This content strategy is game-changing

Read Time: 5 minutes

Welcome to BE THE EXPERT! In today’s issue:

• Game-changing content strategy
• How to Read a Teleprompter without Looking Creepy
• Alex Hormozi invests in Skool???

Game-changing content strategy

What if every piece of content you created helped sell your products or programs?

What if that could be done without “pitching” and “selling” all the time?

In this issue, I’m going to show you exactly how.

Quick Summary

• Organize what you teach or provide into 3 – 7 “pillars”
• For each pillar, generates lists of the most important problems, challenges, questions, your ideal customers have.
• In each piece of content you create, speak to ONE pillar and ONE topic
• For each pillar create a lead magnet that addresses the BIGGEST challenge
• In each piece, simply mention, without pitching, that the topic is covered in depth in your course/program/coaching
• In each piece, make your call to action be the lead magnet for the relevant pillar

NOTE: For the thousands of you who have downloaded my free ​Revenue-generating Content Planner​, it is designed specifically to help you with these exact steps!

Let’s dive in with some real examples!

Define your content pillars

Have you defined an overarching signature system or methodology for your expert business?

The high-level phases or steps you use to create a transformation or outcome for your customers.

Doing so is critical for aligning everything in your business.

It’s one of the first things we do with clients in our Solo to Virtual CEO program. See what I did just there 😉

This is valuable because it helps answer a lot of questions creators and solopreneurs get bogged down with, like:

• What content should I create?
• What should I write about?
• What should be in my course?

Here’s an example: say you are a fitness expert. As you think about everything someone needs for a transformation from unhealthy to healthy, maybe YOUR pillars would be:

• Mindset
• Keto Diet
• Resistance Training
• High-intensity Cardio Training

In my case, the transformation I provide is helping people build and run their own expert businesses, taking them from solo to virtual CEO.

My pillars (the things I believe are critical for success) are:

• Strategy
• Systems
• Tools
• Team

Once you have your pillars defined, it gets much easier to plan content, lead magnets, and products.

Generate content ideas from your pillars

The next step is to take each pillar and generate content ideas.

How do you do that? Use this simple list:

• Top questions about [Pillar]
• Top challenges with [Pillar]
• Top struggles with [Pillar]
• Top strategies for [Pillar]
• Top tools for [Pillar]

Whether you list them yourselves or use AI to help as we do in our content planner, you will quickly get dozens or hundreds of content ideas that are automatically aligned to your pillars and business goals.

In our upcoming content engine implementation program, we go into much more depth on additional topic types and aligning to the stages of the buyer’s journey, but the list above is a good starting point.

Again, there is an example of mentioning a paid program or building awareness and excitement for a new product without being overly salesy…

In your content strategy, you would generally pick a pillar for a given week or month and draw from your ideas list for the given pillar.

Focus each content piece on ONE pillar

95% of the time, each piece of content should focus on one pillar.

This helps keep your content tight and focused.

Occasionally, you may do an overview of all of your pillars, like a definitive guide or something like that.

But most of the time, pick a pillar, pick one of your content ideas, and focus on that.

You would then rotate through your pillars over weeks or months.

A big mistake many creators make (myself included) is trying to address every topic and every level of your audience in the same piece.

Instead, keep it focused and useful.

Mention your paid programs

Within all your content it is more than OK to mention your paid programs.

Most of the time, you want it to be just a casual reference. I did that in the example above. Just a mention that a more comprehensive approach or program exists.

No links, no call to action. Just a mention.

That plants the seed in your reader or viewer’s mind that there is more available.

When you are in more of a launch or promotion phase, it is perfectly fine to put a more direct pitch in, but think 10% of the time or less for your public content.

Instead, what we do want to do is create a useful next step for the person to take after consuming the content.

That is where lead magnets come in…

Create lead magnets for your pillars

For each pillar, we like to create a lead magnet that addresses ONE of the biggest challenges or struggles.

Why? Because we want our content to accomplish two goals at all times:

1. Actually help the reader
2. Convert them to a lead by getting them to opt into something to get even more value

The more aligned your lead magnet is with the topic of your content, the better the conversions will be. That’s why we suggest one per pillar since all of your content will roll up to a given pillar.

The lead magnet should also align with one of your paid programs.

An ideal lead magnet solves one problem for your ideal customer while making them aware of the other problems you solve.

Earlier, I mentioned our content planner lead magnet. Let’s see if it meets the two requirements.

Does it actually help people?

Yes, we’ve received great feedback that it’s helping people quickly put together an excellent content plan for their businesses.

Does it make them aware of other problems that our paid programs help with?

Yes. We offer done-for-you editing, repurposing, and posting.

Once someone has a backlog of lots of content ideas they want to create, that introduces the next problem we help solve: getting all that content created!

Other examples of good lead magnets are 3 – 7 day email courses.

You can cover more challenges and open more loops of the next set of topics your programs address.

Use the right calls to action

When you have a solid lead magnet for a given pillar, you want to make sure to include it as the call to action for any content related to that pillar.

So, in my example, any time we’re talking about Strategy (one of my pillars) and content (one element of the pillar), we have the planner lead magnet as our call to action.

In another of my pillars (Team), one of our lead magnets is a team assessment quiz.

If I were creating a content piece about fractional teams for solopreneurs, it wouldn’t make sense for my call to action to be to the content planner.

It wouldn’t be aligned.

A team assessment quiz is, so it will convert a lot better.

The key to a good call to action is first delivering real value in your content.

Solve something for the reader.

THEN it is fine and even appreciated when you offer them a lead magnet that will deliver even more value.

Following up after the opt-in

Once people have opted into your lead magnet for one pillar, in your follow-up sequences, you can introduce the other pillars, which will demonstrate your comprehensive coverage of whatever your niche is.

You can also begin mentioning and more directly promoting your paid programs.

When your pillars are embedded across all of those elements, and your audience sees all of the different pieces aligned to them, it generates the know / like / trust factor required for a sale.

Take Action

1. If you haven’t already, grab our free revenue-generating content planner and USE IT to define your pillars and content ideas.
2. Organize what you teach or provide into 3 – 7 “pillars”
3. For each pillar, generate lists of the most important problems, challenges, and questions your ideal customers have.
4. In each piece of content you create, speak to ONE pillar and ONE topic
5. For each pillar, create a lead magnet that addresses the BIGGEST challenge
6. In each piece, simply mention, without pitching, that the topic is covered in depth in your course/program/coaching
7. In each piece, make your call to action the lead magnet for the relevant pillar

Saturday Spotlight 💡

Content Spotlight:​

​How to Read a Teleprompter without Looking Creepy​ – Gerald Undone

Several new clients joining our Content Engine service this week had a common question: How can I read from a teleprompter without looking like I’m reading from a teleprompter?

This video has a bunch of tips that help!

Tool Spotlight:​

​Notion Calendar is Here! Your Full Guide To The New Notion App​ – Better Creating

I am a HUGE fan and user of Notion. The planner I’ve mentioned in this post is just a taste of everything we’ve built to run our business.

Notion Calendar is a free app that lets you merge your existing calendars with anything in Notion that also has a calendar view like, say, our entire project and content management system!

News Spotlight:

​Alex Hormozi invests in Skool​ – Alex Hormozi

In the online business and marketing space Alex has grown a massive following in the last few years (how? by publishing content at scale…)

He just made a big investment in Skool which is an online community/course platform so that got a lot of buzz this week.

Skool has seen rapid growth becuase it is one of the simpler / easier platforms to start with AND they give a large affiliate commission so a lot of influencers moved to it and recommend it.

My main take away from this is that communities and courses are STILL a huge business opportunity.