Ever wonder why all these content factories and huge blogs create EPIC POSTS and these ULTIMATE GUIDES? This post explains why that’s the only sustainable content strategy and how with one epic list we grew 3 years old blog’s traffic by 77%.

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Sounds like a mission impossible & it’s hard to believe that one piece of a blog post can create such a huge impact, right? The best part is, what we did is repeatable and anyone can do that. Moreover, in this post we are sharing it for free – it’s all yours, all you have to do is read this article. So, let’s dig in. In this article you will learn the following:

1. What an epic content did for our client’s blog;
2. How to write an epic content;
3. & how you too can rocket your blog’s traffic;

This is it. Buckle up because by the end of this post your content strategy ain’t gonna be the same.

1.0. Fast Forward – The Unbelievable Growth

So there was this blog with great content and steady traffic. Can’t say it was growing but it wasn’t plummeting as well. Steady is a fair statement in this case. We wrote the list of all the Marketing Growth Strategies known to human kind and this is what happened. BOOOOM! One post was responsible for nearly half of the blog’s traffic. This particular blog had around ~80 blog posts but it took only one article to do what 80 other posts were capable of doing. Pretty neat, ha? Imagine, if you would treat every blog post as an epic guide – write it properly and market the living beast out of it. So yeah, 1 article = 77% traffic growth. I guess the better question is “how?”.

2.0. Everything Starts With a Sweet Piece of Content

For us, everything began with producing this sweet piece of content. It was far from easy. Nevertheless, now we have produced 4 step approach to make it easier for you.

Keyword research

Find a topic that’s not covered in-depth. When I say “not in-depth”, I mean there aren’t a post you can skim through in 5 seconds:

1. Find 3 best pieces on this topic and be sure that you can create something that is twice as good.
2. Find keywords with low keyword difficulty to rank (it’s not the same as Cost Per Click). We use tools like KWfinder, Ahrefs or this (which is free).
3. Your site’s Domain Authority will increase throughout the time thus your capacity to rank higher also will grow. Before that happens – finding keywords with high search volume and low difficulty score will be tough.

Topic Research

Research is the only thing that stops you from fully understanding the topic are writing about. There is no such thing as too much research, but there sure is a problem with too little research:

1. For 128 Growth Hack post, we went through 2 005 articles. That’s quite an amount, right?
2. Find every publication that was made on this topic and just read it. Stumbleupon is a good place for post-surfing & of course, Google.
3. Ask experts to collaborate. Send out surveys, interview people on Linkedin or Twitter or chat on Reddit. The more experts collaborate the better data you will have. When the post will be ready these people will be the first ones to share the post.

Writing

It’s a time-consuming process no matter how experienced you are. Nevertheless, I remember my first blog post took me 2 weeks, now the same work I can do in 4 hours. So there is a steep learning curve.

• Good advice would be to read a lot of other blog posts on a similar subject – copy the style till you develop your own.
• In the end of the day, there isn’t a secret sauce for being a good writer. All it takes is practice.

SEO On-page Optimization

On-page optimization is all about inserting the focus keyword and the keyword synonyms in all the right place. Probably the best guide on this topic is available here.

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Good luck with the writing – it ain’t easy but it’s incredibly rewarding process. Our success with creating Ultimate Guides can be linked directly to how much time and effort we spend on writing an article.

3.0. Rocketing The Traffic – The Secret Content Marketing Sauce

So this is the part that makes or breaks your writing efforts worthwhile. Some content gurus go so far that they claim Content Marketing is where 80% of your time should be invested. So imagine if you spend 8 hours a day writing for 5 days, that’s 40 hours. That means 160 hours should be spent on marketing, those are 20 days. If you follow this rule – success is right around the corner. Here you will find all the Epic Content Hacks we use to market The Ultimate Guides.

Start With Basics – Social Media, Mailing list & Your Own Network

This one is an easy one. Share it on all your social media pages and email your mailings list. If your social media pages and mailings list are too small – use influencers. Get on Fiverr & find people who will help you out for a couple of bucks.

Write People Who Helped Creating the Post

This one is a simple one. Send an email saying Thank You and that without the expert help the post wouldn’t be possible. Usually, the answers are overwhelming – everyone is willingly sharing the post without you even begging for that.

Email All The URLs Used in The Post

Say Thank You to Everyone whose article you used. Letting them know that you gave them a backlink usually results in more shares.

Share The Post in Groups

The first rule is – don’t spam. Share the post in the groups where it honestly adds value. Don’t just post a link but write a quick summary of the most important findings. When you post the content that adds value to the community – they will love you. Moreover, the traffic will start raining on your site.

Post it – post the post like there is no tomorrow.

This is our list of websites where we post our Ultimate Guides – Betalist, Designer News, Lifehacker app directory, Chrome Webstore, Hacker News, StumbleUpon, Reddit, GrowthHackers, HackerNews, Inbound.org, BizSugar, Voat.co, Digg, & Tumblr. Submit your post as an answer to people’s questions @ Quora, Yahoo Answers, Wiki-how and Jelly. And add it to content aggregating sites – Feedly (submit here), Fark, News360, AllTop, BizSugar, AffBuzz, Inbound, Blogarama, Blogrific, BlogCatalog, Discover and PopURLs (submit here).

Link building – It’s Tough but Super Important

Link building is the part where you make sure that your article will generate traffic not only for a month or two but continuously by ranking on Google as one of the top resources on the selected topic. This is how we do it:

1. We find all the articles that are linking to the top blog posts on the topic that we wrote about and then we email them saying that we have something better. Clearly, linking to a better article is also beneficial to them.
2. Then we scrape the net with ScrapeBox and find all the articles on this or a similar topic. Then we email them asking for a backlink.
3. Lastly, we guest blog. This one is technique old as the world but boy it works. Per week we create a lot of guest blogs and as we have a huge network of epic posts that we have written, we link to these articles. Works like a charm.

Republish The Content

Turn your post into a shorter article and post it on Linkedin, Medium, and sites alike. Then turn it into PPT and post in on Slideshare. Note: Execute this strategy only when you have gathered few backlinks or there might be a chance that republished content will outrank the original.

Are You Ready to Create Some Ultimate Guides?

This ain’t easy but as we explained in the first section it’s incredibly beneficial to your content strategy.

Basically, 1 Ultimate Guide can be more beneficial than 80 smaller blog posts.

Amazing, huh?

Make sure to share the struggle, ask questions and spread the wisdom!

Let’s help each other.

And may the Ultimate Guide Creation Muse be with you. links

The post Why Ultimate Guides Are The Only Sustainable Content Strategy – an Epic Guide on Epic guides appeared first on Marketing Funnel Automation.