We’re always told as kids that it’s okay to make mistakes and that the more mistakes that you make, the more that you learn for the future. Adults don’t seem to have that approach though! We want to get everything correct right away and to make almost zero mistakes on our first try!
Today on the podcast I have Miles Beckler, and he’s going to tell us all about the journey that he’s had creating content which has become very popular and successful. He did not take the approach of getting everything right on the first run, and instead decided that it was okay to learn by himself, make all the mistakes that he needed, and come out on top in the end!
In the past Miles has search for the perfect way of doing this, looking endlessly into forums and blog posts, following ‘gurus’ and all the other things that you can to do to try to learn the art of creating engaging content, but in the end he just figured let do it ourselves in our way and see how it all works out!
It all boils down to a simple premise – create content that people are searching for and they will likely find it!
I never do this! Take this post for example, I’m just writing whatever comes into my mind at the the time. I’m not really dwelling on the SEO of the title or the main content having the correct keywords. I’m sure that’s the case for many of you too, if you’re creating content that is. You just sit yourself down and have a rough idea of what it is that you want to say and then you let the fingers engage with the keyboard and if somehow comes out.
That’s my approach anyhow! Hopefully, like Miles, you’re a little more thoughtful before the fingers hit the keyboard and you have a little bit of a plan in place for what it is that you’re going to write and some prior insight into the SEO implications of it? You do right… Just like me?!?!
One of the key points of Miles approach is not to get too caught up in the latest thing that’s exploding. Everyone on Twitter is saying that this thing is ‘hot’… you feel the pressure to move over there and start creating content about it so that you’re keeping up with the Jones’. Miles says that whilst this can work some of the time, better to work on the thing that you know about deeply and keep doing that, especially if it’s in an area that has a direct line to some kind of profitability.
I think the I should back up a little here because it might be important to note that Miles is not a WordPress user who writes a lot. He creates heaps of content, but most of that is done with video. He’s comfortable with that and does not really gel with writing too much. So he uses WordPress as a container for his YouTube content, but the approach that he has can be used in exactly the same way if you’re a writer or a podcaster or a video maker or a [fill in the blank kind of content]. Make content that has a shelf life and your WordPress site will keep serving up that some content day after day after day.
We spend a lot of the conversation talk about what it is that Miles feels are the steps that you need to take in order to make content that people are keen to search for and then consume.
Firstly, know that this is a long haul. You need to know from the outset that there are very few shortcuts. From the outset, try to think of this as a process that’s going to take you years, not months or days.
Then get a niche. It does not matter what that niche is, we talk about lawnmowers on this podcast, which presumably is a niche that someone, somewhere is managing to exploit successfully!
After that have brainstorming sessions. Map it out in some way. Just get the all of the types of content that you could create down on paper or an app. Just file them away somewhere. A great big disconnected list of everything lawnmower!
You then need to start to look at all of the search phrases that people are searching for that tackle the idea that you dumped just a moment ago.
You can see that this is going to take time and effort, and that at this point there is literally zero reward for anything that you’ve done. It’s just planning and, in all honesty, it might be quite dull! You might want to use something like the Google Keyword Planner for this (see below for more).
If you’re in a product niche, this process will mean that you’re creating content that you’re pretty certain is going to appeal to people who are, to some extent, ready to buy. Anyone searching for “best powered lawnmower”, is quite likely to want to have one!
This then leads us to the point. Now you write posts about this thing. You actually sit down and write a post about which powered lawnmowers are the best. You make it carefully, put thought into it… actually creating content that is true and which will assist the readers. It’s going to take you time, but if you do it right that piece of content is going to be there for years and years, helping people to buy lawnmowers.
If you’re in the game to make some money out of this, then you could use these posts to host affiliate links. If you’re just in it to promote your brand, then perhaps not, the content itself is enough in that it brings you kudos for being helpful.
Miles’ idea is to find a niche, see what the competition have written, learn about that subject, then write one post that’s as good as you can possibly make it. The best content, the most useful. Just one. If you want to you can really nerd out on the number of tags and all of that, but as a minimum just write your best work and make sire that it’s long enough to compete with other content out there.
You’ll likely be quite bad at doing this to start with, but the more that you do it, the better you’ll become! Honest!
We then go onto how you manage your history of posts that you’ve written. In other words can we massage content that we wrote six months ago to create additional engagement? Miles has some thoughts on this.
During the podcast we go off message a little and talk about the scary prospect of deep fake videos, you know the ones that I mean? I’m talking about the videos in which you think that you’re looking at someone famous, but suddenly the words that they’re saying don’t chime with what you know about them. You begin to realise this video is a sham and that’s it’s all been made up in the basement by some teenage prankster! Dangerous times!
It’s a great episode and I learned a lot about how to do this right.
Mentioned in this episode:
Keyword finding tools:
KWFinder
Google Keyword Planner
Keywords Everywhere
Temi – for translations
