My content’s predictable summer crash and how I’m overcoming it this year.

Takeaways from some research on content audits. Looking at your website and your competition’s content to assess what articles you need to be building out for your niche.

Today Content Refined turns 2.5 years old and Maddie has recently shared a BIG post about the journey!

Read about the entire journey here – Content Marketing Company or my Content Refined business review.

Plus they just had a video produced to help people learn more about Content Refined…

In this post I want to share 3 lessons I have learned from my position (idea identification, initial system architecture and assembling/stewarding the team).

Background:

In the summer of 2016 Maddie joined my team with the mandate of systematizing the content creation process for my portfolio of sites. She killed it!

From that effort we decided to launch Content Refined as a content marketing company.

I documented that launch when I announced it in this post – https://websiteincome.com/content-marketing-strategy-launch-business/

It grew incredibly well, achieving 10% week over week growth for the first few months.

There have certainly been a fair number of challenges/opportunities and in this post I hope to share from my perspective what the 3 most significant lessons were.

Lesson 1: Systems Can’t Replace People!

For everyone that reads this site they know I LOVE systems. Systematized business processes and systematic solutions to problems are core values for the business.

However, despite the engineers desire in me to build a system that doesn’t require great people to run it never happens. Great systems allow great people to execute better.

As I significantly shifted my focus in 2017 to adbank my core businesses needed to be managed and any business where there was a manager responsible for running the business did well. However any business that was solely dependent on a system went off the rails.

Maddie grew the business, Laura managed it while Maddie was on mat leave and I have had limited ongoing involvement. No system could have been built to adapt to the changed and achieved what the team has achieved!

Lesson 2: Churn is a Moral Sapingl!

Content Refined has been a great business with significant initial success and very solid longer term performance. But as with any recurring revenue business that is non-essential, churn is the enemy!

Trying to keep growth moving while fighting churn is a never ending battle and can be very unmotivating.

Sometimes even solid months feel like this…

For anyone who ever wants to dig more into recurring revenue business models this is the best article on any subject ever and it focuses on metrics – https://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-metrics-2/

Lesson 3: Focus on your Strengths in a Congruent way!

Congruent has been my favourite business word for awhile. Ensuring the people, value proposition and systems are all aligned congruently is critically important.

Building that congruence around the set of strengths that makes you unique and focusing on it has been where our biggest successes have come from and also, when we drifted, where our biggest failures occurred.

For Content Refined, the effort around data analysis (to determine what tools/metrics give our content the best predictive ability to perform well in Google) has been very rewarding. Trying to broaden and sell other services where our set of strengths didn’t align didn’t get off the ground in a significant way (for example, an email marketing service to existing clients).

Being accountable for results and not just words, as a content marketing company that uses data (and the thousands of articles we’ve already published) to continually refine what is working now, is what has Content Refined clients loving the service.

Summary

I hope my view on the 3 key lessons while stewarding the growth of Content Refined has been useful.

If you have any content marketing needs be sure to book a free call with Maddie or Laura… they often share some pretty incredible and specific to your site insights on those calls! You can book here if there is availability.

It’s good to have a few trusted keyword research tools under your belt.  Our teams at Content Refined are currently using two in conjunction: SECockpit by SwissMadeMarketing, and Ahrefs.  We started using Ahrefs a while ago when SECockpit stopped returning results in certain fields and niches (i.e. we stopped getting results for cbd oil related keywords).  Ahrefs has a ton of detail in their results, and I really like the way that they suggest alternatives.

So here are the basic steps for using Ahrefs to determine whether a keyword is competitive.  For our purposes, we are looking for a few key metrics:

• monthly search volume over 500
• keyword density under 30
• most of the other top competitors have a low domain authority

These are the tried and true metrics that Content Refined usually sticks to (unless there’s a unique site that needs something slightly different).  We’ve talked about this before in an article about SECockpit.  For that article the monthly search volume filter was set to ‘over 1000’.  We’ve since found that over 500 is a valuable metric with more opportunities for a lot of sites.

For Ahrefs Keyword Research, follow these steps in this order:

1. Go to ‘Keywords Explorer’ from the headings.
2. Search for the keyword. In this example, ‘ketamine infusion’.
3. Scroll down to ‘also rank for’ and click on the ‘view all #’.
4. Click on KD and put ’30’ in the “To” section. Click ‘Apply’.
5. Click on Volume and put ‘500’ in the “From” section. Click ‘Apply’.
6. Now you’ll have a list of keywords with good metrics.
7. Click on one that looks good, in this example, ‘ketamine infusion therapy’.
8. In the new page, scroll all the way down to the ‘SERP Overview’ section. There you’ll be able to see the Domain Rating (“DR”) of the top competitors’ websites. Make sure that the majority of these are under about 35. In the example ‘ketamine infusion therapy’, most of those DRs are low, which is good!
9. Determine whether this is a good keyword for your needs, and copy the details as needed into your keyword research plan.
10. Begin search again with a new keyword, as much as needed, to complete your keyword research.

I love finding new strategies and tricks for finding the best competitive keywords in any niche.  For Content Refined we also go back once or twice a year and run some data analysis to see which tools are working the best.  We did that last year around this time, and are currently in the process of running a new set of data analysis (I’ll be sure to share the findings for you guys).

Keep me updated about what tools and strategies you guys are currently using in the comments below!

I am excited to share a post like this… it has been awhile since I shared a detailed data driven tip on a new strategy that drives IMPRESSIVE results!

The team at ContentRefined has been doing some very impressive work lately performing what we are calling a Pareto^2 Content Upgrade and making the articles pop in terms of rankings and traffic.

This strategy is all about taking what is already working (your 20% of articles driving 80% of your sites traffic) and applying advanced tools/strategy at the right leverage points to make them perform even better!

The Pareto Principle asserts that only a “vital few” produce the majority.

The Pareto principle (also known as the 80/20 rule, the law of the vital few, or the principle of factor sparsity)^[1] states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

Here is the procedure ContentRefined uses to further apply this principle with content marketing and shared for you to use on your sites! As always if you want to do it yourself we show you the results and the exact steps… however, if you want to have the team at ContentRefined upgrade some of your most important articles then contact them here.

Book a call with Laura here and receive a free consultation/report to identify which of your pages are the right pages to apply the Pareto Upgrade to!

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