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How To Create Data-Driven Content That Drives Millions Of Visitors & Rank A Single Blog Post On Page 1 Of Google For Hundreds of Keywords By Roland Frasier Blink… blink… blink. The cursor blinks back at you mockingly as you stare into the blank white screen of your computer, trying to imagine what content to create that will magically capture your audience’s interest and catapult you to the top of the search engines. How many times have you found yourself staring at your screen trying to think of what to create next? If you’re like most people trying to come up with a steady stream of original and interesting content ideas, this probably happens to you more often than you’d like to admit. The fact is that all too often, we drive our complete content marketing strategy based on wild guesses and group brainstorming sessions trying to read the tea leaves to determine what will appeal to our audience and drive traffic to our websites. Data Driven Content to the Rescue But, it doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, it really shouldn’t be that way at all. You can use a few simple, inexpensive tools to access data from millions of websites and user intent actions to let the market tell you exactly what kind of content you should be creating to get the biggest bang from your content marketing efforts. In this post, we’re going to explore just exactly how you can do that so you will… 1) Never again suffer from writer’s block,

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How To Create Data-Driven Content That Drives Millions Of Visitors & Rank A Single Blog Post On Page 1 Of Google For

Hundreds of Keywords By Roland Frasier

Blink… blink… blink. The cursor blinks back at you mockingly as you stare into the blank white screen of your computer, trying to imagine what content to create that will magically capture your audience’s interest and catapult you to the top of the search engines.

How many times have you found yourself staring at your screen trying to think of what to create next? If you’re like most people trying to come up with a steady stream of original and interesting content ideas, this probably happens to you more often than you’d like to admit.

The fact is that all too often, we drive our complete content marketing strategy based on wild guesses and group brainstorming sessions trying to read the tea leaves to determine what will appeal to our audience and drive traffic to our websites.

Data Driven Content to the Rescue

But, it doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, it really shouldn’t be that way at all. You can use a few simple, inexpensive tools to access data from millions of websites and user intent actions to let the market tell you exactly what kind of content you should be creating to get the biggest bang from your content marketing efforts.

In this post, we’re going to explore just exactly how you can do that so you will…

1) Never again suffer from writer’s block,

2) Always know exactly what content to create that will resonate the most with your audience, and

3) Gain more and more organic traffic as you displace your competitors in the SERPs (search engine results pages) and rank for dozens, or even hundreds, of page 1 keywords with each blog post you create.

You’re going to accomplish that by using three specific strategies and a handful of tools that we’ve used to…

1) Build a highly niched B2C lifestyle community site from zero to over 2 million visits per month over the past 19 months,

2) Take a hybrid B2C/B2B crafts site from zero to just under 1 million monthly visits in about 8 months, and

3) Revive a virtually dead B2B niche site from almost zero to about 200,000 visits in about a year.

These strategies work across all niches and industries. As you can see, the three sites mentioned above are in vastly different markets.

First Step: Which Customer Life-Cycle Stage(s) Are You Creating Content For?

Ideally, you know in advance which of the four customer life-cycle stages you will be creating content for. We have found that our most effective content is content that we create to appeal to different target markets based upon our specific customer acquisition goals.

The image below shows the four customer life-cycle stages. They are:

1) Viral (people who have never heard of you, who are likely to click only out of curiosity or very broad interest appeal),

2) Discovery (people who have some issue or brand awareness who may be in the very early exploration stage of searching for a solution),

3) Consideration (people who are actively in the process of making a buying decision), and

4) Existing Customers (people who have already bought and need help consuming and being made aware of your other product and service offerings).

Knowing which of these segments you are trying to appeal to will change the kind of content you are creating. See the graphic below for examples of the differing audiences, goals and keywords applicable to each different customer life-cycle segment.

As you consider the different audiences, goals and keywords for each different customer life-cycle segment, you can see that the types of content you will want to create for them will vary. The image below shows three hypothetical businesses and the different types of content that they would potentially create for each of the four different life-cycle segments.

The first headline in each of the four life-cycle stages is for a financial planning business. In that case, appealing to a very wide audience who has no known or stated interest in financial planning would require broad, non-financial planning focused content that could start them on the path to more in depth information as they progress through the customer life-cycle.

The viral stage content might simply be a quiz designed to appeal to everyone’s curiosity that asks, “Can We Guess Your Real Age?” In the Discovery stage we pose the more financially focused question “Who Really Gets Your Money If You Die Without A Will?” It’s still appealing to curiosity, but now we’ve narrowed our target-market focus a bit and addressed a known issue that we know our target market is facing.

When the prospect moves on to the Consideration stage, we get even more specifically targeted to the specific needs and issues of our prospective customer with “Which XYZ Financial Plan Is Right For You?” to help them compare our services to the competition or the various financial plans or services offered by our firm.

Last, but not least, for existing customers, we want to create content that promotes “stickiness” and helps them consume the products or services they already bought from us, or that exposes them to our other products or services that they might be interested in purchasing . So, here we go with a title like “How To Get The Most From Your XYZ Financial Advisor.”

The second set of headlines in the graphic above applies to a do-it-yourself (DIY) blog, beginning with the viral “How To Make Cheese With Your Feet?” and ever-narrowing to “23 Cheese Recipes Beginners Can Make At Home,” then a live-test review video of a product we offer, and finally an advanced product upsell offer.

The third set of headlines in the graphic applies to a marketing blog, and we progress through the various customer life-cycle stages from the very broad “17 Bad Jokes Only Marketers Will Get” to the issue/interest appeal of “10 Random Words That Are Killing Your Marketing Messages,” to a “how-to” article and, finally, a template post.

Strategy #1: Create Curated Data-Driven Content That Ranks For Hundreds Of Keywords

Strategy 1 is to create a list post (or “listicle”) comprising a list made up of 25 or more items. Each of the items in the list should be something that is already being searched for by your target market. The goal is to combine multiple search queries that are already getting traffic into a single article that will capture traffic around a large number of keywords and, hopefully, rank on page one for all of those keywords.

We pick the number of 25 or more items because our research has shown that longer lists (and longer articles generally) get more traffic and generate more time on page and more shares than shorter lists, but you can create a list of any length that feels right for you.

50% of the content that we create follows this strategy. For this strategy, we use SEMRush to identify the content that our market is searching for. For purposes of this post, I’m going to assume that you already know how to use a tool like SEMRush to identify your competitors and do basic keyword research. If you need a refresher on that, check out this excellent webinar on how to use SEMRush for keyword research.

First, let’s login to SEMRush and look down the left side of the dashboard under the “Keyword Research” section and choose “Full Search” as shown in the image below.

In the search bar (#2 in the image above), type in your keyword phrase and click the “Search” button. For our DIY site in the example above, I’ve entered one of our targeted keyword phrases, “DIY Projects” and SEMRush returns 483 results (#3 in the image above). Next, let’s sort those by search volume by clicking on the “Volume” column as shown in #4 in the image above.

As you can see, our primary search term, “DIY Projects,” gets just over 60,000 monthly searches. We want to learn two important things from these results:

1) What voice does our audience respond best to? And, 2) What “call-outs” should we use to address specific sub-audiences within our main audience?

Use SEMRush To Identify “Voice,” Appealing Modifiers, Sub-Interests and Sub-Audiences

Let’s look more closely at the results and see what we can find out...

As you can see from the image above, the third most searched for keyword phrase is “easy DIY projects” with 2,900 searches per month. The fifth most searched for phrase is “cool DIY projects” with 2,400 monthly searches, followed not far behind by “fun” with 1,600 searches and “cute” with 880.

Using this data, we now know that there is a significant portion of our audience that is very specifically interested in learning more about things that are easy, cool, fun and cute. Armed with that knowledge, we can start framing our content, and the voice we write to our audience in, around those terms.

Speaking of audience, what else can we learn about our audience from these results? Well, the 4th results shows us that they are interested in projects for the “home” with 2,900 searches. They also like “craft” projects (2,400 searches), “wood” projects (1,900 searches), “art” (1,800 searches) and so on.

Additionally, we can see that people also want to know about DIY projects for specific sub-groups like “men” with 880 searches.

Creating Data-Driven Content That Ranks & Drives Traffic

Using this data, we know that we can create content and soak up search results for craft, wood and art projects for the home that are easy, cool, fun and cute and that appeal to men. Get the idea?

Okay, so now that we’re getting the hang of this, let’s use SEMRush to build a high-ranking, search query driven post. Take a look at the image below…

Start by finding the “Keyword Research” section on the left side dashboard and clicking on the “Overview” selection. In the search bar (#1 in the image above), I’ve typed the keyword phrase “paracord projects” that I found to be of interest to the DIY market using the research method we just completed in the last section.

As you can see in #2 in the image above, the phrase match report tells us that there are 18,100 searches each month for our primary term. Here, we’re interested in creating content around and ranking for this highly desirable and well-trafficked keyword phrase, so let’s take a look at searches that Google says are related to the main keyword.

SEMRush gives us this info in #3 in the image, via the Related Keywords Report. This basically saves you the time it would take to search the main term in Google and assemble all of the related search results that show up at the bottom of the page, and it also gives you more in depth information.

Looking at the list of related search phrases in the image below, we can get some great ideas for a listicle (the increasingly popular list article) about all the different paracord projects you can make…

With thousands of searches for phrases like paracord “knots,” “lanyards,” “dog collar,” “belt,” “keychain,” “bracelet,” and “watch band” this seems like the perfect opportunity to do a roundup article that lists several great resources for creating all of these specific paracord DIY projects.

Creating The Content From The Data

The next step is to source the content for the keywords that we identified that we want to build our content around. Since we are doing a list article to maximize our opportunity to rank for the maximum number of keywords, all we have to do is go and look at the SERPs for each of the different projects we want to include in our article. Here’s how you do that…

We start out under the “Keyword Research” section of the left dashboard (Item #1 above). Then we click on “Related” to do a related search (Item #2 above), and we enter our search term “DIY Paracord” in the search box (Item #3 above). Click the “Search” button and the resulting Related Keywords Report (Item #4).

Now, all we have to do is click on the “SERP source” column on the little SERP page icons (Item #5 – Item #9), and we can easily find the appropriate content to curate. Each icon that we click on reveals the SERP pages for the applicable keyword phrase and each SERP has clickable links to take us to the content for

the keyword phrase. Click each one, and move between web, images and videos to see different kinds of content. See image below.

You should be able to find all the content that you want or need to use in your list curation post from these SERP pages, and the beauty of this content is that it has already proved itself by ranking in the SERPs in the first place.

Well, that’s exactly what we did. So, let’s take a look at it and the results and see if this stuff actually works. Here’s a link to the article we created for our SurvivalLife blog from the research we did above.

http://survivallife.com/2014/03/14/36-paracord-projects-preppers

Note that we took what we learned from the research we did above and made a list of the top 36 projects based on what people are already searching for. We didn’t have to brainstorm, and we didn’t have to guess, we just searched for our primary keyword phrase “paracord projects” and then let the data do the rest.

If you take a look at the article we created from this research, you will see that the 36 paracord projects we described in the article include projects for paracord knots, lanyards, dog collars, belts, keychains,

bracelets and watch bands (sound familiar?) along with the other projects we found in the Related Keyword Report.

Check it out…

That’s Cool, But Does It Drive Traffic?

Great question! I’m glad you asked. Let’s take a look at Google Analytics for SurvivalLife and find out.

Yep, turns out that in January, this baby was responsible for over 41,000 page views with an average time on page of over 5 minutes! That’s another huge advantage of doing these kinds of posts. The time on page, one of the most important Google SERP ranking factors, is off the chart, because there is so much content for your visitors to consume.

Note: Including links back to the content you plucked from the authority sites from your list curation post gives proper attribution to the original poster and also helps the authority of your post. Oh, and be sure that you are truly curating and not stealing someone else’s content.

Case Study – Strategy 1: 487 Keywords Ranked On Page 1 Of Google

One of the most exciting things about creating these kinds of posts is that you can rank on Page 1 of Google for literally HUNDREDS of keywords with a single piece of content. Imagine, create one piece of content, one time, and rank on page 1 for almost 500 keywords. That’s exactly what we did with the paracord projects post.

Take a look…

But wait, do you have to create all of this content yourself? Of course not! This is the perfect opportunity for you to create curated posts. If you take a look at what we did in the paracord article, you’ll see that we plucked almost all of the projects and detail on how to do them from other sites.

The bottom line is that you can use SEMRush to do your keyword research and some data drill down and start creating posts like this in no time at all using one of my favorite tools of all, OPC (other people’s content).

Summary of Strategy #1

Step 1: Do a Full Search for your primary Keywords to discover your audience’s voice, sub-interests and audience niches within your primary audience.

Step 2: Do a Related Search on those keyword ideas to find “listicle” topics

Step 3: Create a listicle post using the data you discovered and link out to other people’s content on high authority domains.

STRATEGY #2: Create Data-Driven Trend & Event Related Content

The second strategy for creating data-driven content is to plan 20% of your total content around current events & trending topics. The easiest way to find out what’s trending is to use one or more of 4 tools. 2 of these tools are free (a calendar and Google Trends), and two are paid (BuzzSumo & Spike), although you can use the 2 paid tools in a limited way or on a free trial to get most of what you need for 3 or 4 months’ worth of content. Here’s how.

It’s not rocket science to know what major holidays are coming up before they actually arrive. Knowing that holidays like Christmas, New Year’s, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Valentine’s, etc. are coming up, gives you the opportunity to create content around those holidays well in advance. All you have to do is check free tool #1, your calendar, and start planning.

Use the customer life-cycle content chart and examples from the beginning of this post to brainstorm content around the holidays. Or, better yet, use the data available from SEMRush based on search queries. For our DIY site, for example, we could just enter Halloween DIY as we did in the image above.

Take a look at the results. There are thousands of searches on Halloween “props,” “sexy,” “cheap” and “last minute costumes,” “costumes for men,” “groups” and “infants,” and more. Knowing this holiday is coming up every year, year after year, we can create all sorts of great content that people will be looking for months before they start looking in earnest. The key here is just to be ready with data driven content before the holidays arrive.

If you’re not in the DIY niche, which admittedly is easier than most to create holiday content for, just use a little more brain power to come up with content creatively that people will either stumble over in their related searches or that you can post to social media and generate shares from.

Start by doing a keyword search in SEMRush in the Overview section of Keyword Research. Let’s just type in “Halloween” (#1 in the image below) and see what comes up…

Because we didn’t really get anything too exciting or idea sparking from the initial search, let’s drill down a little bit further and export the list to Excel to see more results. To do this, just click the “Export” button as shown in #2 in the image above, and you’ll get a list like the one below…

We have to scroll down past the first 16 results before we start finding some ideas that can help us in other niches, but take a look at all the possibilities with thousands of search results.

• We can create content about dog costumes (14,800 searches). Good if we sell any products or services related to pets like pet products, vet services, dog grooming, etc., or if we just want to create customer life-cycle stage 1 viral content to capture general interest.

• Crafts get 14,800 searches. Great if you sell anything that can be used in crafting, which could be virtually any physical consumer product.

• We can just do a list of jokes or ideas (14,800 searches). No matter what niche you’re in you can create a listicle on this, and just look at all the searches you can capture.

• Masks gets 12,100 searches. This works if you sell any kind of goods that could be used to create masks, and it also works if you are in family counseling, psychology, motivation, self-

improvement where you could talk about the metaphorical masks me wear. It could even apply to dating (on first dates you are meeting the real person you are meeting their representative). The opportunities are virtually endless.

• Desserts (9,900 searches), cookies (9,900 searches) and snacks (6,600 searches) work if you do anything food related and even if you just want to write a viral article and get the links.

And all of these suggestions and categories get multiple thousands of searches. You can do the same thing with every holiday and have a huge arsenal of holiday based, data-driven content ready to release and rank in time for each upcoming holiday.

The same strategy applies to events. You know that the Super Bowl, Word Series, World Cup and other sporting events happen every year. The Olympics happens every 4 years. Elections happen on a schedule. Movie release schedules are published months or over a year in advance. All of these events are scheduled and easy to anticipate.

Celebrities & trends are also a rich source of potential popular content. All you have to do is do a little data digging and then create content around them.

This data-driven event content strategy alone can provide you with enough material to fill your entire content marketing calendar, but we only create about 20% of our total content around this strategy.

Using Google Trends To Identify Trending Content

While not usually as helpful as some of the paid tools we use, Google Trends can still be a good source of data for content ideas. Let’s use Google Trends Top Charts with some popular athletes and see what kind of ideas we can come up with. You can find it at https://www.google.com/trends/topcharts

As you can see, Top Charts gives you several ideas for trending celebrities in several different categories, including actors, animals, athletes, authors, baseball players and much more. This gives us a jumping off point for deeper research to come up with content ideas.

In this case, there’s been a lot of news recently around boxer Floyd Mayweather, enough so that he is the number 3 most searched athlete for the month of March. Knowing that from Google Trends Top Charts, we can drill down a little deeper.

Next, let’s go to our paid tools (or a free trial) and see what ideas we can come up with. Looking at SEMRush, we find that one of the most popular searches related to Mayweather is about his net worth.

In fact, the number one phrase match report result (#2 in the image above) shows us that 8,100 people search for “how much is Floyd Mayweather worth” every month. So, if we were in the financial niche, here’s a bit of content that might work to tie Floyd Mayweather (and his popularity in the search results) to our target market at the Viral customer life-cycle stage.

Mashable tweeted the tweet in the image above and it generated 11,405 retweets. The tweet drove to an article (see image below) that, itself, generated an additional 51,900 shares.

Imagine if you were a financial planning firm and you used this content this way to generate 63,305 combined social shares for your business. Imagine further that you use retargeting to create custom audiences and that you pixeled those 51,900 visitors to your site to run ads to later.

Using BuzzSumo To Identify Trending Content

BuzzSumo is another paid tool that we use quite a bit to help us identify trending content. It’s not expensive, but even if you just use the free version, which only provides the top 20 results, it still provides a wealth of valuable data. Let’s take a look at what we can find for Halloween using BuzzSumo’s free version…

Here, we just enter “Halloween” in the search box (#1 in the image), and sort by the past year (#2 in the image) and include all types of content (#3 in the image). You can sort by recency if you want the data from the past 24 hours all the way up to a year. Here we use a year so that we can catch last year’s searches for Halloween. #5 shows the content results, currently sorted by largest number of Facebook shares (#4 in the image).

You can also sort by LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ or Total shares. So, even with this free version, you can find the top 20 most shared content pieces from any of 5 different time periods, six different content types and based on share volume across 5 different platforms.

Use this in the same way I showed you how to use SEMRush for holiday content above. Then, apply the same technique for sports events, movies, etc.

Substantially more expensive than BuzzSumo, but also a wonderful tool that also offers a free 14 day trial, is Spike, a tool from the fine folks at NewsWhip. Spike is like BuzzSumo, but is used primarily by the news industry to help them identify trending stories.

One of the biggest benefits of Spike is the ability to search for trends that occurred in the last 1, 3, 12 & 24 hours, as well as additional search sources like pre-viral and YouTube content.

Spike is much more flexible than BuzzSumo in terms of data depth, and if you can have both of them, they are a wonderful combination.

Unfortunately, Spike only lets you go back in time one month for content, so I chose Easter for the holiday in this example instead of Halloween. Still, you can lots of ideas about the kinds of content your market might be interested in. Apparently Peeps and Eggs are rich areas for content that will be shared on Facebook.

Both Spike and BuzzSumo let you drill down and find the Influencers on Twitter who you can reach out to for help promoting your content.

Tying It All Together: Matching Ideas & Brainstorming To Data

Okay, so now we’ve looked at several different event and news related content possibilities. One great way to reconcile everything is to start by getting your content team in a room (whether onsite or remotely) and use a shared Google Doc to collaborate and put all of your ideas down on one document.

In this stage, everyone enters their ideas on the doc and then you match up the themes and topics you discovered using your calendar, Google Trends, BuzzSumo and/or Spike to the keyword research you did using SEMRush, and whittle down to the content that you think will perform the strongest.

The result is something like the match-up document shown below…

In case you find this a little confusing, let’s explore it a little bit deeper. We do all this analysis on an Excel Spreadsheet or Google Doc.

In the Brainstorm column, you list all the themes and topics that came from the brainstorming session. In the Data column, you list all the keyword phrases and search volumes that you discovered from SEMRush. In the Create Content column, you list the posts that you actually plan to create based on matching up the theme/topics to keywords/search volume.

So, in the document above, the third idea on the list was “bracelets.” The data from SEMRush showed us that “how to make a cobra paracord bracelet (320 searches per month), “how to make a paracord bracelet” (12,100) searches, and “how to tie a paracord bracelet” (480 searches) were all viable topics.

Next, match the bracelet post idea to the SEMRush data, and greenlight the 3 bracelet articles. In fact, we actually created & posted these articles on the DIYReady site and they generate traffic every month.

Case Study – Strategy 2

So, does this strategy work? Let’s see. We noticed not long ago a lot of buzz in the news around Man Caves. So, first, we checked out our idea using BuzzSumo to see if there was any successful, shareable content out there about Man Caves. Here’s what we found…

We entered “man cave” into the search box (#1 in the image above), then used the past year as the search period (#2 above) and filtered by all types of content (#3 above). The first result confirmed our hunch and returned a post (#4 above) entitled “DIY Mancave Décor – 19 Creative and Inspiring DIY Decor and Furniture Projects” that had 7,360 Facebook shares (#5 above).

Having confirmed the shareability of this content, we then checked to see if people were also searching for mancave related content. Search volume supported the term as well, as shown in the image below.

We entered “man cave” into the search box at #1 in the image above. #2 shows the phrase match report. Then, the Live Update Related Keywords Report (#3 above) shows that there are, in fact, 18,100 monthly searches for the term “man cave ideas” as shown in #4.

We then used SEMRush and the related search data to pull 19 curated bits of content and created an article called “Man Cave Ideas | 19 DIY Decor and Furniture Projects, as shown in the image below…

To find the content for the article, we just drilled down to the “Full Report” on the “Man Cave Ideas” related search from SEMRush. Here’s how.

In the full report results, we found ideas for the list article. In #2 below you can see that there was search volume for “garage,” “cheap,” “diy,” “best,” “basement,” “furniture ideas,” “small room,” etc.

Next, we used the “SERP Source” column (#3 above) to find the actual content to curate for our post. When you click on the SERP source page icon of a particular article, SEMRush returns the search results page that the keyword came from, so you can click on the live SERPs to get your content to curate.

Just keep checking each result on the SERPs page until you find all the content you need.

How did the article perform for us? As you can see from our Google Analytics page below, one month’s traffic from this article, the 4th most popular on our DIYReady site, was 44,884 page views. Not too bad for an article that took less than a day to research and create.

So, to summarize this strategy:

Step 1: Check your calendar to create a list of trends, holidays, sports events and celebrities that you can create content around. (Tip: If you have industry events in your niche, create content around those too).

Step 2: Check Google Trends, BuzzSumo and/or Spike to discover trending news, celebrities, sports events, personalities, etc.

Step 3: Get your content team together online and brainstorm around all the ideas for topics and themes that you generated in steps 1 and 2. Have the team list them on a collaborative Google Doc.

Step 4: Use SEMRush to get the data on keywords and search volume related to the brainstormed ideas.

Step 5: Match up your topic and theme ideas to the search data and greenlight the content ideas that match up best to the search data and create the content.

STRATEGY #3: Create Data-Driven Content Around Proven Winners Now that you’ve got 50% of your content based on Strategy 1 and another 20% based on Strategy 2, it’s time to go fishing for content ideas that will give you links and traffic from sites and sources that have already raised their hand and given links and traffic to other people’s content. We use this strategy to generate an additional 20% of our content.

Kudos to Brian Dean at http://BackLinko.com where I first saw this strategy documented in detail. Here’s how it works in three simple steps:

Step 1 – Use SEMRush to find content other people have already linked heavily to.

Click on the “Backlinks” section in the dashboard on the left side (#1 in the image above). Then, type a competitor domain that you want to source high quality content from in the search bar (#2 in the image above). Check the visual dashboard to be sure that the domain has plenty of links.

In this case, we’re going to look at a competitor to our DIYReady business, Instructables.com. As you can see in the image above, they have 1.6 million backlinks coming from 78,500 referring domains and 52,400 referring IPs, plenty of backlinks to work with there.

Next, click on the “indexed pages” selection in the dashboard on the left, as shown in item #1 in the image below. This will pull up a list of all of the indexed pages on the site (item #3 in the image below)

and list all of the information about domains, backlinks, external and internal links (item #2 in the image below).

Sort the Indexed Pages results by “backlinks” by clicking on the tiny little arrow just to the right of the “Backlinks” column. We do this because we’re looking for content that will work for our market and niche that has a lot of great backlinks. Ideally, we want content that has a minimum of 100 backlinks.

You may find that you need to export the full list to drill down far enough to find the right content with the right backlinks, but it’s easy and it really doesn’t take very long.

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Scroll through the indexed pages that are listed in the sorted-by-backlinks-list that you just pulled until you find content that you think will fit your market and purpose here. In our case, we’re looking for something fun and interesting for our DIYReady site. There are several possibilities, but one post on Playdough looks really interesting. It has 443 backlinks from 160 different referring domains, so it looks like it will fit the bill nicely.

Good news! This post (shown in the image below) definitely has potential. It got almost 7 million views since it was originally posted over 6 years ago. Even though the post date is not listed, there are dates in the comments section, so you can always check there to get a publish date or at least a good approximation.

Will it work for this strategy? Maybe. The next thing we need to do is look and see if we can improve it.

Let’s click on the URL to the post itself and see if we think there are any opportunities to improve on what’s already there. If so, we’re good, but if not, then we’ll have to keep looking.

Here are four ways that we can do that.

1) Make it look better by improving the design, using better photos or making an infographic. 2) Update it with any new information or even just integrating information you learned by reading

the comments from people who tried making playdough and ran into some challenges or offer additional advice that is helpful to the playdough-making process.

3) Increase the length. For example, this article only has 2 steps. It’s possible to make more steps that more clearly and simply describe the process. You could also include several different playdough recipes or even different projects that are suitable for different types, colors or grades of playdough.

4) Make it more in depth by adding video, more pictures, do’s and don’ts, a FAQ, etc.

Step 2 – Use data to source content that is even better and more thorough than the content you found in step 1.

Okay, now we that know that we can do better than the original piece of content in several different ways, the next step is to use data to source content that is even better and more thorough than the content we need to improve upon.

Use the process described in Strategy 1 above to source the content from the SEMRush “SERP source” column on the Related Keywords Report.

Step 3 - Reach out to the influencers that made the content popular and get them to promote your, even-better content.

The final step in Strategy 3 is to reach out to the folks who helped get the original content so many links, and let them know that there is now new, even better content than what they linked to before. The goal here is that they will check out your content and link to it, since they have already linked to similar content in the past.

There are several ways to reach out to these influencers. The first step is to go look at the actual backlinks that the original content has to see which ones you should reach out to.

To do that, go to SEMRush and click on the “Backlinks” selection under the “Backlinks” section of the dashboard on the left side (Item #1 in the image below). Next, copy the link to the original content article that you have improved and paste it into the Search bar (Item #2 below). Next, click on the “Export” button on the right side of the page under the backlink visuals (Item #3)

When you click the Export button, you are given a choice of format to export your data (see image below).

Choose the one that works for you (we’ll choose Excel in this example), and click on it to complete the export.

Once the export is complete, open the exported document and you should see something like this…

This gives you a complete list of all the links that you can sort and manipulate at will. Next, sort the exported list by External Links. Then, delete all the links that either seem impossible to get (like a .gov you investigate & determine to be unattainable) or just don’t make sense & then we’ll have our final list

Now, we can use this list to start our outreach campaign. The easiest and most simple way to start your outreach is to gather the contact information of all the folks on your list and send them a short little email. I like to use Brian Dean’s email template from his Skyscraper Method post, as shown below…

The next step is to get the contact information for each potential backlink contact from your list so you can enter it into the email template above and send your outreach emails. There are several ways to get this data. You can manually go to each backlink site and try to find the contact information in the “About” section of the site.

There are 2 great reasons to reach out to Influencers. The first is to get them to link to your content. The second is that the more influencers you have, the more your content is likely to be amplified and reach a dramatically larger audience.

As you can see from the chart in the image above, if 5 influencers share your content, you can typically expect a 4 times greater reach than it would have if no influencers share it.

Here’s how we can find them. The first tool you can use is Authority Spy.

Authority Spy is a SaaS (Software as a Service) application that costs anywhere from $27 one-time to $47 per month, depending on the level of service you want to subscribe to. Paste sites or search terms into the search bar (see image below) and AuthoritySpy returns a wealth of information about your potential link partners.

Another good paid solution for semi-automating the influencer outreach process is BuzzStream, which costs anywhere between $29 and $249 per month, depending on the version you choose, and which is my first choice for influencer outreach, mainly because you can just take your full list of backlinks, load them into BuzzStream and get much of the needed contact information automatically.

There are several other tools that you may want to investigate for influencer outreach as well (see the image below).

Case Study – Strategy 3:

Using the content discovery strategy outlined in Strategy 3, we did backlink research and found a great post about DIY projects for teenagers that had a large number of backlinks. We created a curated post that improved on the original (see image below).

We conducted influencer outreach to all the prior linking influencers and ended up with a post that generated 60,549 page views last month (see image below).

Strategy 3 Summary

Step 1: Find high-ranking, high-search targeted keyword volume content with 100 or more quality backlinks.

Step 2: Improve it.

Step 3: Reach out to all the influencers who linked to the original content and let them know about your new and improved version.

BONUS STRATEGY: Create Content To Acquire High-Value Links The first three strategies presented above account for creating about 90% of the total content on our sites. So, what do we do for the remaining 10%? We do data-driven research to determine opportunities to acquire high-value links like .gov and .edu that are typically very difficult to obtain. This is a simple strategy that is solely designed to go and get high-value links.

If you’re using SEMRush, just follow the steps in Strategy 3 to find all of a competitor’s backlinks. Export the list just like in Strategy 3, and then use Excel’s “find” feature search the complete results for high-value links from .edu and .gov. Filter out all the non-governmental links and you’ll be left with a great target list like the one below.

We did this for a real estate site that competes with one of our portfolio companies and found lots of great government links that we could get for our own site like the one below where Ft. Launderdale gave a link in exchange for being given an award that any site (including ours) could give. See below.

Currently, the process of sorting through all the backlinks from a backlink export is a bit time consuming, so hopefully SEMRush will add a feature that identifies the number of different types of backlinks like .edu and .gov sometime in the near future. Ideally, you would see the number of .gov and .edu backlinks in the Backlinks Report summary and be able to click on the number and be presented with a list of those types of backlinks like some other programs do.

Strategy 4 Summary

Step 1: Identify your competitors using the Competitors

Conclusion Now you’ve seen 4 complete strategies that you can use to drive millions of visitors to your website and even rank a single blog post on page 1 of Google for hundreds of keywords. All you have to do now is go and implement these strategies. In addition to these strategies that are lots of different ways to amplify the content that you create using them. We’ll talk about that next time.

About The Author

Roland Frasier, Partner DigitalMarketer.com

Roland began his direct response career in the legal field, representing such direct response luminaries as Tony Robbins, Brian Tracy and Dennis Waitley and providing information channels for AOL and CompuServe. His companies have been involved in the production of several infomercials, including 14 infomercials with Guthy-Renker and 2 with k-Tel Direct for products such as Medicus Golf Clubs and many others. He is a partner in DigitalMarketer.com, and the co-founder of Funnel Experts, a consultancy providing marketing and conversion funnel optimization services to a wide array of clients across over 100 different

industries. Roland and his team have assisted clients ranging from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries to USAir, the Buffalo Bills and Franklin-Covey. He is a sought after international speaker and has a reputation as an exceptional marketing strategist.

You can connect with Roland on Facebook at http://Facebook.com/RolandFrasier, LinkedIn at http://LinkedIn.com/In/RolandFrasier & Twitter at http://Twitter.com/RolandFrasier