The Online Content Creation Formula For Success

Today I had a quick conversation with a member of our team that is going to start contributing content to our website. I was explaining our general internal process for producing awesome content on our sites and it occurred to me I've never published an article on my own site about how to write awesome articles.

First the Disclaimer: The site you are on right now… jacobspaulsen.com is where I rant and share about my life of marketing and personal development. Don't hold me accountable to doing all the stuff I preach on this site. The lessons I share here are things I apply on my businesses and the websites where I actually generate revenue… not here on my hobby/journal site.

Here is our process start to finish:

1. Identify a topic worth producing content around
2. Use Google and the Google Adwords Keyword tool to determine the top search phrases for that content topic. For example if I want to write an article about how to select the best toilet paper at the grocery store I might find out that the top related search phrase is actually: “Best Rated Toilet Paper.” The top search phrase should be a massive consideration in your articles headline.
3. Finalize the article's headline considering both the top search phrase as well as what would actually be enticing to readers. It needs to have shock value or create significant curiosity to the relevant audience.
4. Find the following three competitors:
   1. The #1 ranked content piece for your target search phrase
   2. The #1 top quality (based on your own opinion) article on the topic
   3. The #1 top quality or most popular YouTube video on the topic
5. Ask yourself how are you going to improve on the three competitors outlined above. What can you add or better explain to make it better?
6. Formulate an outline for your own content by first just listing out key points that you want to make. This generally just looks like a list of bullet points at first.
7. Organize your list of key points into the best chronological order so as to help the reader flow through the content is such a way that is logical, emotional, or brings them to the conclusion you are trying to recommend.
8. Ask one other person who is also very familiar with the topic to look at your outline and point out anything you have missed.
9. Turn the key points into section headers and repeat step 3 for each section header to make sure those section titles keep the reader reading.
10. Fill in the content for each section
11. Review the content and work on gathering or creating the best supporting images or videos to accompany the content. You probably need more than you think.
12. Have another person read through your final draft.

There is our full process that we try (try is a keyword here) to follow. When we do, it always leads to a source of strong and ongoing traffic.

Cheers,

Jacob