Session #1. Traffic Targets

Generating 1,570% in the first three months. But it’s important to understand that Traffic Targets are lagging indicators, happening only after you implement these strategies and tactics. In this first session, I introduce the three primary frameworks that will help underpin the more tactical discussions to follow over the next few weeks.

F R A M E W O R K O V E R V I E W

you can’t control the output, you can only control the input
they’re lagging indicators
Planning predictor (Week 2)
- Payback period
- Organic CTR
- Topical authority
- SERP competitiveness
- Harvest demand
- Catch 22 with content planning: you need to be a big site to rank for good keywords, but you need to rank for good keywords to be a big site
- difficulty is related to buying intent
- HARVEST DEMAND
  - what’s already out there?
  - awareness stage > consideration stage > decision stage
  - longer tail variations from what’s already out there
- SERP COMPETITIVENESS
  - who is currently ranking for this and can we compete?
  - 2 big things to look at:
    - keyword difficulty - offsite strength, DR score and the number of referring domains
      - domain strength vs page level strength
    - content quality - how well are competitors doing with these keywords?
- TOPICAL AUTHORITY
  - if you do a good job of those things, that helps you develop topical authority
  - glass ceiling - do you need to built it up from scratch?
  - one way to increase this is through pillars/clusters/hub and spoke
  - you can have this parent - child relationship with pages (categories and link building, it all has to be joined up)
- ORGANIC CTR
  - refers to the fact that most people click on the first through results on the page
  - most people (60-70%) click on the top 3 results in google
  - if you can’t get into the top 3 within a certain amount of time, don’t bother with that keyword
- PAYBACK PERIOD
  - sometimes this means understanding that the payback period time will be longer and you have to be okay with that
  - can take years to achieve ranking on the best keywords (example: monday.com)
Optimized operations (Week 3)
- QUANTITY: in both content production and link building as you try to push up quantity, QUALITY: inevitably trends to drop. These operations and systems will prevent that.
- ROLE SPECIALIZATION
  - create a workflow for a team of specialists to work in an assembly line fashion
  - restaurant example: different things created at different times, all have to come out together (brigade system)
  - this is how he recommends setting up your content team
- CONTENT QUALITY
  - define your own internal standards to make the subjective objective
  - needs to be objective if you’re ever going to scale content
  - you can’t rank for anything good outside of your brand name unless you’re producing A LOT of content
  - create a checklist and make it specific, makes it easier to hire writers, maintain quality over time and even edit edit on the back end (simplifying the life of editors and not leaving it up to opinion)
- TEMPLATE - BRIEF - OUTLINES - DRAFTS (operational process)
  - and drafts, how do you take something subjective and make it objective?
  - spoonfeed writers exactly what they need, exactly when they need it
  - how do you turn 1,000 topics into 10 different types of content pieces that line up together?
  - how do we prep individual briefs on those topics and give them to a writer? how do they flush out the outline that an editor will review and give feedback on?
  - how do we structure this process 10x?
  - example he gave: competitor outline, capterra, look up who are my competitors? (wp engine alternatives, they do a good job of this)
  - outlines should line up with exactly what you see in a draft
- GUIDELINES AND SOURCES
  - document internal policies to better align with your team with pre-approved assets
  - need documents for the writing team that outline things like: these are sites you’re allowed to link from, sites you can’t link to, sites that are approved for research etc.
  - this helps the editor or writer to NOT run into issues later, it’s one uniform resource so you don’t run into those issues (one source of truth)
- BATCH AND PARALLEL PROCESSES
  - enable team to work async, in bulk to drive down unit costs, all at one time
  - refer to the restaurant example
  - different people working on different stages and projects at the same time
  - status - site - content project (example chart)
Distribution drivers (Week 4)
- high quality, low quantity
- how do you balance these opposing things?
- keyword difficulty and referring domains
- if you’re going to do anything in a competitive space, you need to build links
- how do you separate out that middle?
- quadrant:
  - high quantity, low quality: scalable (10s-100s/mo) but typically lower DR range (on avg 20-60 range)
    - hunt down all unclaimed mentions
    - outreach to people that have already mentioned you
  - high quantity, high quality: scalable (10s-100s/mo) with higher DR range on avg (60-95 range)
    - difficult to do
    - good example: product reviews and affiliate/brand partnerships
    - reverse engineer something like this, easy to scale
    - how are your competitors getting product reviews?
  - low quantity, low quality
    - any good tactic performed poorly will still suck at the end of the day
    - guest posts on small websites - waste of time
  - low quantity, high quality
    - HARO (help a reporter out)
    - it is possible to get good links here, but most of it is junk
    - very difficult to scale
- which basket should I be putting my link-building into and why?

TAKEAWAYS:

high-growth companies don’t rely on tricks or gimmicks or one-time arbitrage
they do simple things: better, faster and in bigger quantities than their competitors
Systems
Prioritization
Factory
Distribution
use different writers for different things, in-house writers will take longer, freelancers are better for output
use multiple sources for a better machine:
problem, agitate, solution - copywriter formula