If you’re writing blog content but no one’s reading it, it’s not because your content sucks. It’s because most of the content marketing advice out there is bad.
It’s designed for big companies with huge teams who can just throw crap at the wall until something works:
- ‘Publish every day’
- ‘Target every keyword’
- ‘Just write more, more, more’…
Yuck.
Not only is this bad advice, but if you’re a small business or Solopreneur, you don’t have unlimited time and resources. Because let’s be honest, you’re usually writing content in the evenings or weekends, so you need tactics that are going to work, even when it’s one person doing this part-time.
Which is why in this guide, I’m going to share my own personal content marketing tips that I’ve learned over the last 12 years of doing this professionally.
I cut out all the stuff that doesn’t work, so we can focus on the things that have the most impact for the least amount of time.
With that out of the way, let’s get into these tips…
Tip #1. Don’t worry about ‘The Death of Content’
So let’s clear this up right away.
Every single year that I’ve been writing content online, without fail, there have been people saying that content marketing is dying:
Seriously, every single year it’s been one thing or another, and it’s still here. The people who claim it are usually those who are trying to position themselves and their competing service:
- Social media,
- FB groups
- FB ads,
- etc.
Trust me on this, content isn’t dying.
However, it’s worth addressing the elephant in the room because right now, a lot of people are freaking out about AI Search and traffic going down.
And yes, there have been dips, and I’ll cover how to deal with them in a second. But first, I want you to stop and breathe and realize everything is going to be ok.
Yes, it’s still worth writing content.
Here’s why…
First off, all those large AI search tools and companies? They’re all currently hiring content marketers and paying them ridiculous amounts of money…
$225k a year!
Why would they be focused on growing their own organic traffic with blog content if they thought this channel was ending?
Secondly, the traffic being lost to AI Search is not a bad thing…
Most of the keywords and articles that are seeing traffic drops are on the topics that wouldn’t really convert anyway.
For example
In the past, a lot of big companies would focus on the highest-volume keywords around super basic topics and searches. All stuff at the top of the funnel and the start of the customer journey.
Stuff like “What is content marketing”:
480,000 people search for that, so I understand the appeal of wanting to target it.
But the thing is, with these new tools, the user can find out the information in just a sentence or two right there in the search window, so they’re not clicking through to those websites, because they got what they needed:
And because these are high-volume terms that used to send them a lot of traffic, these sites are freaking out because now they’ve lost all those clicks.
But let’s be honest…
The people who search for these things are so far removed and not ready to be a customer yet anyway. (No one is ready to buy a content marketing service who doesn’t even know what content marketing means yet, so no big loss).
The thing is, even though this traffic is down for these terms, it’s actually a good thing.
Why?
Well, because of how intuitive these tools are to use, people’s search methods are changing. Rather than ask a question and click through, nowadays they usually ask something basic, get the answer in the AI results, and THEN ask follow-up questions.
This is important because these follow-ups then lead them to answers where they want to click through to content.
For example
Let’s say you ask ‘what is content marketing is’, you see the answer, and then see all the advice on managing writing teams or advice saying you should write hundreds of posts… Both things that you don’t want to do for your situation.
In the past, they might have ended here. But now with AI Search, they can refine their questions.
So then you ask ‘how to do content marketing as a small business’, and it starts recommending guides specific to this, and they find resources and click through:
That’s a huge game-changer, because although we’re losing front-end, top-of-funnel type traffic, the people are moving closer to becoming a customer much faster.
A lot of the aha moments and trying to figure out what they need gets accelerated, and so they come into your world quicker. Especially if your content aligns with the questions they’ve been narrowing down.
However, there’s one more reason not to worry about the naysayers around content, and that’s the fact that…
Even if Google died tomorrow, I would still write content!
Why?
Because content marketing is much more than just a traffic generation channel. The traffic is just a bonus thanks to how search engines work.
The real value of content is being able to communicate with your audience at scale without you being there. You write something once, and then every new visitor can read it and move towards becoming a lead and a customer.
If you think back to that job posting for Anthropic, they said the exact same thing:
They’re looking for someone who understands that great content has the potential to both educate and drive adoption across the entire pipeline. Which is corporate speak for it turns readers into customers.
They don’t even mention traffic goals as a requirement, because they know that’s not the main benefit!
Once you realize this, it totally changes how you think about content, because new traffic channels will pop up over time, and you can simply send people to your content from whatever the new shiny thing is.
The trick though is to:
- Write good content
- Around topics that your audience cares about
So with that in mind, how do we know what to write about?
Tip #2. Write for your audience and customers first, and for algorithms 2nd
I once had someone reach out to me for advice, because their blog was getting millions of visits a month, but struggling to make $10k a month in sales…
The problem was they were focused on the wrong types of content.
So whats the solution?
Well, the trick is to turn the common advice upside down, and use my ‘Build it Backwards™’ strategy.
How the ‘Build it Backwards™’ content strategy works
In marketing, we have 3 levels of customer awareness, called TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU.
These names represent the 3 layers in a marketing funnel:
The top of the funnel represents everyone in the audience who might become a customer. They are just now aware of a problem but might not even understand what the problem is, let alone the cause.
These are the people searching for ‘What is content marketing’ etc.
Most companies focus on content topics at this end because they will have the largest volume of audience. However, this is a bad starting position because:
- These terms are incredibly competitive to rank for
- And we’ve already seen that basic stuff like this is now getting answered by AI Search tools
Also, the people who do find you for this are so far away from being a customer. It’s kind of pointless until you have everything else in place.
That’s why I recommend everyone starts by creating content at the bottom of the funnel first.
- This is content for people who are just a step or two away from becoming a customer.
- It’s far less competitive to rank for
- And it helps make you sales
We build it backwards to everyone else.
We start at the bottom and then move up to MOFU and TOFU content after. This also means that as more traffic starts to come in, our site is far more effective at turning people into customers.
Pretty smart right?
So let’s break this down further…
Start with the BOFU
So what content should you create first?
Simple!
Go ahead and open up a Google Doc and then:
- Make a list of what it is that you actually do for customers.
- Make a note of all the steps and features and why you do them.
- Be sure to also include the problems it solves and the benefits.
These are usually all the conversations you have before someone becomes a customer, or sticking points or problems they often have.
And just like that, you now have a list of topics that you can write, and then send that content to people instead of you having to repeat yourself any more.
Easy right?
We can also take this a step further with 2 other types of posts to help make the sale.
Make other people the hero
Case studies can help make more sales, because they’re proof that what you’re talking about works. However, most people write them wrong.
How?
Well they’re usually super short, and say what they did, and talk all about themselves. But people don’t care about you. They care about themselves and their own needs.
That’s why when you write case studies, you should make one of your customers the hero of the story.
Make it all about them:
- Who they are,
- What life was like before,
- What life is like now,
- The exact steps you took to help them,
- And any problems along the way
This not only shows your expertise, but it helps people resonate because they see themselves in the customer.
How?
Well, they think: ‘If it works for those people who are similar to me and my needs, then it should work for me too, right?’
Do this and you’ll make far more sales from people who are not sure if your thing will work for them.
However, there’s another article you can write to make easy sales though, and that’s comparison guides.
Help them decide
There are a lot of people out there who like to make sure they are making the best choice.
So before they decide to buy, they weigh up the options and will often search for guides such as your offer vs a competitor’s offer.
Hardly anyone writes these guides, and it’s crazy because they do 2 awesome things:
- You can help people decide to choose you if they were not sure
- Or, they can be read by people who are looking at competitors but didn’t know about you. Suddenly your offer is now one of the options that they might choose
You can literally steal competitor’s sales out from under them like this!
Better still?
These types of guides are almost never competitive to rank for. So if one competitor has a HEAP of traffic, you might find thousands of people searching for alternatives to them at the last minute.
You write it, rank for it overnight, and boom – easy sales!
Just make sure when you write them though:
- To be honest
- Say who you are right for and not right for
- And recommend the competitor if they do something better that’s not your focus
For the people who don’t want those features that you’re missing, they will see you as honest and buy from you.
It’s such an easy win.
If you write all of these, you’ll now make far more sales.
The next step is to start writing middle-of-the-funnel content that gets more searches, so you can scale up your traffic.
Write MOFU content once the sales content is in place
There’s usually some overlap between this content and stuff you’ve already done, but it’s a step or so removed.
For example
Let’s say that you’re an SEO agency and you offer SEO services.
Your bottom-of-funnel content that you planned earlier might be around different link-building techniques and which work best. This then leads them to the technique you use and offer as a service.
However, people that are in the middle of the funnel (MOFU) might trying to figure out how to get more traffic to their website.
They don’t know what the options are solutions are yet, and may not even know what SEO is fully. So you need to write this ‘How to get traffic’ guide, and then share how SEO works, so it then leads them further down to becoming a customer.
Make sense?
Now, you could just write how-to guides on all this, and that’s fine. But, there’s also a few sneaky tricks you can use to stand out even further and help make people want to buy from you.
So let’s break these down.
Plant your flag in the sand
A really great way to get people to trust you is to help them become aware of a problem they might not even know about yet. Especially if you can do this by providing a solution that’s contrarian to common knowledge.
For example
One of my very first articles was the one below. My argument is that more content is not the answer when you are time poor:
Fun fact?
My very first blog subscriber was James Clear. The atomic Habits guy – all because of this article above.
So why does this work?
- Well first off it makes you stand out because you’re different to the rest
- It stands out even more if you help them understand an issue they didn’t realize was the root of the problem. It’s like you have this forbidden knowledge and experience
Smart right?
You can make yourself seem even smarter with the next type of post.
Use the Big Mac Method
If you think about it, the Big Mac isn’t that different from any other burger out there. It’s bread, beef, lettuce, cheese, and Big Mac sauce:
A lot of restaurants offer something similar, but the Big Mac stands out.
Why?
Because they’ve given it a unique name, so it sticks in people’s brains.
That’s exactly what I did with my Build it Backwards content strategy earlier.
So why do this?
Well a few reasons:
- It helps you understand it,
- But it also helps me stand out and shows that I have a level of expertise beyond just knowing a thing, because I also named the thing
Such a simple concept, but it elevates me above the average person who has similar skills, services, and offers. And you can do the same thing with your methods and stand out with your audience.
You can even take it a step further by giving big macs to your peers, and then leverage their audience so you are seen as an even bigger expert in your space…
Raise your perceived expertise
It’s really easy to do. Basically, you pick a company or celebrity that your ideal customer knows, and then share your advice as if they were a client.
For example
One of my other ‘Big Macs’ is something I call a hyper-specific offer.
Basically it’s a technique to capture emails from blog content.
Super simple in concept – we just create lead magnets that are unique to an article and designed to be the next step the reader wants to take once they finish reading.
Here’s a screenshot of one below:
If you want to see it in action, you can check it out on this article here.
So why care about this?
Well:
- The average email opt-in rate is just 2%, so only 2 out of 100 readers become an email subscriber
- But my technique averages around 15%
- And I’ve had some articles convert as high as 83%. That means 83 out of 100 readers subscribed…
I’ll cover this more later, but let’s say that I pick a celebrity and share how they could use this particular ‘Big Mac Method’.
In this case, I could pick Backlinko. It’s a marketing blog that talks about SEO, and a lot of their audience would probably be my ideal customer:
I could then write an article about how Backlinko could use Hyper Specific Offers (my big mac) to get more leads. Then Backlinkos audience would see this, and then see me as a peer on a similar level.
It’s super simple also. All I have to do is say how my method would impact them.
So in this case I could put their website into a tool like ahrefs. Then I would find 3 blog posts that tie into their offers and calculate how much traffic they get:
So that’s:
4,783 + 3,400 + 1,783 for a total of 9,966 visits per month.
If I do the math of this traffic, with my optin rate of 15%, then that’s 1,494 subscribers a month or 18,000 a year that they are missing out on. Just from those 3 articles.
So I write the post and I share how the method works, give some examples, show the math and boom – the audience now sees how this could impact even the biggest sites in the space, and now they want to try it themselves.
It’s a really easy way to build expertise almost overnight.
So whats next?
Now we can still do other how to guides etc, but these will really help us stand out as leaders in our space.
Only at this point would I ever start targeting the TOFU type content, and if I’m totally honest…. I would probably skip it.
Why?
Because I would be better off doing a few other things in this guide first, or rinse and repeat and create BOFU and MOFU content topics for new offers.
That all being said, your content still needs to be good for this to work, so let’s cover that next.
Tip #3. Quality comes from systems
The difference between good content and bad, all comes down to systems. Because when you have a system, you can avoid the common mistakes that make writing hard.
So here’s my system.
Open up a Google Doc open, and then write the following on it
- Headline (What they want)
- Intro (BAB)
- Body section
- Conclusion + CTA
Space that all out. These are the main parts of the article. Now we’re going to fill out some of these sections before we write the post.
For example
Let’s say that I want to write an article on how to do guest posting. I’ll walk through the steps here alongside you as I fill this out.
For the headline, just write what the topic is for now. This is so you can see it and keep yourself on track
Next we want to do a rough outline of the intro, but, we’re not trying to do it perfectly because writing intros is hard. If you try and write them great from scratch, you’ll spend hours.
So instead, go ahead and write the follow and answer these questions:
- Before (Who is the audience for this article and what is the problem?)
- After (Where do they want to be after this problem is solved?)
- Bridge (How will you help them get there?)
Just fill out the parts in the brackets with your own answers. This will then help you write a better intro later on, and its further clarification of what this post needs to include.
Next we want to do the body section. This makes up 90% of the article.
Go ahead and:
- Write down any ideas of what you want to cover here.
- Then, go to Google and search for other content on the topic and see if there’s anything these posts cover that you miss and think you should add.
- Also, is there anything they all recommend, that you don’t this can help you point out where the problem is for people
Once you’ve added all these notes to the body section, rearrange them into a logical order.
Then it’s as simple as filling this out.
Start writing out the body section, and do it as if you’re talking to a friend. This way your writing will sound normal and you’ll cover the things they need.
As you go through, add links to any reference that will help them understand (maybe your offers or other content or 3rd party websites). Add images also to help them understand easier, and so it breaks up all the text.
Then finally, tighten up your intro using the BAB notes you had before.
By leaving the intro to the end like this, it’s much easier to write, as you can tailor it to what’s actually inside the article. (Rather than trying to come up with it in advance and being stuck).
Smart eh?
However, even when the content is good we still need to do one more thing…
Tip #4. Change the relationship and capture the lead
Not everyone will buy from you right away because they need multiple touch points so that they can trust you and understand their issues.
The problem of course is that most people visit a website and never come back, so we need to collect their email. That way we can send them other content and get the sale later on.
My number #1 system for this is my Hyper Specific Offer method that I mentioned earlier.
It takes a little more time and effort, because you’re making bonuses for almost all your articles, but it means you’ll collect far more leads.
Not only that, but this has a far bigger impact than doubling or even tripling your traffic.
So let me break this down with some quick math:
- Assuming you actually capture the email (which most people don’t), then your average optin rate is 2%. So if you get 100 visitors, 2 become email subscribers that you can sell to later.
- Now if you use my HSO method, you might convert at 15%. So for 100 visitors, 15 would become a subscriber
Now that doesn’t seem like much of a big deal. All we did was move from 2 to 15. But to get the same number of leads by increasing traffic, you would need to increase it by 700%
What do you think is easier and will impact sales more?
Putting in a little bit more effort for each article to convert into leads, or to increase your traffic by 700%?
It’s the leads method obviously!
Absolutely every blog should be doing this, but especially Solopreneurs and small businesses that don’t get a lot of traffic. Because this way you can still convert and make sales.
Better still, as you scale up traffic later on, you’ll be far more effective and not waste all those visitors.
For example
Let’s say that our article gets 1,000 visitors a month instead:
- If we stay at 2% we only get 20 leads
- But at 15% we get 150 leads…
Definitely give this a try. It can be the biggest ROI you do this year.
Speaking of traffic though, let’s cover how to get it for free.
Tip #5. SEO is easy when you do this
SEO is actually fairly simple.
- You need to tick a few boxes and do a few things to each article so that Google understands what your page is about. This way it knows when to recommend it
- Then you need to get websites to link your site. Because Google pretty much always recommends the page with the most links as the best option, meaning it gets most of the free traffic
Easy right?
So how do you get backlinks?
Well I’ll be honest, there’s a whole heap of methods, but these are the best ones for Solopreneurs:
- Journalist links. There are websites you can check out each day, where journalists are looking for sources for articles they are writing. You find one that’s relevant, write a good reply, and get referenced in their article
- Guest posts. You write an article for another person’s website and add a link to yourself in the article
- Podcast guest links. You pitch podcasts on you being a guest, and they link to you from their website in the show notes
The good thing about those last 2 methods also is that it gets it in front of new audiences.(Distribution of content that converts is never a bad thing).
But anyways, back to SEO.
Podcast links are my favourite, simply because it only takes around 30 minutes to be a guest on a podcast, and the links from these can be insanely strong.
I once did a huge push and get on 90 shows in 3 months, and those backlinks helped me outrank sites that were 5 years old.
My site?
It was brand new at the time without a single backlink! So yeah, they work pretty well…
There is one other technique you can also do, but it’s very time consuming.
However, if it pays off, you can get hundreds of links with one article.
Basically you write an article that I call a Data Backed guide. It’s a unique post where you’ve collected data insights on a topic that you know that journalists in your space like to talk about, and will reference and link to.
For example
I recently wrote one of these for my client, where I researched 344 cities in the US to find the best locations to get started in a tech career. (They do tech training).
It was all freely available information, but no one had done the legwork before to figure all this out.
Not only that, but it also had some interesting findings because believe it or not, Alabama is a better place to get started in tech than Silicon Valley. More money left over after costs, lower competition, etc.
Anyways, reporters read this and then started featuring it in stories:
All links you would never be able to get otherwise.
Now, my audience might not care about the topic. But all those backlinks help to raise up the overall SEO strength of the website, which then makes all other posts rank slightly higher.
This technique can take a while to pay off, and I wouldn’t do it before the other methods, but it does work. It also gets more people’s audiences to come across to you which is always a good thing!
Speaking of which…
Tip #6. Repurpose
I’m not a huge fan of republishing your content on other platforms, simply because it can be time consuming and you’re better off building your own platform.
Your blog and email list is your owned audience.
That being said, there is one platform I recommend all content marketer use and that’s YouTube.
Why?
Well 2 reasons:
- YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine after Google. So if you rank for a topic on there then you can get free traffic
- YouTube also recommends content to people before it ranks. If the videos are good quality, then it will keep being shown to more and more people for free. So you get a chance at huge audience of the right people
Not bad right?
You can also recommend the same Hyper Specific Offers in your videos, so that you then get leads from people who click across.
If you write good content then you pretty much have a video script also. Just add images and some basic edits and you’re done.
Like all things though, you need to make sure its working for you…
Tip #7. What gets measured gets managed!
If you want to achieve something, you need to figure out the important metrics, and then measure them and improve.
For example
If you want to lose weight, you have to weigh yourself each week and track what food you eat. But when it comes to Content Marketing, I find its best to measure your actions and what you can control.
For me that means tracking 4 things:
- Am I publishing articles on the right things?
- Am I making a video each week of those articles
- Are people opting into my HSOs?
- Are people purchasing my training programs?
If I track those 4 things, I know I’ll hit all my goals. Because it means I’m doing the right things, but also focusing on measuring and improving the main areas:
- If optin rates are down I can improve or fix whats broken
- If sales are down, I can figure out why and tweak the offers
- If traffic is down, I can update and improve content, etc
- And as long as I’m tracking content done, I know the audience will grow
But if you don’t know if it’s working, you won’t do the work.
You need that tracking, measuring feedback loop if you want to succeed at anything. Especially content marketing because it’s a long term play. The longer you do it the more it pays off.
So what's next?
Hopefully these content marketing tips have helped clear up a few common problems you’ve been having, and you can now get past them.
I’ve linked to a bunch of different resources and guides throughout the post so be sure to check them out, and then get writing. Content creation is the highest ROI channel that you can focus your time on, so get to work!