Over the last few months we have published a LOT of GREAT content for customers in all industries at ContentRefined.com
Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could say with statistically significant confidence what metrics an article needed to hit in order to perform well on Google?
See Inside Our Content Marketing Continuous Improvement Process! (more…)
Sometimes, especially when you are a little hard headed like me, you need to be hit on the head a few times with an idea to have it finally sink in.
This post is about how one of those ideas is now going to be seeing the light of day and the process I have followed to think through the opportunity and the execution plan for a new project/business.
Don’t want to read everything… the new project is a Done For You Content Marketing Service
In the comments I would be VERY VERY interested in hearing people tear this plan apart!
But also since I am sharing so much info about my business plan so early in the process I would be interested in feedback on if that is either…
I have been being continually asked if, since I already have a team and process, can’t I just publish content onto someones money site for a fee?
I continually said NO WAY since I believed creating great content was a core process for any money site owner and thought people should do it for their own sites!
However, what changed my mind was several discussions with people who are looking to rapidly scale their portfolio and taking the long time (which it does take) to build the internal processes/procedures and team to create great content consistently would slow them down.
Plus, there were others I talked to where their “core competency/offering” they needed to own was something else such as physical products, SAAS offering or even for someone building content sites their focus was on keyword research and monetization not on running a content team.
In short people needed a service that could act as their in house end-end content marketing team that could easily plug into newly acquired sites or existing businesses where the owners/managers wanted to focus on priorities other than content marketing!
Our new project is ContentRefined.com – Content Marketing Refined!
We will take care of all your content marketing needs from keyword research to post publishing and promotion.
We act as if we were your in house content marketing team.
Have a Look at ContentRefined.com
note – some limited and discounted beta testers are now welcome
Currently the services offerings seem to be focused on producing content with little focus on driving the results for the business associated with that content. Many boutique content marketing agencies charge an incredible amount for publishing fairly basic content.
What I mean is most businesses come from a content first background and try to make the marketing portion of content marketing work. For us we come from the marketing side of content marketing and our core strengths are in the keyword research and promotion compared to our competition who want to focus on $/word.
With our extreme (as you will see below) focus on systematically verifying high quality articles we will be able to produce the best content but will crush our competition in terms of creating content that delivers results.
Content Marketing Companies:
As always I like to share EVERYTHING and this post is a little different where normally I don’t like to share everything so early in the process but I believe that if I am not feeling a little uncomfortable I am probably not pushing hard enough. So to that end I have decided to share almost everything VERY early in the process!
At a recent conference (RhodiumWeekend) a great presenter, very successful website portfolio manager and long-time reader of AuthorityWebsiteIncome (Daniel) showed a 1 page business model canvas that I really liked and had the opportunity to apply it here.
More Information About the Business Model Canvas – Click Here
Unfair / Competitive Advantage – Highly systematized business with talented/dedicated north American business manager providing a productized service that is nicely integrated into my existing audience and productized services AuthorityWebsiteIncome.com, LightningRank.com and BrandBuilders.io. Marketing focused first vs other content focused first content marketing services.
Following another of my favourite business books (LeanStartup) I have my list of variables/hypothesis to validate to determine how viable this business will be…
Next I have another set of variables to test and validate with the next round of beta-testers
3. We will be able to scale without losing margin
4. Customer acquisition costs will be known and stable
5. Churn rate for customers will be manageable
If you are interested in being a beta tester you can checkout the service here.
This aspect of setting up a project/business has been often overlooked by me and I have paid for it!
All my projects that have had the most success when it comes to running smoothly and realizing their full potential the most important part has been setting up the business consistent with EMyth Revisited.
Having a highly systematized business and with a clear structure on who sits in 3 key positions (Entrepreneur, Manager and Technician) has been the key for a project to realize its full potential.
For ContentRefined.com the team is clear…
Maddie will be the key person for this business. For those of you used to interacting with the very organized Kelley from LightningRank.com Maddie will fill a similar role for ContentRefined.com
Maddie will be every clients favorite person! She manages the team and each clients orders. Whether it is a one-off question or detailed explanation as to why an article title was selected she is your go-to resource.
Transparency on how we do our work is going to be key for our business and below is exactly the process that Maddie/I have developed to execute this business.
For any of my services I like to share everything I possibly can to show you how we are going to go about delivering on what we said we were.
Plus, for those that want to execute content marketing in house I hope that what we share below will be of some help!
Below is just a sampling of the procedures the team has in place.
Here is my procedure:
| 1. I post a writing job on Upwork |
| 2. On upwork I generally post a job with the following specifications: 1. Writer for ____+ word article 2. Writer must be native English speaker 3. Looking for bids around 7.50/article |
| 3. Once the Job Posting is posted on upwork, I hire 3-5 top applicants without an interview within the fist 24 hours What I look for in a Top applicant 1. Native English Speaker (only metric “required”) 2. Good cover letter 3. High job success score 4. The more hours worked, the better |
| 4. I Assign each new hire 2 articles using the Writing Instructions Template that I created for new writers |
| 5. Once articles are received, I review articles for quality assessment 1. Assess grammar and language capabilities 2. Copy and paste text of the article in Copyscape to make sure there is no plagiarism |
| 6. Once quality has been assessed, I use my judgment in hiring/firing decisions If the article is full of grammar and punctuation issues, I will end the contract.If the language is way too simple and it doesn’t seem like the writer is completely fluent in English, I will end the contract |
| 7. As soon as the new writer is on board I will assign them batches of articles continuously as articles are returned to me. Once writers are committed to you, you then have the responsibility of keeping them busy. |
I mentioned above that once you have some writers that are committed to you, you then have the responsibility of keeping them busy. Let me elaborate on that.
My process is simple:
Google Forms and and Google Sheets are amazing resources and also an integral part of the onboarding process for new clients for this service. I have been finding success with the following procedure:
Keyword research is probably the most difficult part of this process. If the Client doesn’t give you any specifications, it might also take a long time to do it well as you’ll have to read through their site to see if they already have content around words of interest. This can take a long time! To make it easier on me, I’ve trained up a couple of my best Virtual Assistants for this task. Below is the step-by-step guide I send them to make sure I’m getting the best titles and the best keywords
| Step: | Action: |
| 1 | Log into the Keyword Research Platform of choice. (lately this has been SECockpit) |
| 2 | Plug in their “Seed” Keyword (*Seed keywords are simply general keywords you can plug into keyword research tools to find more specific, long-tail keywords) |
| 3 | Make sure that the filters on the seed keyword search include appended prepended and words in between,  (Note – this is one of the big strengths of SECockpit and its ability to generate more keyword ideas within the tool) |
| 4 | Once the seed Keyword has loaded all of its associated the long tail keywords, look for the following metricsMonthly Search Volume : Over 1000 Competitiveness: 30 and under Or for very low competition with some lower traffic o Traffic > 100 o Competitiveness < 20 |
| 5 | Once a Long Tail Keyword that meets the metrics has been identified click on the long tail keyword to view the Analytics (SERP competition) |
| 6 | On this page look at the competitors for this long tail keyword |
| 7 | Check to see if the top 10 articles ranking for this long tail keyword are similar to the company site trying to rank for the keyword (if all ecommerce and your site is a content site that is not a great sign) |
| 8 | Check the Page Authority, the Domain Authority and the Linking. Ideally a good Long Tail Keyword would have results with both PA and DA under 20. Example of a good table Example of a bad table: |
| 9 | If competitors are in the same league as your site, and SERP table looks good, create a Post Title with that Long Tail Keyword included within the title (ideally at the start of the title). Copyblogger has great resources for creating great headlines. |
| 10 | Once Post title is created, add the new title to the Content Management Sheet |
I mentioned above that I have article templates that I like to send out to writers to provide them with a “shell” of what the article is expected to look like. The more guidance they have, the better and more accurate to expectations the article is going to be!
NOTE – This level of guidance only applies after the writer has been on boarded.
For this service we offer 5 different types of articles. Click on each for the template!
My procedure is the following:
These are the instructions I will send my editor to ensure consistency:
| Step: | Action: |
| 1 | When editor receives the article from the writer, the editor does a very quick review |
| 2 | Once the article has gone through it’s preliminary review, the editor must log into http://www.copyscape.com/ |
| 3 | Once on on copyscape.com the editor must copy and paste sections of the article one by one into the text box and check for plagirism |
| 4 | If the text comes back with results on copyscape, the Editor must notify the Portfolio Manager immediately, and notify which sections were plagiarized |
| 5 | If no plagiarism is found, Editor must got to app.grammarly.com and paste the entire article in the text box |
| 6 | Grammarly will suggest grammar edits. Editor is to go through the Grammarly suggestions and edit text where he or she see fit |
| 7 | Once the text has been edited, Editor must open their Hemingway editor and paste the edited text in the text box |
| 8 | The editor will click on the sidebar and check “edit” to get a report of the article
Enter your text here… Enter your text here… |
| 9 | Once the editor has pasted the text and clicked Edit, the editor much check that the word count matches the requested amount and that the “readability” of the article is a grade 5-8 level. |
| 10 | Once all the metrics are met, the Editor must take the edited text and create a new word document titles “ArticleTitle_Edited” Example ”bestworksocks_Edited” |
| 11 | Now that the article is unqiue, grammatically correct and verified to be readable the article goes through MarketMuse to ensure the article covers the topic in more depth than any competitor article (Neil Patel has a great article on using MarketMuse here) |
| 12 | Once the new edited version has been made, the editor must send the final edited copy back to the portfolio manager and update the Content Management sheet (Sheet 3) with the date of completion |
With the Content Refined Service, we also add value to your article by making sure that the graphic design piece is nailed down. I actually have a virtual graphic designer who does this for me. I’ll simply send off your headings and top to this designer and I’ll receive custom headings with cool images to go with your article!
Example Image
Once the editor is done with the article, they will send it back to the manager. The content manager will review the edited article to make sure it reads well and then send it to the publisher to be published on the site. The article can stay in draft mode until the client has reviewed and given us the green light to publish!
Anytime we start mapping out a new process it can be a very fun process and this is no different, below is an image taken Saturday night at 10pm as I was working on mapping out the new model.
This new project will be Maddie’s #1 focus and I will continue to push it to become the best/only service online that can deliver and promote high quality content consistently!
If interested in being involved in the next round of beta-testing there are a select number of spots open at discounted pricing but you will be able to signup for a wait list when we get sold-out. Checkout ContentRefined.com.
Have a Look at ContentRefined.com
The main purpose of this post is to put myself out there revealing an uncomfortable amount of what should be proprietary data to get feedback on the model and idea. So please…
Getting high quality articles written for a very low cost is a key strength for my online business. In this article and for the first time I share exactly how I get high quality articles created cheaply. Websites having good content has always been important and is only getting more important according to this Matt Cutts interview.
If you are looking for a complete done for you content marketing solution for any of your businesses I highly recommend checking out ContentRefined.com.
Content Refined provides a complete end-end content marketing service from Keyword Research to Content Publishing!
[thrive_link color=’blue’ link=’http://www.contentrefined.com/’ target=’_blank’ size=’medium’ align=’aligncenter’]Complete Content Marketing Solution![/thrive_link]
Writing quality content is key to any authority websites success. Google has been clear that they are looking for content that adds value and not just a bunch of words on a page. (more…)
