The basic approach to great blogs is to keep it simple..
Underneath the message for ‘keep it simple’ is a much bigger story which I think it’s worth talking about. Matthew for his simple talk is indeed a driven and well read individual, risk free in his approach and challenged by what he calls the ‘corporate’ world.
He highlights what I see in every entrepreneur I meet, passionate, hard working, committed and driven by a need to exercise his passion and for him it’s online writing and becoming self employed which in his case was achieved by the Matthew Woodward blog.
He’s winning, why? Because he’s stuck to his project for over 2 years (The SME standard failure time line), he’s fixing a real problems, I know this as he’s finding and listing to people who share with the world via forums problems. The problems he finds are in them self the secret to his success, by finding the problem and providing solutions in the form of a blog post he’s turning ‘his’ community in to profit.
Profit gives him ‘runway’, time to continue to do what he does, to build his learning, his blog content, find the problems, offer solutions and sharpen his trade of converting his community in to cash. On his site are some excellent ‘take aways’ which I hope to bring to our business over the coming months.
One point worth referencing, to have success in any business you have to generate revenue, you have to be committed and you have to apply intelligence and learn through the journey.
This is a hard working guy, open to learning and committed to living a life he controls. I wanted to document his critical points to support our evvnt community to have better blogs as Matthew certainly knows his stuff.
GREAT JOB !!!
Richard Green
CEO & Founder @evvnt – @ungagged2015
Matthew Woodward Presentation at UnGagged2015
Content Strategy
Keep it simple, try to understand what the problems, focus on the problems that are freely available on forums in your sector and solving the problems with ‘Exceptional’ blog posts on the solutions.
Promotion Strategy
- Become part of the community: Join forums in your industry and mine for problems, listen, plan out the solution and do your home work
- Black Hat World – http://www.blackhatworld.com/
- Tone of voice: Use words and terminology that relates to your audience, stay true to yourself.
What is value
- Subscription: Acquiring an email address, to be able to communicate with your target audience ‘at will’ is essential and the primary focus.
- Builds relationships
- Drives constant content
- User generated content
- New social shares
- Steady flow of profit
- Social Sharing: Social signals are good to drive page ranking and traffic.
- Make sharing visible (‘Please Share’)
- Social Lockers (Share or Sign Up)
- User Generated Content: Try to move your conversations and discussions on to the posts to help them become more valuable.
- New Traffic by Sharing Content with Others: Send your link to others to answer the killer questions. By creating solutions you can expect people to share it.
- Affiliate Clicks and Sales: Once you have the community you can monetise it.
Content Upgrades & Lead Magnets
- Pop up offers that occur based on content: Drive increased sign ups through having relevant content pop ups and offers.
- Offer PDF’s / White labels: By offering more comprehensive information on key tops will increase the desire to pass out email addresses.
Subscriber Value
- Auto Responder, engagement series (Automated email)
- Welcome message & double opt in at 90% 🙂
- Relationship builders
- Ask each sign up if they have a questions, can I help you
- Forum (BB Press Plugin)
- Creates Community
- Long tail search traffic
- 15,125 users / 4,892 posts
- 424k page views
- Content ideas
- Testimonials
- Breathes life into old content
Launch With a Bang
- What is the hot topics
- Find the BIG problems
- Expose lies or badly communicated information
- Create clarity
Types of Content
- Competitions
- Bring new visitors
- Builds email list
- Product Review
- Step by step usage
- Profitable
- Tutorials / Case Studies
- Solve peoples problens
- Teacher / Student relationships
- Shareable
- Competitions
- Speak to parts
- product name / Review (Url)
- Email address / share
- Create the competition offer
- Replace with the review
- Win the prize (3 items)
- Create email list (5k emails)
- Send them an exclusive offer (Converts to sales)
Controversial
- Topic v’s another company
- Go viral
Regular Features
- Incomes Reports
- Income Report Round up
- What have I read
Summary
- Spend time planning and preparing
- Setup your blog to extract value
- Create the very best content on the web
- Find out what people want – give it to them
- Keep it simple