A Six-Step Framework to Create Content that Brings Profit & Conversion with Julia McCoy

If you’re a content creator, you know how challenging it is to consistently produce content that is of value to your audience and can generate profit and leads for your business.

Recently on my Facebook live show, I had the great honor to consult Julia McCoy on how to create favorable content that will bring profit and conversion.

Julia shared with me and my live audience how she leveraged effective content writing strategies to grow her business and how she achieved her first financial breakthrough of earning $120K a month.

Holy cow!

How did Julia do it? What are Julia’s secrets to creating profitable content?

Click on the link below to watch the replay of our Facebook live interview and read my highlights here to learn from a content marketing expert.

Before we dive into the content of our interview, let’s first get to know Julia.

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Who is Julia McCoy?

Julia McCoy is the CEO of Express Writers, a content creation agency, for more than 7 years. Julia also hosts The Write podcast where she features successful content marketers and entrepreneurs. Julia is also the author of several popular content marketing books, such as So You Think You Can Write? The Definitive Guide to Successful Online Writing, and Practical Content Strategy and Marketing.

In addition, Julia is a contributing author to several websites like Search Engine Journal and the Content Marketing Institute. Julia’s success story and expert opinion on content marketing have been featured in Forbes twice (read here and here). To learn more about Julia, visit her Website and connect with her on Twitter, and LinkedIn.

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The Number One Mistake that Content Creators Make

Do you consider yourself a content creator? Did you notice that over the past several years, you have grown busier and busier in terms of creating content, but haven’t been able to generate any profit from all of that work?

If you answered “yes,” you are likely making one common mistake that content creators tend to make.

That is, immediately jump onto the content creation bandwagon without fully understanding why they are creating the content in the first place.

During our live interview, Julia shared that during the earlier stage of her content marketing journey, she was publishing tons of articles. She blogged almost daily and wrote numerous guest blogs. Unfortunately, the content Julia produced wasn’t able to earn her enough leads to keep her business growing. In addition, Julia was overworked and exhausted.

Can you relate to Julia’s scenario? I definitely can!

With so many experts and gurus constantly reminding us that we need to become storytellers and content creators, we probably feel an ever-increasing urge and pressure to create more and more content. Many of us quickly jump onto the content creation game without fully understanding some fundamental and crucial issues. As Julia reminded us,

Why are we producing content? What is the end goal for the content that we are producing? How is my content moving me closer to my end business goals and objectives?

Failing to reflect on these questions was one of the biggest mistakes that I made in my social media and content creation journey. I didn’t take the time to think through these overarching questions. I got lost in creating content for the sake of creating content. I was doing busy but not meaningful work. I saw the trees, but not the forest.

The truth is that content is not an end in itself; it is a means to an end.

Instead of jumping onto the content creation bandwagon, we need to first think through our overall business goals and objectives, target audiences, and effective social channels to reach out to our target audiences before we start producing content. The bottom line is that you want your piece of content show up in front of the right people and at the right time in order to accomplish your intended goals.

Content creation is both an art and science. The ultimate goal for content creators is to produce captivating, creative, and valuable work of value to their audience; at the same time, learn to follow strategies and processes, guided by overall business goals. One without the other will not help you achieve the results you are aiming for.

Within this context, let’s dive into the six-step framework that can help you strategize your content creation to bring profit and conversion.

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A Six-Step Framework to Create Profitable Content

My biggest takeaway from my hour-long interview with Julia was her six-step framework to produce content that can generate profits and leads. It took Julia years to crystallize and narrow down these steps that are proven to work.

Without any further ado, let’s dive into the six-step framework to create profitable content.

1?? Get clear on the fundamentals: What does your audience want to hear & what is your content differentiation factor?

Before you start creating content, ask yourself these questions, “Who are you? What industry are you in? Where are you in the digital space? What do people in your industry want to hear about?

Julia shared one example,

If you are in the medical field and you are speaking from your place of expertise, you may not be speaking about what people want to hear.

In other words, you need to conduct research to discover what people want to hear about.

Parallel to knowing your audience, one needs to know one’s content differentiation factor.

Did you know that there are two million blog posts going out every single day? How can your content rise above the digital noise? Julia’s secret weapon is to have one’s own content differentiation factor, which means

What differentiates you? What differentiates your content from the rest of all the content out there? What makes you different than the rest of the volume in the digital space?

2?? Know how to bridge your audience and your sales together.

In the second stage, you are not only speaking your audience’s language, but are also bringing them through the stages of the sales awareness cycle, which includes Awareness, Consideration, and Decision.

For example, how do you speak with your customers when they are considering your products or services? And how do you bring them to a close to become paying customers? It’s crucial that you know how to create content that can speak to your audience at each stage of the sales awareness cycle.

3?? Knowing your Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Step three is about knowing your software and the techniques you should use to conduct keyword search to boost your SEO. Julia shared that this step played a key role in her overall success as a content marketer.

For example, when you are conducting keyword search, Julia suggested:

Don’t look at the numbers when it comes to search volume. Look at the competition. How competitive is that keyword? If it is a  low competition keyword, you might be able to rank high in a few months. If you get into the first five in Google for a search phrase, that is worth so much money.

To know exactly if a keyword ranks high or low on competitiveness, Julia shared that you had to rely on tools. And using the right tool is key to finding the right keywords for your content.

Two particular tools that Julia spoke highly of are:

? SEMrush

? Mangools.

Any of the above tools can give you a score on keyword competitiveness instantaneously. For example KWFinder (Keyword finder) via Mangools will give you a keyword score from 1 to 100 and will inform you of the difficulty level of that keyword.

Julia shared a simple example to help us understand this.

For example, if your keyword is ‘black dress,’ the competition can be 100, but if you lessen the keyword to ‘a little black dress size medium for my prom,’ then you might have a competition of 20. This means that only other 20 websites are competing with you. That’s when you know this is a great keyword and you can create content on it.

4?? Building online authority through your content course

Step four means that you need to know where you publish and when you publish.

To me, I publish my content on Medium. This is my home base. However, to Julia, she publishes her content on her website.

How about you? Where do you publish your content?

5?? Create content consistently

Once you have developed your strategy & are intimately familiar with the first four steps, you can start to create & distribute your content. However, rather than pushing out as much volume as possible, you need to refer to the first four steps to help you decide what and how often to publish.

Once you have your schedule optimized, stick to it! Keep your audience coming back for more, lead them along in the sales cycle, and don’t disappoint them. This is how Julia went from 45 to 1 piece per week. She was able to optimize that work and consequently keep her workload to a manageable level. It was both profitable and sustainable.

6?? Budget, promote, and do content maintenance.

Julia observed a pattern among content creators: Most of creators publish a piece of content and then forget about it. Most people rarely update their own content! I am definitely guilty of this myself.

However, through proper content maintenance, there is so much more value that we can gain from our existing content. For example, Julia shared that she once updated a piece of her old content and that brought her a new sale within three days!

What an incredible story.

Content maintenance is indeed crucial. Take time to review your old work and keep it updated with your current branding, fix errors, update it with new information, and re-share it. This is effective content re-purposing.

When you are updating an old piece of content, here is another great tip from Julia. Simply update the content without changing the URL of the content, because the content has already generated a certain level of SEO for you. If you want, you can add a sentence such as “this article is updated on which date.”

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From FOMO to JOMO: A Paradigm Shift

You are probably aware of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). Every time when a new app or tool comes out, we feel an urge to jump onto it, secretly fearing that we might miss out on the next biggest thing.

Unfortunately, much of content creation — and more broadly, social media — operates on the FOMO paradigm. There’s an urgent need, both real and perceived, to stay fresh and updated.

James Altucher once asked Ice-T how long it would take for people to forget about him if he stopped producing new work. Ice-T’s response: 6 months. Most of us probably operate on a much shorter shelf life — 6 weeks or 6 days!

The drive to remain current is, in its own right, predicated on FOMO. However, as I have learned from Julia’s experience, producing content following the FOMO paradigm is simply not scalable. It will only exhaust you and bury you in busy work.

If you can somehow relate to the FOMO scenario, it is time to consider a new paradigm. That is, JOMO, Joy of Missing Out. Instead of feeling fearful of missing out, we need to take the time to stay focused on what we are doing. As Julia shared,

Sometimes, it is crucial that we ignore everyone else and put our heads down, and focus. Although staying focused is harder than ever, you have to do it to be successful with your content creation. At the same time, instead of just creating a ton of content, think about how you can create the best piece of content? That’s where I focused. I went from 45 pieces a week to one.

What a drastic move! But, clearly the change has helped Julia’s business. She was able to achieve her first financial breakthrough of earning $120K a month.

If you are interested in learning more about JOMO, Julia and I actually did an entire separate Facebook live interview on JOMO and what it means to content creators.

Click on the link below to watch the replay of our interview, JOMO > FOMO: How to Focus Your Efforts for Powerful Content Results.

Conclusion

Although creating content takes a lot of work, knowing how to do it strategically will make it much more sustainable, scalable, and profitable in the long run. You need to stay focused and understand the overall business goals and objectives, and rely on the right strategies and tools to guide your content creation. I hope Julia’s six-step framework and the tips shared in this article can help you create content that scales and brings profit.

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