How To Publish Like A Huge Content Creation Team (When It’s Really Just You)
I’m tired of all the click-bait success stories in many marketing guides, stuff like this:
Or this…
If it were as easy as those guides claim, we’d all be millionaires by now.
These so-called “success stories” are normally created by people who are either already marketing experts, or have a pre-existing audience. That’s because if you already have 100,000 monthly visitors, it’s relatively easy to obtain an extra 1000 users.
That’s why I want to share with you a case study on Niklas Goeke (click here for his LinkedIn).
For Niklas, his first 1,000 subscribers took him 6 months of:
- Trying every tactic and strategy book
- Writing thousands of emails
- Spending hundreds of hours on blog posts
- Creating countless content upgrades
- Promoting my work everywhere
But it does get better. The next 1,000 took just 50% of that time:
That’s why Niklas is showing you the exact system he used to grow Four Minute Books to almost 30,000 visitors, 837 email subscribers, and a cool $736.00 in affiliate commissions in just 60 days.
But $736 in 60 days is nothing! Well, considering Niklas was a total beginner fresh out of university, it’s pretty impressive. Instead of going for get rich quick schemes, go for the long haul and focus on getting experience.
How many new grads can say they have 30,000 website visitors? Not many. And that’s how you can differentiate yourself if you’re looking to get a job at the best companies and work with the best marketers.
You can do the same. How?
By setting up a content creation process and streamlining your SEO and promotion, so you can write without thinking, publish every damn day and turbocharge your site’s growth (even if it’s brand new).
For the full in-depth (7000+ words) guide with tons of supporting GIFs/images, check it out by clicking here.
Otherwise, you can continue reading here for a summary:
Step 1: Figure out your “why” → crunch the numbers to meet the goal → validate
Niklas’ goal was “$1000/month in passive income” and to meet it, he decided to pursue affiliate marketing.
He would sell books and make a commission for each one he sold.
Validating which books to promote/sell is tricky. To choose the best books to sell for his affiliate income, he used two methods:
Method 1) Using a tool called NerdyData, he could see a list of other affiliate marketers promoting his product. He would then look for the affiliate marketers who pay to promote (e.g. banner ads) the affiliate product.
By searching for the banner’s web archives, he could see how long the banner ads were up. If the banner ads are up for a few months, it must be selling enough to justify the banner ad costs.
For example, Mike Vardy had this banner ad for the same affiliate product up for several months:
This informed Niklas that the affiliate product is providing income to Mike. So he’d prioritize selling the same book on his own website because it was already proven for his competition.
Method 2) Niklas told his friends about the product, and for the friends who were interested, he’d send them the affiliate link. He made 3 sales by doing this, which was enough to validate.
Once it was validated, he now spent the time to build a website and drive traffic to it.
Step 2: Build a content log and streamline SEO, email collection and your promotion process.
To sell his affiliate book products, Niklas created a site that would provide short book summaries and reviews. There were four parts to it:
Part 1: Content Creation
Niklas wanted to publish content everyday to promote his affiliate books. To do so, he’d limit each article to <1000 words by following a framework:
Part 2: SEO
Since he was creating a piece of content each day (30/month), he started to rank for certain keywords by using Google’s Keyword Planner. He would then add targeted keywords into his content headlines.
He would then make sure the keyword were in the meta descriptions, url slug, and inside the body of the content.
Part 3: Email Collection
Niklas was now creating a bunch of content, and several of the content pieces started to rank in the first page of google on popular keywords. He was starting to see quite a bit of traffic going to the website.
He would make the most of the website visitors by collecting emails using SumoMe.
By collecting their emails, he would send them his best hand-picked summaries (more affiliate products).
Just by doing this, he would collect over 8% of all website visitors into email subscribers
Part 4: Promotion
Every day, Niklas would spend ~1.5 hours writing the content piece, and another 90 minutes promoting it.
Here’s the exact promo checklist Niklas runs through every single morning:
- Submit to StumbleUpon
2. Submit to Hacker News
3. Post to relevant Slack groups
4. Send post to 1 person via email
5. Tweet at input creator
6. Buffer tweets
7. Check in on coach.me (or another community you’re a part of)
By doing this for 10–15 minutes a day, itadds up to over 5 hours a month, which makes your promotional efforts manageable on a daily basis, but the effects compound fast
Step 3: Publish every day until you hit your goal
Create content every single day. By doing so, eventually you’ll have several articles that start to rank high in google. Create a content creation structure so you publish at the same time everyday.
And that’s how Niklas eventually achieved his first 1000 email subscribers and $736.
Want to read more?
Check out this 7000+ word guide of Niklas’ exact blueprint to grow an online business from scratch.
There’s more detail, more pictures, tutorial GIFs, case studies, and tools so you can do the same thing.
