- [Neil Patel] Hey everyone, it's Neil Patel and today is another day of Content Marketing Unlocked. And I'm going to be teaching you alternative content strategies. There's two main strategies I'm going to be teaching you today.
But first, here's something I want to ask you, or more so I want to tell you. User generated content can be a powerful tool to grow your traffic on any budget. And more so what I wanted to ask you is now here, which is what do all these companies have in common?
The Google's, the Facebook's, the YouTube's, the Apple's, you know, Android which is technically owned by Google, and even Instagram, which is owned by Facebook. Yes, they're all multibillion dollar companies, but they have something else in common. And what they have in common is, they leverage user generated content.
They're not creating their own content. They're scaling by leveraging other people's content. And it's a very effective approach or else they wouldn't be these massive multibillion dollar companies.
And even if you look at smaller companies like Forbes, which is still a multimillion dollar organization, they get over 144 million visits. How do they do this? Guest contributors.
Over the past 24 hours, they've had over 745 blog posts. Just think about that, 745. Let that sink in for a minute.
That amount of content that they continually produce, on not just a daily basis, but they do this all year around, has helped him reach millions of visitors a month. So who is a guest contributor? Well, a guest contributor is someone who writes articles or content on another site.
This person contributes as a guest and in return gets compensated for writing that content. Now that compensation isn't always money based. A lot of times it's notoriety, they may get traffic to their website from it.
In most cases, from what we see, it is not money based. In other words, you don't really have to pay people to be a guest contributor. A lot of people love to because they want the extra press, the awareness, because hey, marketing is expensive, so if you can get free press, why not?
One of my business's, Crazy Egg, over the years we scaled up our content, got hundreds and thousands of visitors, and we did it through guest contributors. Super effective. But there's some rules that you need to follow if you're going to be leveraging guest contributors.
First, you don't want people writing regurgitated information on your website. That material needs to be new, fresh, that hasn't been published before. And you don't want that same content to also be on your website, or their website.
So if they publish it on your website, you don't want them to take a same piece of article and also put on their website, has to be new and just put on your website. And sure they may own the content, but they're giving you right to use it. So where do you acquire these guest contributors?
Well you don't really have to pay them or anything, but there's a process that I use. I pretty much look at all my competitor blogs. I do some research to see who's a guest contributor, typically they're labeled as guest contributor, and I see if I like their content, did it get a lot of social shares?
Did it get a lot of engagement? If so, maybe I should hit that person up and try to get them to write for me. Write down a few important things like the social shares, their LinkedIn profiles, their email address, if I can find it online or I'll use tools like hunter.
io, I'll, you know, write down their name, their own website. And I even break down the post that I read of theirs that I liked. And that all helps me, you know, have ammo so then that way I can then go out and reach out to all the people that I want, you know, who are guest contributors on other people's websites to be a writer for my website.
And I'll use a template or email that looks something like this, and I know this is a lot to read, you don't have to read it now, I've broken it down into brackets and you just fill in the blanks in the brackets, or you can customize it using the information you just got on the previous slides that we discussed such as what articles you like, what do they write on, their expertise? So that way you can make it even more custom. But what you can do for now is look at this template and you don't have to read it all, as I mentioned, I have it for you at neilpatel.
com/training, click on Content Marketing Unlocked, and then within there go to week two, video three, and you'll see the template beneath the video and you can just use that and send that off. Another thing is when you hit these people up and you get more contributors, over time, it makes it easier and easier to get more and more. And after a while, they'll start hitting you up so you don't actually have to approach them anymore.
They'll just start coming to you. because people will be like, I want exposure, I see so and so got it, I want to be on that site too. And as I mentioned, they'll see some more contributors, more visibility, higher SEO traffic, higher rankings, and this will allow you to scope your content marketing without having to spend tons of money.
Heck you can actually do it for free. You yourself can edit their content, make sure it's good. Or in many cases, some of these writers will just write it and there won't be really any editing that's needed at all.
Now there's a lot of case studies and field reports that you can use to help you build out this strategy, go to neilpatel. com/training, click on Content Marketing Unlocked, click on week two, video three, and you can download that. So that'll help you get started, especially when it comes to guest authors.
Now, another strategy that I wanted to discuss today is Google Search Console, because this can help your website rank really well from a technical standpoint. And the way you end up doing it, is you go to Google Search Console, click on your website, if it's not installed, make sure you install it. The first thing I want you to do is check your Crawl Errors Report, fix any errors.
The more errors you have, the worse your rankings are going to be in most cases. So make sure you go and fix them. And once you fix them, click on the Validate Fix, and then Google will crawl it and tell you if it's been fixed or not.
Sometimes it takes a bit, but they'll go and crawl. And here's a workaround to make sure Google can fix this really quickly. So you can see if he did a good job or, you know, you can just wait sometimes days or a week for Google to do it on their own.
Within Search Console there's a URL bar at the top, whatever pages had those issues, put the page URL in there and tell them to crawl that page, just hit enter and they'll say, would you like us to crawl it? And just go through and click Yes and Next, and that'll help you get the answer sooner than later, if the issue or the error has been fixed. The next thing I want you to do is submit your sitemap.
So, you know, usually a sitemap is going to be like yourdomain. com/sitemap. X or XML.
You can use the free tool, xml-sitemaps. com to generate a sitemap for your site. If you're on WordPress, you can use a Yoast SEO plugin to automatically generate a sitemap, but make sure you submit that sitemap to Google Search Console, because that way they know all the pages on your site, and then they're more likely to crawl them.
Or if you release new content, the sitemap automatically can update, especially if you're using things like the Yoast SEO plugin, and it'll tell them, notify Google to crawl that page that way you can get index again. Next, I want you to click Links within Google Search Console. This will show you all the people that are linking to your site and the top most linked pages.
And you can see top most linked pages, They break them down. And what I want you to do is go and look to see what pages are getting links. Who's linking to them?
Are these pages the ones with the right keywords? Well if not, if they're not ranking well, you should go and do keyword research using Ubersuggest and go adjust the keywords on those pages so they get more traffic because if you have a lot of links coming to your pages, but they're not ranking well, it doesn't really matter. You want to go and adjust and fine-tune it so that way you can get more traffic.
Then of course, click on Breadcrumbs within the sidebar. You want to make sure you have good Breadcrumbs, your URL's look pretty. As you can see the before and after image, you can see how it's nice and pretty on the right side versus the left side is not as pretty.
So things like Breadcrumbs, Schema Markup, really important. It helps with click-throughs in the long run. Every little bit adds up.
If you're on WordPress, there's a lot of different options for plugins like the Schema All In One Schema Rich Snippets, or Breadcrumb NavXT, you can use these to help you with your Schema and Breadcrumbs as well. And once you make these changes to your site or any changes to your site if you're improving it, and you want Google to pick it up and get your rankings faster you can always submit your URL at the very top, within Search Console, submit it and Google will crawl it faster than if you just wait for them to do it all on their own. Another thing to look at is AMP.
AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. You see on neilpatel. com.
I use this. It allows Google to load your content super, super blazing fast for anyone who's on a mobile device. I recommend checking it out.
Easy way to get traffic. We see by using this, you get a boost in traffic from mobile devices in countries where their infrastructure, internet infrastructure isn't as good. We haven't seen really any traffic increases from using this on, let's say sites that are primarily targeting, let's say, the United States or the UK.
Another thing I love using because speed is an important part of SEO, is Lazy Load. That means that someone scrolls and reads your pages, it loads up the images as they're scrolling, versus loading them up all when they first visit your site, because that just takes longer and creates a poor experience. So check out the Lazy Load plugin, especially if you're using WordPress.
And last but not least, I want you to go check out the Security Issues area within Search Console, make sure there's no security issues. because if you have a lot, Google, won't rank your site in the long run. Now what I want you to do is go to neilpatel.
com/training, click on Content Marketing Unlocked, week two, video three. I want you to download some things, first, there's a content reduction tool list that'll help you out. Then of course, the email template that will help you get writers and the outreach sheet to help you track everything.
And once you download these three files, you're off into the races and you can start producing more content and generating more traffic. So over the next week, I'm going to be covering how you can get your content to rank faster. Then I'm going to teach you how to promote it, even if you have no money.
Then I'm going to go over advanced on and off-page optimization strategies. And then of course link building, because without links your content won't rank as well. If you enjoy this video, make sure you like the video, share it, tell your friends about it, subscribe to the channel.
If you have any questions, leave a comment below. If you just need help with your marketing, you want my agency to do it for you, check out Neil Patel Digital. I hope this lesson has helped you find contributors so that way you can scope your content marketing efforts.
Take care and have a wonderful day.
