One Way To Spread Insane Value & Gain Loads Of Exposure

I recently came across a content idea that not only creates incredible value for your potential clients but (if implemented correctly) can gain you some great exposure along the way.

The Plan

Firstly, let’s get a quick shopping list together to make sure you have everything you need to get started.

1. You’ll know who your ideal client is

2. You’ll know at least one of their main pain points that you help solve

3. You’ll have a blog to write an article, if not on your own website then you can create a profile on a site link Medium. The point here is to have something people can easily link to and share for you.

We want to put together one monster of a valuable article. We’re going to do this by:

A: Finding 10 successful ideal clients.

B: Asking them each a series of really interesting & probing questions

C: Write down our findings and share it with as many people as possible.

The Start

Let’s start with the first two. Once you know who your ideal client is and what their main pain point is, you can begin your search.

Search for people or businesses that have a great representation online and have likely already solved (or mostly solved) the pain we’re thinking about.

What do I mean by “a great representation”?

They have active social media channels which they’re posting regularly on and they have engagement from their followers. Preferably they will have an active blog on their site too. This means they have an audience who is interested in what they have to say and who are, more importantly, paying attention.

Don’t concern yourself too much with the amount of followers, we’re not looking for the 5M+ mark here. Follower count is relative depending on your niche and 1,000 active followers are worth a lot more than 2 million who are fast asleep.

Spend a bit of time checking out their content. Like some things, comment on some things and generally get involved in the conversation happening around their posts. Now it’s time to reach out.

Here you’ll want to explain who you are, what you do, how much you love them (and what they do) and that you’re currently putting together an article about *insert your title here* and you would be honoured if they could contribute by answering a few questions to provide value to your audience and hopefully theirs. These can of course be answered over the phone or via email, whatever is more convenient for them.

Now don’t worry, I haven’t completely lost my mind. You need to find 10 of these people, all willing to get involved and give you some golden nuggets in the process. If you can achieve this by simply messaging 10 people and get them all to agree then you’re some sort of mega messaging genius that I don’t think I have the mental capacity to even comprehend right now. It's more likely to assume that you’ll need to message more than this in preparation for a few of them being unresponsive. That’s okay though, we expect that, so we keep our chins up and we crack on.

The Questions

Now you have your interviewees lined up, you need to prepare some questions. Questions that will provide answers your audience really want to know. Here are a few ideas of how to find these…

1. Search through FAQs on competitor websites to see what they think people need answering.

2. Search blogs and forums in your niche to see what people are writing about.

3. Search Youtube to see what people are filming videos about and what questions people are asking in the comments.

4. Ask some of your previous clients, what they wish they would have known before they started working with you.

There is no hard fast rule here as to how many questions you should ask, just make sure your questions will gather enough valuable information to make your article really really (no... I mean REALLY) useful.

The Title

Now we need a title. Something eye catching and intriguing. Maybe something like…

10 Of The Best **blank** Tell Us the Exact Tactics They Used to Fix **blank**

These **blank** Businesses Each Share Their Top 5 Secrets To **blank**

There are loads of different ways you can formulate an article headline. Is you want to ready more about this, don’t go down the Google rabbit hole but instead read this one really useful article from hostgator.com - https://www.hostgator.com/blog/tips-creating-great-blog-titles/

The Distribution

You’ve formulated your article now, maybe as a simple questions and answers list post or you’ve taken the main points and crafted more of a journalistic approach, this depends on you and the subject at hand but now we need to get it seen.

Your first port of call are your interviewees. They are already active on social media, they’ve just taken part in a really useful article, they’d be mad to not want to help you get it out there.

Next are your previous clients, who you’ll have an incredible relationship with I should imagine.

Then your peers. Anyone in your network who shares what you do for a living or compliments it. If the article is truly useful, people won’t need much convincing.

Now the tricky bit, asking some strangers. While searching for questions you’ll have most likely come across similar articles written by similar people, you’ll also be able to find out who shared their articles and those same people will probably be up for sharing yours too.

Two methods for this…

1. The Old Google "Quotation Mark" Trick

Let’s take the article I shared above from HostGator as an example. If I search that same URL but put it in quotation marks, like such:

"hostgator.com/blog/tips-creating-great-blog-titles"

I will be greeted with a list of sites that have directly shared this link to the visitors on their sites.

You’ll notice I omitted the "https://www." from my search. These are seldom used when sharing so will most likely give you inaccurate results.

After performing this search I can see that 2 sites have shared the direct link to this blog so I could reach out to them and see if they wanted to do the same for mine, as long as mine covers a very similar topic.

2. Who Shared On Social Media

This is where you’ll need to dig into a website called Buzzsumo.com

Buzzsumo is pricy but they have a free trial option which is all you will need for what we’re about to do here.

First thing’s first, create an account and start the free trial.

Type your subject or phrase/keyword into the search bar on the site.

It will then show you the most popular articles on that subject and where they were shared the most - Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. You’ll then see a button that says “View Sharers” and this is where the gold lies.

This list shows you exactly who shared it and links you to their profiles on social media.

You can craft a lovely message explaining how you love what they do online, who you are, what you’ve written about, you can see that they’ve shared similar articles in the past and would they be willing to spread the love and share yours. You could end up sending this message out many many times but that’s the point. You want as many people as possible exposed to you magical research piece.

The Summary

This is one highly effective content method. It’s definitely not easy, it’s certainly not quick but that is exactly why many people don’t do it and also exactly why you… are not going to be one of those people.

Go forth and create my friends

Dave