Where should you be getting your research from

Social media research – gold standard is using a tool like BuzzSumo to see what’s being shared (and linked to) and using that info to inform your content. Whether that means going after similar topics, doing outreach to the people who are doing all the sharing, or just following a similar content format or headline format. But you can do much of the same stuff on the social media networks themselves directly, it’s just harder.

I assume competitor research would be to stake out what’s working for them and do it better?

Competitive research – yeah what they’re doing and do it better, or different but similar, or complementary/related.

The significance of the mean for the word count

Can you help me understand the significance of the mean for the word count? When I look at these graphs I take away that maybe I want to aim for 1,500 words, and tap out after 3k unless it’s really adding content. Am I looking at this right? The mean makes me think I should perhaps be aiming for 1,500-2,500. I’m not sure how to interpret this I’d love some insight.

I think more important than the specific length numbers is just the general observation that more successful bloggers publish longer content. I don’t think it’s because they shoot for a specific length so much as because they try to make their content really good and thorough.

For example this study is my most successful blog post so far and it’s 4,700 words. That’s much longer than the higher-income average but I wasn’t paying attention to word count at all; I just wanted to make it really good. There’s basically no fluff to it — I even removed a section because I thought it watered the whole thing down too much.

Overall my recommendation would be that whenever you write a blog post, check how it’s been covered before and try to make yours a lot better than that. Usually that will mean making it longer and more in-depth, but not always.

One of my biggest takeaways

One of my biggest takeaways from is the importance of knowing your customer / audience really well and delivering content for those specific people rather than trying to appeal to everyone.

We have different sub-niches and segments.

For example, people that are interested in high yield dividend investing are going to be COMPLETELY different from people interested in short term Options trades which are going to be completely different from people looking for cheap Marijuana stocks that are set to explode.

And really paying attention to open rates, CTR, and the behavior of your buyers and subscribers is paramount to changing your messaging around based on what they are reacting best to.

I’ll tell you that after a DECADE in this industry I am almost always wrong (still) in my assumptions of what content will or will not resonate.

Usually I write a few different versions of things to test.

Almost always, like clockwork, it’s the version I dislike the most that I have the least hope for that ends up doing the best.

And more often than not, it’s the most hyperbolic, most click-baity, lowest hanging fruit version — the version I imagine they’ve “seen enough of” or that “is too saturated” or “doesn’t work anymore” or that is “too salesy / cheesy.”

I have no idea why I’m still so surprised by it.

It’s the art of BS really. I’ve come across those “who reads that stuff???” people many times and they’ye been at high marketing/content marketing positions for a lot of years. Said the same thing and even got pretty offensive.

If you give people value they will read it and connect eith you (some books have 600+ pages and people still read it right?). If you give them bad content, they will notice right away it’s not worth their attention and leave. Don’t waste their time.

I guess doing things at this higher level needs a lot more understanding and knowledge of a ton of fields/skills. So when you propose something like this to people that are ignorant, you’re basically shaking their tree so they may fall down from it.

I’ve known for a while that +15 years of experience for A LOT of people means they’ve been able to gather 1 year of experience and just repeat that for 15 years.

Another solution is to find people that GET IT and work with them and never let go of them 🙂

I work with a lot of financial publishers

I work with a lot of financial publishers. Some are HUGE in that they drive over $400 million or more in sales every year, some of them are tiny little operations, but they still draw in upwards of $10 to $30 million a year.

People get VERY confused when they see the websites of these companies — boring, bland.

Then they see they have ZERO social media presence and think they must be unprofitable.

And they blow a gasket when they see people like me writing 10,000 word sales pages, 2 hour long webinars, 1.5 hour long VSLs, emails that are 2,000 words long and more.

Because “Who reads that stuff?!?!”

Then they’ll accuse me of lying when I say that this same content is solely responsible for driving $125,000 in sales in just ONE day.

It comes down to…

List building
Good content
LONG content
Great sales copywriting

Capture leads, nurture leads, convert leads, upsell leads.

Can you go into a little bit more detail about what these financial publishers are creating and selling? Are they creating financial advice, guidance, content, analysis etc., and selling that as a product or service?

They basically sell research, analysis, ideas, and model portfolios.

One client for example has started a “420 Millionaire’s Club” with the goal of turning $100,000 into $1 million in 3 years (that’s the goal anyway).

It’s a real money portfolio, which means he has put $100,000 of his actual money into this portfolio and subscribers can follow along, receive information about his methodology, buy and sell alerts, new companies he is looking to add or drop.

It’s doing quite well, even with the marijuana sector taking a gnarly dip at the end of 2018 he’s up a little over 30% since starting about 7 or 8 months ago (so about $30,000).

Another one would be a different guy and it’s centered on dividend investing and income stocks.

That one isn’t a real money portfolio, but it is a tracked portfolio where people can see how all recommendations are going, all currently held gains and all closed P/L going back to the inception of the service over 8 years ago.

And of course then get a monthly newsletter, buy/sell alerts, analysis reports, ideas, and more.

But I mean that’s basically the whole industry in a nutshell.

Various investment niches from day trading, to swing trading, penny stocks, growth stocks, income stocks, Options strategies, sector-specific investing, and all sorts of niches and strategies.

But it basically comes down to subscribing for analysis, ideas, alerts, and model portfolios.

Many investors subscribe to a variety of financial newsletter services that are in competition and like to see the competing analysis on specific stocks for example to help them decide on what they want to do.

I know that’s the case for Uranium right now. A lot of people have the idea that Uranium is about to go on a tear, but of you’re on the fence and you’re not sure how to expose yourself to the market, you might sign up for two or three energy investing services and see how they are handling it and what their recommendations are.

Others are looking for literal trade alerts and that’s it. Like…this guy has a good track record, he’s up 200% overall for the last 3 years, I just want to buy what he’s buying and sell what he’s selling.

What’s the most successful platform? Your own website or a content discovery platform like medium or both (stubs on medium with a link to your own domain)?

The best advice I’ve typically seen is that it’s best to initially publish on your own site and just syndicate it on Medium or elsewhere. I believe Medium lets you add a rel=”canonical” tag linking back to your own site — those aren’t 100% reliable but in general it should allow you to keep the organic search rankings for yourself while still capturing some readership from Medium.

Your 80%-finished book sounds like a valuable asset for sure. If I were you I’d create a separate post to ask about it so you’ll get more answers, but if it’s really good you could try giving away part of it and selling the rest. ProductHunt may be a good promotional avenue.

Keep in mind that it will probably lose value the longer you wait to publish it, as practices and technologies evolve.

There’s currently a shift/change in platform use, a lot of people are going back to making their own (either wordpress, jamstack/static sites are gonna be big,…) for various reasons.

The main one I saw is “control” over a lot of things the platforms can’t deliver. Platforms tend to change things around so it’s not best for a content writer. Even privacy, ownership of content etc., legal things, are issues as well).

Medium for example is “one for all”, ok to start but once you grow you want to add maybe newsletter forms… and even change the layout to fit the content you make better. Any platform can easily limit you once your audience grows.

You can still use Medium though, but it’s used to fuel your own site.

I conducted a study of 1,117 content marketers to learn what successful blogs do differently. Here are the top takeaways.

In February I ran a big survey to find out what blogging & content marketing strategies are working best right now.

A full 1,117 people responded in total, including a bunch of redditors.

Two-thirds of them are blogging to make money or build a business.

Their responses have given us some really interesting data with a 2.9% margin of error at 95% confidence.

The best part: it’s segmented by income level, so you can see what bloggers who earn over $50K per year do differently from lower-income ones.

The full results post includes 19 illustrated charts and reactions from experts like Brian Dean of Backlinko, Andrew Warner of Mixergy, and more.

Here are some highlights:

Blogs that earn over $50,000 per year put a lot of focus on email, using 343% as many email-collection methods as lower-income blogs.
Longer articles are correlated with success. Bloggers who earn over $50,000 per year say their most popular blog posts are 2,424 words long on average: 83% longer than those from lower-income bloggers.
Bloggers who earn over $50,000 per year tend to put a lot of emphasis on SEO. Their #1 traffic source is typically Google organic search, and compared to lower-income bloggers they are 4.3 times as likely to conduct keyword research.
Over 50% of bloggers say it has gotten harder to get traffic from Facebook over the past two years, and nearly one-fifth say it has gotten harder to get traffic from Google.
Higher-income bloggers rate the importance of social media 19% lower than lower-income bloggers do.
“Quality of content” is rated the #1 most important success factor among all bloggers. However, higher-income bloggers put much more emphasis on promoting their content than lower-income bloggers do.
70% of bloggers who earn over $50,000 per year say they are active or very active promoters of their blogs, compared to only 14% of lower-income bloggers.
Google AdSense is the most popular monetization method bloggers use, followed by affiliate marketing. But for higher-income bloggers, AdSense ranks third: they are 2.5 times as likely to sell their own product or service as they are to use AdSense.
45% of bloggers who earn over $50,000 per year sell their own product or service, while only 8% of lower-income bloggers do.
The most common challenge bloggers face is getting traffic to their blogs.
Successful bloggers know their audiences well. 73% of bloggers who earn over $50,000 per year say they focus their content on the interests of a very specific group.
Bloggers who earn over $50,000 per year pay content writers 3.6 times as much as lower-income bloggers do.
Compared to lower-income bloggers, bloggers who earn over $50,000 per year are 10.3x as likely to use paid promotion, 5.8x as likely to publish case studies, 5x as likely to have a podcast, 4.5x as likely to publish video, and 3.7x as likely to publish interviews.

There are a lot more insights in the full post, — for example, the first chart ranks the top 10 success factors.

But this isn’t a checklist of things that all blogs need in order to be successful.

Adopting an advanced technique too early may even make a blog less likely to succeed. (E.g. Unprofitable ventures will probably only become more unprofitable if they start using paid promotion for their blog posts.) These statistics are also based on correlation and not necessarily causation.

However, if you’re just starting a blog or having trouble making your content marketing perform well, it can be very helpful to see what successful bloggers are doing differently.

The key is to think about how those techniques fit in with the stage you’re at, as well as what you are trying to accomplish and what would best serve your audience/customers.

Thanks to everyone who took the survey!