Content Marketing For Small Businesses

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With that out of the way, let’s get into this article…

Why traditional Content Marketing is wrong for Solopreneurs and small businesses

To understand how this method I’m about to share works – and why the traditional method doesn’t, we need to look at the difference between burrito vans and shopping malls.

I don’t know what it’s like where you live, but in my town the mall is still an incredibly busy place, with literally thousands of people visiting them every single day.

However, even though these places are super busy, you still end up seeing restaurants in the food court that close down.

Why is this?

Simply because large volumes of traffic on it’s own, are not a guarantee of business success!

The mall might be packed but it’s competitive and some of the restaurants in there are huge chain stores with large funding and cheap prices, so it’s hard to compete against them.

The problem of course is that most people approach content marketing from this same perspective of ‘bigger is better’, and that’s why the struggle.

They try to target the super competitive search keywords with the largest traffic, and let’s be honest – they’re insanely hard to win.

The thing is you can pretty much ignore them and still succeed.

In fact, you can have a tenth of these bigger businesses traffic and make far more money – as long as you’re smart about the content that you create.

For example

Take the burrito van/ taco truck:

• It can be run by a single person
• Mexican food is super tasty
• And you can make a lot of sales each day – simply by driving to an office space during the lunch hour rush

All thanks to the low competition and the hungry audience.

And that there is how this system works…

Content Marketing plan for Solopreneurs and small businesses

In this strategy, we’re going to ignore those larger, super competitive keywords that are insanely hard to rank (for now anyway).

And instead, we’re going to focus on creating content that hits the easy wins at the bottom of the funnel first:

• The content that people search for just before they’re about to buy to help them decide, so we can steal competitors sales
• Content that helps remove objections and doubts to further increase sales
• Product searches that fit your offer that are not insanely competitive
• The content that helps your audience solve problems and shares how your product can help them out even further

Why focus on this?

2 reasons:

1. It’s less competitive and easy to rank for almost immediately 
2. Each of these type of articles are designed to make more sales fast.

Basically very easy wins that can make a big difference.

After that, we work our way backwards up the funnel and create the more competitive content as our blog grows and can compete.

So easy wins now – harder wins later when we have a chance of ranking for them.

Even better – because of this approach, it’s a result we can achieve as a solopreneur or small business – because the content all has a direct impact.

So let’s walk through the steps…

Step #1. Show up for what you sell

It seems obvious but we always want to show up in Google when someone searches for what our product or service is.

Why?

Simply because if someone is searching for it then they are very close to buying – and we don’t want to miss out on those easy sales.

However, sometimes the search terms for what we sell can be super competitive (especially if you’re selling worldwide).

The solution is simple.

Rather than target these more difficult and competitive ‘Mall’ keywords, we can instead take our burrito van approach and target keywords that are smaller in search volume, but far easier to rank for, but with still high intent.

(It’s better to show up #1 for 40 high intent searches a month, then try to target a keyword with 4,000 searches and rank so far down the results we never get a single click. The easier term is guaranteed more sales).

So what are we looking for?

Well, usually these keywords are normally long-tail terms that are 3 or 4 words vs a single word. However, we need to make sure they still tie into our offer.

For example

I have a course on how to use ChatGPT as an AI writing assistant.

It helps me create content faster and easier, and it saves me around 210 hours per year on my writing and editing work.

However, if I tried to rank for the keyword ‘AI writing tool’, I would probably never see traffic from it because I would be so far down the list of results.

That would suck, so let’s get more specific and see what other options are available.

So if I head across to ahrefs SEO tool and search for potential keywords, I find this option: ‘chatgpt ai writing assistant’

Sure the traffic is low at 150 searches a month, but the competition is almost none existent – meaning if I optimize my page for this, then I can rank for it almost immediately.

(Also, low traffic terms like this tend to get a lot more traffic than ahrefs estimates. I’ve seen keywords with estimated traffic of zero drive thousands of visits).

Better still, my course fits this insanely well. It literally teaches you how to use ChatGPT as an AI writing assistant, so I would be crazy not to target this with my sales page.

Remember: The long tail ‘burrito van’ term needs to still be relevant to your page. So this one here is a perfect fit for me and my offer.

All I have to do now is optimize my sales page for this term, and it will rank and get sales.

That being said, I’ll get far more traffic and sales if I can rank #1. The solution is to be able to build backlinks to my website.

Step #2. Build some easy backlinks

Even with the growth in AI search, backlinks to your site are still important. (AI search uses them to verify the quality of the results it shares). Not only that, but we also want to rank high in traditional search engines, and Google still uses them as trust factors and how to position the results.

So how do we get backlinks?

Well, there are 3 methods that I like to use, (out of the multiple options out there), simply because I think they’re the best ROI for your efforts.

Two of these options take a little time so we’ll add them into this content plan later on when they fit best. However, one of them we can start now BEFORE we even write content and start getting links.

In fact, it only takes around 5 minutes per day to get done.

Here’s how it works:

Journalists and reporters are constantly writing new content for their websites and clients. However, they don’t want to just copy and paste the same information that everyone else has.

They want to stand out and give unique details, and the easiest way for them to do this, is to speak to experts on topics and include quotes from them inside the post.

(I say ‘expert’ but honestly they’re just looking for someone with a particular level of experience or knowledge that’s more than the average person on the streets).

Why do we care?

Simply because when they feature an experts quote, they also link to that experts website. So, if we can be featured like this, we can get backlinks from sites who might never have gotten links from before.

I got a backlink once from a site that just wanted to know what Entrepreneurs were planning for holidays over winter break. So nothing super relevant, however these links all add up.

That one particular link might not send me traffic on its own, but it helps every page on my website rank higher and get more traffic so it compounds.

So how do we get these links?

Well, because it would take hours and hours for a reporter to reach out to everyone, they instead list their articles on sites like Qwoted and HelpAB2BWriter.

So let’s break these down.

The requests look like this.

Each pitch has:

• The article topic
• The type of people they are looking to comment on this (based on experience etc)
• The specific question they want answered
• And the website that the article is going to be featured on (so you can check out how good the backlink will be)

All you have to do is reply and answer their question.

Easy right?

You won’t get accepted for all of them, but when you do the link is totally worth 5 minutes of your time.

This one was a DR91 link!

If you don’t know what that means, backlinks are ranked from 0 to 100 in ‘power’ levels.

However, its not a straight line difference – its a curve. So that DR91 link is the same as getting literally thousands of links from small blogs.

Now you can see why I recommend this method. You can do it daily – even if you don’t currently have much content on your site.

• Just login each day
• Checkout the requests
• Reply to ones that are relevant
• Build up links over time

The key to getting accepted is to put some effort into the reply and not use AI to write it for you. Reporters can see this a mile away and you’ll just get removed – possibly from the entire site.

But take a little effort and see HUGE rewards.

So now that you have some links coming in, let’s start writing some content…

Step #3. Get more sales with comparison guides

You will have seen these out when searching the internet sopping at some point in your life:

• Best product for X
• X product vs Y
• Etc

Why write this content first?

Well, for a few reasons…

Reason #1.

The only people who ever search for this type of content, are people about to make a purchase. they just want to make some final checks before they do. So SUPER high sales intent.

Reason #2.

Not only that though, but these types of articles are usually insanely easy to rank for. Normally it’s just affiliate marketing blogs that write this type of post because they know how well they work.

Reason #3.

You can steal sales from competitors with this content.

For example

If someone is looking at a product and they then search for ‘X product alternatives’, this means they are not 100% sure this offer is right for them.

If you rank for this and can get your offer in front of them you can get that sale.

Reason #4.

And because some of these competitors are huge, you can actually get hundreds of visits a month from these posts. All from people who are 5 minutes away from purchasing…

For example

If we go back to my AI assisted writing course from earlier, I can do a quick search for competing offers such as AI writing tools.

From there, I can make a list of each major competitor and then do some basic searches to see if people are looking for comparison type posts.

Here we can see one of these competitors.

There are a big brand with around 30,000 searches a month for their company name. However, around 200 people per month are looking for an alternative option, and that keyword is insanely easy to rank for.

We could easily write this guide and get traffic.

In fact, the current #1 guide for this search gets around 400 visits a month and its an affiliate site – not a competitor.

How valuable do you think this could be for sales?

Well, on average, we could expect around 2-5% of traffic to become a customer almost right away – possibly higher due to the high buying intent.

That’s worth thousands of dollars per year on its own. Now imagine we do that for every major competitor…

(In 5 minutes of research I found 15 easy articles I could rank for and get sales from like this. I’ll share a case study later on how well this worked out for me).

But can you see the value here?

They’re not even that hard to write:

• List the prices
• List the features
• Give context
• And be honest!

If you point out a feature they have and you don’t and explain why, then that’s a huge game changer.

For example

With my course, it’s not a one-click done for you solution. The reason being is that one-click content like this is generally garbage and you spend hours trying to edit them into something readable. Users of these tools know this and they want a solution that works.

So in my program, I teach them how to use AI properly to edit as you go. It cuts down time like you wouldn’t believe, but it also bypasses a lot more AI quality and control issues.

So although I’m technically ‘missing’ a feature that the others have – I can instead position this as why its a benefit. For the people who want this, this is the thing that will make them buy.

And for the people who don’t want this – they will recommend it to friends who are looking for this option because you were honest about who your offer is for and who it fits.

Simple!

Step #4. Get more sales and convert people who are on the fence

Assuming you’ve already made some sales, the next content you should look at writing are customer case studies.

These work great for converting people who want what you sell – but are not quite sure it can work for them.

They think their situation is unique or different, but if you can show them other customers who are in similar situations, they will start to believe it can work for them, and then they’ll buy.

However, you need to be strategic about what you write in these because most people write case studies wrong and then can’t understand why they don’t work.

It can’t just be 2 paragraphs and then a result of what you did. It needs to tell a narrative instead and focus on the customer being the hero of the story and not you.

You need to cover:

• Who is the customer?
• What happened?
• What was their life like before?
• What is it like now?
• What did they try and how did it pay off?
• What did they try in the past that didn’t work?

Including these points adds emotional connection and context. It helps the reader see themselves in the story and connect with their situation. And if it works for the person they are reading about, it can work for them too.

When you write like this you can make sales like crazy. I once got over $3 million dollars in client requests in 2 weeks from a single case study like this – it was insane.

So get these done next and see more sales from the traffic you’re already getting.

That being said, there’s another article we can write that help improve sales even more.

Step #5. Remove objections

So a quick recap.

Our content so far has been around either helping people make a choice or seeing that it can work for them.

Some people though will have specific objection that they need to get past. Not price or anything – more to do with a belief or a problem.

The good news is we can create content around this to help move them towards becoming a customer.

This is the first step into our MOFO or middle of funnel content. We’re creating assets that appeal to people who could be a customer but are one step removed. If they solve this thing, they’ll then be looking to buy a solution.

So how do we solve this?

Well, there’s a few ways. Some sales people will take an objection and then try to reframe it as a positive. That’s kind of like what we’re doing with the comparison guides where we’re framing our differences as selling points.

For the people who already had the issue and tried the other solution – this helps us stand out as what they were looking for.

But for the people who haven’t figured that out yet, we can instead bring it up in advance before they ever buy. We call this pre-framing. 

We  bring up the issue on purpose to remove it – increasing our chances they then use that to help them decide.

For example

If we go back to my AI writing assistant course, then most peoples objections when it comes to AI content are:

• Most AI content is bad
• Good AI content is either edited for hours afterwards into something readable which is a huge pain in the ass
• Or its written by expensive tools that start out around $250 per month

So how can I tie these into an article? Well, I wont bore you with all the details but one of the best solutions to the low quality content with a cheap tool is not to edit after the fact. It’s to edit as you go and instead direct the tool like its a helpful intern helping you write. Its faster and higher quality output.

So how could I frame this into a post?

Well, the majority of users don’t about this. However, they do know about ‘humanizing’ content. Which is basically where you do edits to make it appear like a human wrote it.

So if I wrote a guide on how to humanize content with different tips, and then positioned the best tip as to not even bother with humanzing after but instead to learn how steer and direct the AI better and show them how this works – then they would be really interested.

Suddenly they wouldn’t be looking for $250 one click solutions, but for ways to learn how to do this for themself. Which would then be the perfect point to link my course.

See how it works?

If I tried to convince them of this after the fact they wouldn’t be interested. But by finding the common objection and common solution, I can now weave my offer into it and pre-frame and remove their objections in advance.

Smart eh? It’s actually one of the most powerful sales techniques you can use.

Better still, these types of posts tend to have higher search volume then the BOFU content we’ve done so far. So now we can strategically scale our content and target easy to win keywords that help make us more sales.

Speaking of scaling up traffic…

Step #6. Create MOFU how to content

How to guides are the content marketers best friend. They are easy to write, rank fairly well, collect backlinks, and can capture leads like crazy.

So what do we write about?

Ideally we want to create content that ties into your offer in some way, so that you can lead people to it. So it’s less about focusing on a specific objection, and instead finding a tie in.

For example

Onpage SEO is incredibly important to learn as content marketers. Basically, it’s learning how to tick the boxes on your article so Google understands it so that it can rank.

So I could easily write a guide on how to do this, and walk them through each step.

And for a tie in, I could explain how you can do most of this with ChatGPT if you have the right prompts, and show them how.

(Which is one the steps in my AI writing course).

If they see the value in this, they’ll start to wonder what else they can improve and make easier, and that starts them down the path to potentially becoming a customer.

We can increase our chances even better if we take the next step…

Step #7. Capture leads with a Hyper Specific Next Step Offer

Email marketing is one of the most cost effective marketing channels out there.

Better still, it can do it all on automation. Once someone is a subscriber, you can then send them content to help them become a customer over time.

Now, there are a lot of ways to collect emails but my favourite method is one I created, called an HSO or Hyper Specific Next Step Offer.

Basically its a logical lead magnet. You give them something they want in exchange for their email address. But you make it super specific to that situation.

For example

If we look at the article idea in the last step, I talked to them about onpage SEO prompts and showed them how they work.

At this point they want to try it out right? So if I offered them that prompt in exchange for an email, how many people do you think would opt in?

Way more than you would think.

You see the average email optin rate is around 2%. But with HSO’s, I’ve seen conversion rate as low as 15% and as high as 83%.

Crazy right? But it makes sense because we’re giving them exactly what they want.

Better still, it’s so easy to do this with how to guides because you’re showing them how to do something. So if you help them then take action, the take rate is massive.

As a solopreneur or small business this method is insanely powerful.

Why?

Well let’s say you have an article that gets 1,000 visits a month.

If you used the usual lead capture methods you might only get 2% which would be 200 subscribers.

On the low end with an HSO you could be looking at 1,800 subscribers instead!

And that’s just for one article. Do this for every how to guide and you’re making your website far more efficient at converting all visitors into sales on automation. (While also building trust and proving your expertise with all the assets you’re giving them).

This is how you can earn even more than large traffic blogs.

Do this well and you can even run paid traffic to content at a profit, simply because you can capture emails and make sales for cheap. I used to do this and make $22 back for every $1 spent, promoting blog posts on Facebook.

For now though, let’s look at the final step which is to get even more organic traffic from building better backlinks…

Step #8. Build backlinks (not ask)

So I mentioned earlier that there are 3 methods that I like to use to get backlinks.

The first method is only 5 minutes per day but it doesn’t have a 100% success rate. And sometimes, we need backlinks from larger sites, so what can we do.

It’s simple. We can go out and create those links ourselves.

We go to those websites we want a link from and create content for them. Either a guest post or if they have a podcast, we pitch them to be a guest on the show.

Its more effort to do these methods but we can not only get a link, but we can write the content and drive traffic also.

You’ll be surprised at how well this can work.

For example

When I first launched this blog, I wanted to build a lot of backlinks and get my name out there.

However, because I was just one person my time and effort were limited, so I wanted to try and get the biggest ROI for my efforts.

I realized that if I could get on podcasts, I could build trust and rive traffic, while also getting a backlink from the shows I was on.

So I pitched 100 shows, and in 3 months I was on 90 different podcasts. (Which is a HUGE success rate for outreach btw).

It worked so well, that I took my blog from brand new DR zero to DR 50 in just 90 days!

For most websites that can take 4-5 years. I did it in 3 months. Better still, the rest of my content ranked and I made sales from the traffic that came across after listening.

This is why I love podcast linkbuilding.

Better still, it only takes around 30-45 minutes to be a guest on a show, compared to a few hours writing a guest post.

Not bad right!

So what’s next?

So as you can see, this path is the easiest way to scale up and make sales as a one person or small blog.

You can simply rinse and repeat as you go, prioritizing those BOFU topics and then any MOFU content, and rinsing and repeating steps 6-8 until you can compete against more competitive terms and finally go for that top of funnel content if you want.

My favourite part about this entire process is by being strategic like this, you’ll see sales far faster. You just have to write that content.

So what are you waiting for? Get started now!