5 Types of Blog Posts That Can Rank & Go Viral – Especially If You Hate Writing [OMP 003]

Show Notes

[TRANSCRIPT]

You’re listening to Online Marketing for Profits episode three, five types of blog post that can rank and go viral, especially if you hate writing.

Nicolas: Hey, it’s Nicolas again for episode three of Online Marketing for Profits. If you missed episode two, you might want to go back and listen to it. We talked about some conversion killers that I’ve seen as a consultant in both Fortune 500s to startups and there might be a few in there that you’re unfortunately doing on your website that might be hurting your revenue and killing your growth so you might want you go back and listen to episode two.

KISS?

In episode one, I kind of just introduced myself and if you’ve looked at the about me page at onlinemarketingforprofits.com, you might have noticed that I used to be in a KISS cover band. Now, I’ve gotten a few inquiries about that and people are asking what that was all about. So, I used to play Gene Simmons and so, that means that I was the lead singer. I used to, we used to put on a show I think with two-hour show covering all of their major hits and I did get to spit blood because that’s what he does when he’s on stage so, I have pictures of that actually and I’m willing to perhaps publish them out if I get enough of a demand.

So if you’re interested in that, just let me know in the comments and all that and I might succumb to the pressure here. So, that’s a little bit about me.

I’m not a good writer…

Today, we’re talking about blog posts, a subject that I’m very passionate about because I’m really not a good writer. Hate is a strong word but I pretty much hate writing or at least I’m not a good writer when it means coming up with thousands of words for one, on one specific topic.

One of the reasons honestly that I wanted to do a podcast is that I’m much more comfortable speaking in front of a microphone in front of a crowd to be honest than just writing out and spitting out 2,000 words posts.

Now, it used to be back in the days when I started as an internet marketer maybe 15 years ago, you could get find results by just having articles that were just a few hundred words in length. That’s not the case anymore. Now, you really have to go deep because that’s what Google wants, that’s what Google expects and if you don’t do that, you’re really, really at a disadvantage.

SERP IQ Study

I’ve got a few studies here I want to share with you, just to show this before we dive into what can you do if you don’t want to go to the, fune up a good writer or you don’t want to go that route.

I’ve got some pretty good and excellent things I’ve done personally on my own websites that I’ve really, really gone some good traffic and also has been shared a lot on social media. So there was a study by SERP IQ looking at most of the top 10 results in Google and their study concluded that most of the top 10, so that means the first page on Google, had 2,000 words or more and the top three of the page had 2,500 words or more. That’s a lot. It means that if you’re just putting out, spitting out some 500 to even a thousand words articles focusing on your keyword and all that on your blog, on your business, you’re probably not doing enough.

Neil Patel from QuickSprout posts that he found that post that had more than 1,500 words got an extra 68 percent more tweets and 22 percent more Facebook likes than shorter ones so again, more than 1,500 at least 2,000 from SERP IQ and Moz, one of the top SEO blogs and agencies out there.

When they published their ranking factors, their other things that you might want to consider when you’re looking at what ranks in Google such I think like the bounce rate, the time on site, social shares, the likes, the comments, all of these.

If you’re putting out a 3,000-word article, there’s a good chance that people might bounce less because you might have more inbound link interlinking so they might go to another page of your website. They’re certainly going to spend more time on your site if they go through the entire article and weed it than if you just have a quick blur of about a few hundred words because it’s going to be a very, very good article probably in depth.

It’s much more likely to get more social shares. As we know, people liked to share these kinds of articles and blog posts and it’s going to get more likes obviously and a lot more comments because people will have more questions, more comments about your entire article because there are just more stuff to digest.

5 Blog Alternatives…

So, I guess the best way to really rank in Google is to still use the 2,000 and 3,000 words articles. That’s kind of the number one I guess but if you’re like me, what can you do if you don’t want to go that route, if you’re just staring on the blank page and you’re just, “Man, how am I going to get to 2,000 words” and I’ve tried it before and usually when I hit that thousand-word mark, I really have a deep and kind of the inspiration and I don’t know what else to write about at that point often time.

So, if you don’t want to put in all that work into writing those huge blog posts, what are your alternatives?

I’ve got five of them today.

1. The Embed + Short Editorial

The first one is really the idea is really to leverage what someone has already done on the web totally legally. We’re not going to swipe or we’re not going to copy and paste anyone without permission or we’re not going to do anything that it would be shady. That’s really not what I’m saying.

But the idea is that there’s a lot of stuff online that can be shared, embedded and that you can really take and refurnish and publish it as your own while the owner of the original text or video or whatever it is, is totally fine with it.

For example, the number one thing you can do is maybe embed some kind of material that you found online that has an embed option.

That means that the owner of the material is okay with you embedding it on your site that they’ve said yes to this and the tool allows it to for example, a YouTube video, an infographic, a slide from a SlideDeck somewhere, a tweet.

So things like that are often times public and if you go on YouTube, any big video site, an infographic often has an embed code underneath it so you can embed it on your own website, a slide or tweet you can do the same, although there are some tools out there to tweet it. Tweets are public most of the time so you can certainly quote someone’s tweet and republish a tweet from someone and embed it on your site.

Now, you might not want to just embed it. The embed might be the core of the blog post but what you really want to do is perhaps dig a little deeper into what the infographic, for example, is saying or the SlideDeck or the tweet or the video.

So for example, let’s take an infographic as an example.

If I was to embed an infographic on writing good blog posts, I might write a quick article above the infographic introducing the concepts of the infographic and saying what it’s all about perhaps why people should pay attention. I’ll come up with a headline that’s going to be different in the infographic perhaps targeting different keywords or giving different benefit and then I’m going to embed the infographic itself.

It could be a video like I said, a slide or whatever it is and then after the embed, I might write some other piece on the infographic so asking questions for people maybe to comment in the comment area, saying maybe writing my own opinion about the infographic, things that the infographic might not be saying. Maybe there’s something missing. There’s a thing or two in there that I thought should have been part of the infographic and I’ll just add that to the blog post to kind of adding my two cents to the whole thing interlinking perhaps with other things I’ve written about in the past.

And so that way, you have when you look at the Moz ranking factors, if you have… you can come up with 500 to 100,000 words of your own then you split into two, introducing the concept and having the embedded infographic and then writing kind of an opinion piece on it then you’ve got some good meet.

People were very likely or less likely to bounce.

They’ll certainly spend more time on your site because it’s going to take a while to digest all of this because its going to be needs to be good quality content. Now, there’s some other infographic out there, some videos, slides out there that aren’t very good. You don’t want to embed those just for the sake of embedding.

It needs to be something that’s very valuable.

So, if it’s good and your opinion piece and your introduction and all of that is good also, people are much likely to share it and like it on Facebook and perhaps to comment it also. So, it kind of has all the hidden benefits of a good ranking blog post without you having to spit out thousands of words of content.

So that’s number one, embed an infographic or video or slide mostly and then write opinion pieces and introductions around it.

2. The 2:1 Video Cut Out

The second type of blog post that can really rank and go viral is to take a video, a good quality video, that you have on YouTube, for example, and do a video cutout. So what you do and this is especially good for how to videos.

So for example, how to — I don’t know –how to build your website on WordPress in 10 minutes.

Maybe there’s a video out there on YouTube and what you do basically probably in the video there, they explain all the steps and all the pages you have to go through to get started on a WordPress and all that. So, what you do is you grab screenshots during the video of all these steps. You have maybe a sub-headline for each of these screenshots. You add a caption telling what the screenshot is about.

Of course, you’re going to use some good SEO practices in all of these screenshots, these images so that you rank well in Google for that. And then, you can basically just have a sub-headline and then just small blurbs, small paragraphs or just a few phrases of what the cutout is about.

So for example, if it’s a step one is to download the WordPress from wordpress.org then you can say, sub-headline can be just download from wordpress.org then you can have maybe a link. It’s kind to be even better then you just kind of sum up what the step is about.

You have the image and then the caption and then you go to step two, three, four, five and often times, you’ll end up with like 25 steps but think about again the bounce rate.

People, if you’re doing interlinking, they’re less likely to bounce.

They’ll spend a lot more time in your site.

It’s going to be a big detailed post likely get share again, comments, likes. It kind of feels all over Moz ranking factors so that they get a lot of goodwill from your community. And then what you do after your cutout and all your maybe 25 or 15 cutouts like that, you can embed the video at the bottom of the page so that people can watch it and spend a lot more time on your page at that point and a great way to draw your network and get even more love is to actually email the publisher of the video.

So for example if this video on WordPress has been done by John Doe, I’m going to email John Doe and say, “Hey John, I just took a little bit of my time to cutout. Your video was awesome. I thought it would be great for my audience so I just took a bit of time to cutout all the basic steps, embed your video and I’ve also linked back to your website” for example would be great and then perhaps this publisher will share the love with you.

So, they might share the actual post on your website, link back to it on their website and growing your network that way because now, you have a connection. People, that person’s probably going to remember you is never bad. So especially if that person is a good influencer, is someone that’s known on your industry, even better. So like I said, it’s not about copy and pasted things that people haven’t given permission to do that.

You don’t want to do that.

Now, we’re talking about videos that have been published online that are for everyone to see. You can just take a few of those screengrabs and have a very, very good detailed blog post on this specific subject you’re trying to talk about.

All right, we’re going to take a quick break. It’s time for the offline ignition minute and when I come back, I’m going to talk about types three, four and five and especially type number three which is one of my favorite and even better way of building your network and reaching out to top influencers so I’ll talk to you then.

3. Have Them Write It For You: Ask the Experts

Our number three of the five types of blog post that can rank and go viral is really my favorite.

It’s terrific.

It has tons of unique content which is a bit different in what we’ve shared today when you’re embedding something, somebody has really embedded it somewhere else or there’s an original somewhere else and if you’re doing a video cutout then the video is hosted somewhere else also.

So, this third one is going to be pretty much everything original and the best part about it is you really don’t have to write much word yourself. Now, there’s also a secondary benefit I’m going to talk about in just a second.

So, I call this ask the experts and I’m sure you’ve seen some of these blog posts where someone reaches out to a whole bunch of experts in their industry. So, let’s say you reach out to 15, 30, 40 experts, whatever and then basically, you asked them one question and on that blog post, you will simply list all the answers to that specific question so you can’t… it really has to be the same question for everyone because not that, your bulk was what make sense but it really has a secondary benefit as we kind of talk about step two of the video cutout if you reach out to someone you can grow your network.

Well this one just to produce the piece in the first place, you need to reach out to people because you need to reach out to those experts and ask them that question.

How can you do that? The easy way of course is using Twitter.

Most experts and all the marketers are going to be on Twitter.

You can just send them a direct tweet asking them, “Hey, I just have a question for you, would you mind maybe following me so I can PM you or something like that.” I’ve done that before. That works great or you can perhaps visit that person’s website to reach out to maybe grab their email address and send them an email or user contact form so you can be a bit more explicit and I’m going to post on the show notes for this show at nicolasfradet.com the exact template I use to send out an email to get some people involved in this so just a couple of outlines about the email.

[TEMPLATE]

You want to start out by saying that maybe you’ve read something that this person has said or just quote or whatever.

This needs to be true, right?

You don’t want to make this stuff up and you don’t want to start this relationship on a bad foot so perhaps something like, hey, I’ve just finished reading your blog post entitled whatever. I thought it was great because of this and that. So you can add a reason on why you thought it was good to kind of prove that you have indeed read it then you can just get into the meat of things.

You say, I’m putting out an article on the best tools for doing SEO and I would really like to have a blurt from you. I think my audience would really appreciate it and it would be hosted at my website.com.

So, you want to give out a little bit more information about you so if that person is interested and they want to find out a bit more about you and what you do and where are the article will be hosted because that’s important, you want to know where their names is going to be used and all that. They can do that. So that’s kind of the basis a little.

If you already have some people that have said yes, you can add a paragraph saying, “Hey, I’ve already received answers to this question on by this person and that person and so I really appreciate if you could just join in yourself. So that gives, adds trust to your whole thing and really tells the expert that it’s probably very on a first name basis with these other experts you’ve just talked about that you’re legit and everything’s on the up and up. And then I don’t necessarily ask this question right now.

I say, if you’re interested, let me know and I’ll shoot you the question. And then just add a quick benefit like it will only take you a few minutes of your time and of course, I’ll maybe I’ll link back to your website or any website you want me to, something like that.

So, that’s kind of the outline reaching out. If you’re doing it on Twitter, of course, you won’t be able to as detailed as this but you kind of have to do it in steps.

So for example, just PM me back, follow me, I’ll PM you then you maybe want to separate this and maybe two or three tweets, private tweets so that the person can, has a good way of finding out what you’re all about to know that.

So next, you send them the question and you can use some survey tools out there like SurveyMonkey, SurveyGizmo or Hotjar is a survey feature also that you can use and so, you can basically all gather all the responses at the same place.

I find it very easy to do that.

So once you have enough of these experts, you kind of bundle all their answers into a single post. Pick the top answers. Maybe somehow will have been, has bit more detailed and will have given you some really, really good content.

Some might be a little bit less good.

You can maybe push those a little bit further down the page. If you have some very top influencers, probably you want to showcase them at the top of your page and people that are maybe a little bit less known at the bottom and it’s really something I’ve used in the past and like I said, as a terrific bonus, it now gives you a great way to build your own network because when you publish the article on your website, now you are able to email back or tweet back to this expert, each and everyone of those experts, that you featured and say, hey, the article is live, you can go to my website.com/whatever and then maybe they’ll link to it.

Maybe they’ll share it on social media. All of these good stuffs that we know are good for SEO.

If you want to have a quick example of this, I did something recently about exit surveys on nicolasfradet.com. I’ll link to it also on the show notes and I’ll give you kind of what I’m talking about. It’s a great way and that article has been super popular in my website also so you can be on the lookout for that.

4. The Transcribed Video Or Interview

All right, number four of the types of blog post that can rank and go viral is the transcribed video or interview.

So, you can do the interview yourself.

You can find one online or you can again find video that you like on YouTube or other things like that. You’ll want to embed the video, embed the audio file if it’s an interview, or just with sound.

Then you can perhaps transcribe it yourself or you can use tools like services like Fiverr, Elance, Speechpad, things like that, that have… there’s a lot of people out there that will transcribe the video for you.

So you have… especially on Fiverr, you have to make sure that people, that person has good reviews. There are some very good out there reviews very often so it’s very cheap.

Fiverr is all but $5 but often times for depending on the length of the video and all that, there’ll be some extras but under $20 or something like that you’ll have a very good transcription of the video or the interview you just did.

And again, you don’t have to write a single word, just do the introduction, post the embedded video or the sound byte and then have the transcription. Again, you have some very good content.

But you don’t want to have one big block of text, right?

You want to treat it as just a regular post which means that you’ll have some paragraphs, some sub-headlines, things in bold, some links so you don’t want to put out the work of doing it right but you don’t have again to write much about it which is great.

Again, if you’re using a third party video or something like that, you might want to link back to that person or reach out to that person to say, hey, I just transcribed your video, it’s terrific and I linked back to your website.

If it’s an affiliate offer for example, I’m using to sell your offer or something like that. I think that’s a great way to again grow your network, get some good love from Google and all that with some pretty quality content.

5. Quote List: Leveraging Big Names

All right, number five on types of blog posts is to gather a quote list. Now when I mean quote, I’m not talking about those quotes that we all see appear on our Facebook feed or Instagram feed and all that, that are very inspirational and if you’re in that market, that’s I fine I guess.

You just go ahead and do it.

If it makes sense and if it gives value to your audience that’s okay but I guess in most audience, it won’t make sense but so what you really want to go more is to gather quotes from authority blogs and newspapers, again social media influencers.

So for example, the New York Times talks about a subject that your market would like and there’s really a good blurb there that you could use, you can quote without doing it too much, you don’t want to swipe the whole article and copy and that wouldn’t be good.

If you just quote a few lines of text then you can link back to the original article, you can use their logo to build trust again and if you do this on one topic, you can do it five, 10, 15 of these authority blogs or authority newspapers and then you have yourself a very high quality blog post.

Basically, what you’ve done is you kind of curated some very good content out there for your audience and people love that because they’re too busy to read all of these articles. You’re just taking some of the best blurbs and you’ve just included them in one single post so again a terrific way to do that.

As an added bonus, there’s some tools out there especially on WordPress where you can make sure that each quote is shareable so that way, you can easily on the click of one button of the Twitter button, you can share that quote and it links back to your article.

Again, you should link back to the original article, for example on the New York Times, so that people that want more detail can actually look at the source and get more information on it.

So again for that types of blog post, not much else to do. There’s a lot of research involved of course. I’m not saying that any of these are copy and paste. They take you 10 minutes.

That’s not the case.

A lot of this take a lot of work but if you’re like me and you don’t like writing or you’re not good at it especially by competing with doing 2,000, 3,000 words posts, these are terrific ways to get some high quality content on your website that’s got likely going to be shared and going back to our Moz ranking factors, that’s likely going to have people spend a lot of time on your site, perhaps not bounce and it’s going to get a lot of likes and shares and a lot of this will also help you build your own network which is kind of a very side benefit but certainly a very important benefit not to be dismissed.

So, again these five types of blog posts I think are terrific; embed an infographic or video, do a video cutout, ask the experts in your market, transcribe a video or an interview or just gather a whole bunch of quotes and to publish a blog post.

I think you’ll be well and you’re way to having some high quality content on your site and people will love it for it, they’ll share it, they’ll spend more time and it’s very likely to attract you a lot more free traffic.

Give me a rating or a comment in iTunes

All right, that’s it for the show today. If you enjoyed the show, I’ll be posting all the show notes and links, slides, transcripts, all that at onlinemarketingforprofits.com/3. What I want you to do right now is to give me a rating or a comment in iTunes. I want to know what you think about the show so far, what you like, what you don’t like.

Let me know if I should be posting those pictures of me as Gene Simmons.

That’s very important. 🙂

So, go to iTunes, leave me a rating or leave me a comment. I promise, I will read all of them and I’m looking forward to hearing back your thoughts and I will see you next time when we talk about affiliate marketing and especially what’s the best conversion funnel for your affiliate offers.

I have a ton experience in this.

This is the first startup I eventually sold. It was basically just affiliate offers so I’m really looking forward to sharing my thoughts and what’s the best way to make those affiliate offers convert so I will see you next time on Online Marketing for Profits.

[/TRANSCRIPT]

Show Links

http://blog.serpiq.com/how-important-is-content-length-why-data-driven-seo-trumps-guru-opinions/

http://www.quicksprout.com/

https://moz.com/search-ranking-factors/correlations

https://www.fiverr.com

https://www.speechpad.com/

https://www.surveymonkey.com/

https://www.surveygizmo.com/

http://www.hotjar.com

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