if you’re not feeding it that then all the other areas of SEO are not going to help that much.

I’ll speak from my own perspective.

I’ve done hundreds to thousands of content pieces over the years.

I started off blogging to make affiliate income and that’s where I started learning more about the benefits of SEO.

So unlike most, I actually practised my craft. I found ways to achieve better ranks and get more traffic.

By the time I started my agency in 2013, I knew that my techniques would apply well to my clients.

The more I worked with clients the more I saw the huge impact it had on traffic, leads and sales. You’d be crazy not to do it which is why I never understand why agencies would ignore it.

I’ve worked with writers creating articles in the past, but most will never know how those articles rank.

I’ve worked with writers creating content, but most will never know how it performed.

It’s understanding how your work performs that helps you perfect the process for the future.

It’s no different to the “popstar personal training”.

They get to those positions because they’ve worked their way up from helping everyday people get fit to slowly transitioning to pop megastars.

You don’t lift a few weights in the gym to go and start training Katy Perry.

They know what works and they get hired to get results.

Working with a strong agency can be expensive but you know that you’ve got a much higher chance of seeing success. At the end of the day, content that doesn’t perform is just as expensive.

How many countless hours of your time and your team’s time need to go into content that doesn’t have any impact?

When you’ve “seen it” then it’s very easy to achieve the result again. If you’ve never seen impactful content then it’s easy to get stuck in your head leading you to make poor decisions.

Those are the benefits of using an agency for your content.

Using Software

When it comes to content I’m a big believer in using data and removing the guesswork.

If you want to write content based on outperforming existing content, this is where software like Surfer SEO comes into play. More on that shortly.

In the past, I’ve spent weeks writing 10,000-word mega posts only to see that they have very little impact on search results and traffic. At the end of the day, 10,000-word posts can be really hard to digest and Google knows this.

It’s why you can often see 2-3k posts ranking really well.

For a while there, everyone in the industry was preaching the “Skyscraper” strategy. The Skyscraper Technique is a link-building strategy where you find high-ranking content with tons of backlinks, capitalise on its weaknesses, and develop a much better piece of content.

It often results in these “mega post” articles resulting in 10,000 words of content or more.

They are very time-consuming and take forever to put together.

What a tool like Surfer SEO will help you do is optimise your content around what already performs well. So rather than doing a 10,000-word mega post, perhaps you take the average word count of 3,000 for the top 3 ranking pieces and then create your own article at 3,500 words.

Here’s a great example of a PixelRush piece where we are ranking in position #15 and our word count is 6197 words and the top pieces are only 2500.

This might provide justification to reduce your piece into something that’s more digestible.

Using software can also highlight which sections you need or which words you should mention most. Like anything, you need to be cautious not to keyword spam so don’t just take recommendations blindly.

With software, you can help align your content with high-ranking content pieces and therefore you’re not just creating content blindly but you’re using data to guide you towards developing a piece that will be highly effective for your business.

Speaking To The Right Audience

I’ve made this mistake in the past.

Where you’re creating content but it’s not aligned with any persona or audience.

For example, I’ve created articles like Phone Call Tracking With Google Tag Manager, which is a highly technical article on how to track phone calls through your website.

If I’m speaking to lawyers, then most lawyers may not even realise that they can track the performance of their website, therefore creating an article on this is probably not going to have any impact on my leads and sales.

In fact, it’ll probably attract the wrong type of visitors leaving me with content that gains visitors but never does anything more than that.

There’s always a bit of grey area when it comes to decisions like this but at the end of the day, you want to create content around topics that are crystal clear.

Lawyers are often some of the worst when it comes to content because they create highly complex articles with very technical terms and acronyms but forget that most of their target customers won’t be able to understand them.

If your readers can’t understand it then it doesn’t matter how many times you read it because you’ll never get any value from it. It’s also about as entertaining as watching paint dry.

Consider creating a target persona and listing out some of their pains so you can focus on that.

Make sure you’re laser-focused on who you’re speaking to, try to remove ambiguity with every article you post and ensure that everything is aligned with one of your persona’s.

Don’t post content just to inflate your own ego or to try to convey how smart you are, the only thing your persona cares about is themself and how they can get what they need by reading your content.

Making Your Content Easy To Digest

The human brain is naturally lazy.

It wants to take the quickest path to the outcome whenever it can.

You need to be careful with overloading your audience because trust me when they see a massive chunk of text with no images and huge paragraphs they are going to quickly put you into the too-hard basket.

If you have a thousand words of text smushed onto a page with no headings or titles then you’re again going to repel your visitors to a fast return to the Google search results.

So how do you make your content easy to digest?

Use short sentences to make content less overwhelming

Stop using long sentences, and switch to short and sharper paragraphs.

Don’t be afraid to use single sentences to your point across. The point of the article is not the number of words but to improve the value per word count.

At the end of the article go back through your article and figure out whether you can say the same but with fewer words.

Use headings to break up your content

Headings are great for SEO, while your main title may be optimised for your primary keyword you can use your subtitles to break up the article and optimise for your secondary keywords.

For example, if you focus on a car review of a Tesla electric car then your subheadings might be based on drive performance, interior, exterior, maintenance, costs and battery life.

Doing this helps Google to understand and optimise the article more easily and more importantly it helps your readers to find and digest the information that’s most important to them.

Use images to convey your points more easily

People are very visual, if you can convey your point in an image then it’s often far more effective than trying to convey the same point with hundreds of words.

It’s because they can digest it very quickly so it’s a mechanic that we’re all using every day.

Images can be used for value and entertainment purposes and at PixelRush you’ll see us using them in both ways. We often use gifs for entertainment value and then we use images to better convey examples of what we’re describing with our text.

Google is known to prefer and rank articles with more images and Surfer SEO will also compare the number of images in your article versus the number of images in competing pieces.

Your Content Doesn’t Have to Suck Anymore

So now you know why your content sucks but the great thing is that it doesn’t have to suck anymore.

Rather than going at it alone, endlessly posting for little to no impact.

You’ve got all the secrets you need to put your content into the spotlight. You don’t necessarily need an agency to help you do that.

If however, you’re someone that simply can’t find the time for content or you don’t have the resources to set up your pipeline then I totally get it.

Or you want to work with someone that has 10,000 hours of experience so that you don’t have to painstakingly learn it yourself.

Then an agency is probably the best next step for you.

If you’re looking for a search engine agency that takes content seriously or you simply want to align your content marketing efforts with proven processes and experience then reach out to PixelRush today.

We’ve optimised thousands of articles and we’ll happily optimise yours too!