6.3 How to Format Content for the Web

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In this video I discuss:

  • How to format content for the web
  • The BIG formatting differences between web content and more traditional content
  • How to strike a balance between on-page SEO and user experience within your content

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

 

6.3 Transcript Below

Hey there, everyone!

First of all, you have to forgive me if this feels a little bit disconnected. You’ll probably notice in Lesson 6.2, I’m wearing like a different outfit and then in Lesson 6.5, again I’m wearing that outfit; but in 6.3 and 6.4, things are a little bit different. And that is because the first time when I recorded 6.3 and 6.4, for some reason, they had no audio. So I recorded them a few weeks ago and now realized that they have no audio and I’m re-recording them. So please forgive me if it feels a little bit disconnected. But I promise the information is all going to stay the same. Alright.

So I want to talk to you a little bit about how to format content for the web. That’s what we’re talking about in this lesson because it’s very different than other forms of media and we’ll talk about that as we dig into today’s lesson. Alright.

So before we begin writing, I want to make sure (as I just said) to really call attention to the differences between print media and traditional media (traditional writing) and web content because there are some stark differences. And if you try and put the type of formatting and style that you would put in print media on the web, it’s going to make for a really, really, really bad user experience and overall hinder the success of your website.

So one of the biggest things that we do with web content – at least experienced writers – we settle into it over time. Everyone figures this out at one point or another as you’re building an internet business. You want to break your paragraphs into smaller chunks. I say “chunks”, so, you know, whereas in a book you may have that much text on a page… if you put that much text on the web; in someone’s web browser, especially on a mobile device – it looks really, really, really bad. So you want to break your paragraphs up into smaller chunks. That doesn’t mean you write a sentence or only two sentences for every paragraph, but you’ll see what this looks like as this section continues.

The other thing that I want to call attention to is, of course, when you’re reading a magazine or a newspaper, you have justified text. And in case you don’t know what justified text is, it’s where basically you have these perfect lines on either side and the spacing in the paragraph is a little bit larger and shorter on some lines than others because it gives that really nice clean line, and next to it another line for another column, and the next to it another line for another column and it makes for these really clean lines.

We don’t do that with web content because it’s a nightmare. It’s just a coding nightmare, a formatting nightmare, and it just wouldn’t make for a very good user experience because we would have all this kind of mixed spacing and it just wouldn’t make any sense. It looks really, really, really bad. And again, especially once you take it from a computer screen and try to make it mobile responsive so it displays the same way on someone’s phone – nightmare. Nightmare and a half, for sure. So we just don’t do that. We don’t worry about justifying text with web content.

The other thing we want to make sure to do as we go through our article – and again we’ll see this later – is as you’re writing, you want to insert images regularly to help break up that wall of text feeling. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a website, you may not have noticed it consciously, you probably just left without realizing why you were leaving; but if you go to a web site and they don’t have their paragraphs broken up into smaller chunks and on top of that, they don’t have images inserted kind of periodically throughout the text, it feels really overwhelming because your screen is just covered in text.

And I don’t care who you are, I don’t care how much you enjoy reading, that is not a good feeling. It’s overwhelming. And typically what it results in is subconsciously, without even realizing it, navigating away from the website and just going and finding one of their competitors that gives the information but they formatted it a little bit better. So don’t let that happen to your website, right? Format the content correctly from the very beginning. And I’ll talk to you in the next lesson – 6.4 – we’ll talk about where to get these images.

And you’ll also want to make sure to strike a balance between search engine optimization and user experience, alright? So of course, we’ve got all these acronyms: that’s SEO and UX. We want to make sure to strike a good balance between these two things, because yes, you want to insert your keywords where they’re helpful and they boost your on-page SEO and they lay a solid foundation for you to get rankings down the road for the keyword you’re optimizing for.

But at the same time, we don’t want to overdo it so much that it’s hurting the user experience. We don’t want a keyword stuff, we don’t want to cram these keywords in every single headline because Google has gotten good enough over the past few years that when you sacrifice user experience specifically to try and game Google and get rankings, it’s going to hurt you. It’s going to not only hurt your user experience, but it could significantly hurt your ability to rank for the keywords you’re trying to rank for. So don’t overdo it. You want to find a nice balance. And of course, we’ll look at that as we continue through this section and I’ll take you in a few lessons over the shoulder so we can see the type of content that I’m describing with all of these different kind of elements that we’re going through lesson by lesson. Okay?

So as I mentioned, you’ll see all of these in the coming lessons. I think it’s going to be crystal clear by the time you finish this section. How all of these things add up to really high-quality content that’s going to get ranked, that’s going to create a wonderful user experience and is going to really, really set you up for success down the road.

Okay, I just realized one thing I forgot to discuss was when I mentioned justified text: excessive fonts. What I mean by excessive fonts is you don’t want these really fancy… you don’t want to pick a theme with this really fancy font. You want really clean, easy-to-read simple font. You don’t want something… you know, a lot of the time journalists will use Serif fonts which is a classification of fonts that have a different style on kind of the ends of the letters. Maybe they have these lines on the end.

You’ll notice that most web content is Sans Serif which means it’s just… the best way I can think to describe this – smoother looking. But you could if you’re really curious, you can Google Serif versus Sans Serif. S-E-R-I-F versus S-A-N-S S-E-R-I-F. So that way you can kind of get an idea, but you know, you could also just take my word for it.

Most good themes are just going to have a Sans Serif font, meaning it doesn’t have those little edges and lines and stuff like that. You’ll even see in the text that I’m using on this slideshow, this is a Sans Serif font. You’ll notice that it doesn’t have any… like Times New Roman and Georgia – they have these kind of fancy on the edges of the letters, they have these extra lines and decoration and they overall just make text a little bit harder to read. And we want to lower the barrier to enjoyment as much as possible to ease of use (usability), user experience. We want to make it as user-friendly as possible and typically a Sans Serif is what does that.

So you don’t need to get that technical. You don’t need to be looking at your themes and be like, “Oh my God, I have a Serif font.” Don’t freak out about it, alright? In most cases, it’s going to be taken care of for you and you don’t need to worry about going into the code and editing that stuff. If you want to address those things down the road, once you’re getting traffic, you can hire a programmer and they can fix it really, really quickly and easily, alright? So I just realized that I overlooked that in that bullet point and I wanted to backtrack before I finish the video and address that.

So as I mentioned, you’ll see all of this in the coming lessons as we work on the content for Rue Tattoo and I think it’s going to be really, really clear before we’re done.

But as always, if you have any questions, feel free to post them to the Facebook group, we’d be more than happy to help; and if nobody else comes along to help, I’ll be there, I promise. And in any other circumstance, I guess, I’ll just see you in the next video. Talk to you then.

6.2 Preparing Content and Creating an Outline

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In this video I discuss:

  • What you need to do to prepare to write high-quality content
  • How much time you can expect to spend preparing for writing high-quality content
  • Creating an outline to work as efficiently and productively as possible once you start writing

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

 

6.2 Transcript Below

Okay!

So the first step in creating high-quality content is creating an outline. It’s going to serve as the foundation for the rest of the post. And I found that it helps really accelerate things and break them down into smaller chunks, because sometimes it can be very intimidating and almost (for me personally) debilitating to think about a topic without breaking it down into smaller chunks.

And so that’s a function of creating an outline before you start writing. I think it’s just going to optimize the entire process for you. And for whatever reason, it’s something that I didn’t start doing until several years in and it has helped me tremendously – and not only when I write, but also when I train my writers for my business in my individual websites how to write.

So, Step 1. Before you start kind of… creating the outline is to research your topic pretty extensively. And once you’ve found your keywords and you know what you’re going to write about, you should start researching before you start writing, obviously.

And this is where existing expertise comes in very, very handy. The more experience you have in the niche you are in and the topic you are writing about, the less time you’re going to spend on research. And the opposite of that is true as well.

If you’ve picked a passion-based business (and we talked about this when we were picking a niche), you’re going to spend a lot more time researching because you know less about the industry and it’s harder to create a ton of value that you can build a very successful business on. It’s not impossible, but it’s likely going to take more time researching every single time you write an article.

So this is where if you picked an expertise-based niche – like in an industry you’ve worked in in the past or if you have a certification for something, it’s going to be a big advantage and a big time-saver for you. Don’t get discouraged if you’ve picked a passion-based niche because those can be more fun and more energizing to work on. They have their own advantages that are very unique, too. But just know that you’re going to spend more time researching your topics probably before you start writing content.

An important thing to do when you are researching and putting together your outline is to make sure you’re gathering from credible sources and high-quality sources. You don’t want to just kind of perpetuate false information or write outdated information because you didn’t do enough research.

So at the end of the day, if you’re unclear on what’s actually the correct advice for whatever you’re writing about, you need to do more research until that becomes clear. Don’t just start writing because you feel like, “Ah, I’ve been researching for five hours now and I still don’t know what I’m doing. I’m just going to write this.” It’s important if you want to become an authority within your industry that you make an extreme effort to always post really credible, high-quality, truthful, factual content; because if you don’t, over time, that’s going to catch up with you.

And after you’ve done all your research… actually, typically, they kind of happen simultaneously. As you’re doing your research, you’re starting to formulate the article and that’s creating your outline.

And as I mentioned at the beginning of this video, this is going to dramatically improve your productivity once you begin writing. Because every time you finish a section, you don’t have to go, “Oh, what am I writing about next?” and sit there and think about it. You can just start writing it because you’ve probably already researched it and that’s why it’s in your outline.

At the very least, you want to have in every article… it’s very similar to if you think back to when we learned how to write in I guess middle school and high school and even college… when you’re writing an essay, it’s composed of an introduction, a conclusion, and at least three points in between. And the same actually applies very well to blogging and so I would say aim for at least that in your business. An intro, three solid points, and then a conclusion.

Remember, above all else, you want to add value to that reader’s life. So you want to make sure you’re addressing their pain points or their questions head-on and adding value to their lives based on the perspective of someone that would be facing those pain points or questions – which, if you’re in that niche, are probably pain points and questions at least in many cases that you’ve faced yourself.

All-in-all… I’ve mentioned this in a previous video, I believe. High-quality articles are usually going to come out to at least 1,200 to 1,500 words – maybe somewhere between a 1,000 and 1,200. But most of the time, they’re going to come out to somewhere in this neighborhood: 1,200 to 1,500 words.

And you know, I see people post 500-word articles… 800-word articles… you can see they just kind of throw it out there and hit Publish. And if you read those articles, there’s just (the vast majority of the time) no way to add the kind of value you need to add on that topic to become an authority in that industry. It’s just not a very helpful piece of content. It just barely scratches the surface of the topic compared to other people in the industry that are really digging deep and kind of fleshing the entire topic out. And if you’re doing that the vast majority of the time, it’s going to be at least 1,200 to 1,500 words in my experience.

The article I wrote for this section as an example (which we’ll see for the first time here in a few minutes or in a couple of minutes) is just over 2,000 words. And like I said, that may sound really intimidating, but when you put together a high-quality outline and then you just sit there and you start typing, you will be amazed at how quickly it all comes together.

And I’ve written articles that are 3,000, 4,000+ words…. I’ve had writers for me, but just a couple of weeks ago, one of my really great writers turned in an article that I believe was like 12,800 words. So that was really extreme but it was a very, very comprehensive topic. And in order to create one of the most authoritative pieces of content in the industry, we had to dig that deep to add the level of value we wanted to add. So that is a very rare exception.

And especially when you’re looking to establish your website, I wouldn’t focus on writing these gigantic pieces of content just yet. I would be focused on getting out a fair amount of content but also making sure that I’m kind of… you know… of course, not sacrificing quality. So I would be probably sticking towards the 1,200 to 1,500-word kind of low-end. Maybe creeping up to 2,000 words for my articles rather than spending days potentially writing these 10,000-word articles.

It can be very helpful. You may have one or two of those in the early stages of your website because it really demonstrates the quality of the content you’re putting out when website visitors come to your website and it could be an instant way to establish credibility and authority with a website visitor.

But for SEO purposes and to try to get you out of there kind of vying for as many keywords as possible, I’d say you want to aim for more content without sacrificing quality. Again, I’ve emphasized this in a previous lesson: do not ever sacrifice quality for content. So get out as much content as you can in the early stages while you’re getting your website established for the first few months without sacrificing quality, alright?

So, example time!

Let’s take a look at one of my outlines which I created for my first Rue Tattoo article. And it’s all pretty self-explanatory. If you want to kind of pause the video and take a look at it, you’re more than welcome to. There might be typos in here because outlines are internal documents so don’t feel like they need to be proofread and completely perfect because all this is for is for you.

It’s a tool to improve the productivity and the efficiency in your own writing. Because now that I have this together, I can kind of type out the headline for this first point – because this isn’t a headline, this is just what I want this section to be about. And then I can write a paragraph for this, I can write a paragraph or two about this, I can write a paragraph or two about this, and then as soon as I’m done there, I know what my next point is. I don’t have to think about it. I don’t have to sit there and kind of ponder. I don’t have to go back out and continue doing a bunch of research. I know as soon as I’m done here, I’m going right here.

And that alone will eliminate so much wasted time in your writing process – in my experience, because I used to spend so much time when I finished one point kind of thinking about, “Okay, what’s the next point I want to write about? How am I going to approach it? What are going to be my sub points?” So it’s just a matter of efficiency. If you do all of these at once and decide what you’re going to write about, you can just focus on writing and nothing else whenever you get to that point.

And so… what was I going to say? I was going to say… Oh, the other thing I mentioned was whenever you’re doing this… when I was thinking about this article, it was overwhelming. And it’s in my nature – it’s not something that’s in everyone’s nature – if I’m overwhelmed by a project, and it’s huge and it’s abstract, and I don’t know how to approach it yet, it makes me not work on it. I will procrastinate for a day or two days or three days because I’m just stalled. Because I think about it, I don’t want to think about it, it’s intimidating, I don’t even know how to go about it, and it makes me not work and not be remotely as productive as I should. And so when I do this, it clears that right up.

So in this particular article, I chose the title when I wrote the outline. Some people prefer to choose a title after they’ve written the entire post and I totally get that. But I know what keyword I want to target and that’s “How Much Does Tattoo Removal Hurt? An Honest Patient’s Experience”. I did that using the exact strategies I taught in the keyword research section. But the keyword I’m targeting right here is “how much does tattoo removal hurt”. I found it using Jaaxy and I think it’s going to be a great target. I think the competition versus search volume really makes it a great opportunity for me to target in this particular business.

And even though I’m not planning to build this website out extensively (right now, it’s just serving as a tool for me to teach), it is a niche I’ve considered pursuing in the past and so I wanted to make sure to get off on the right foot in case I do hire a writer down the road or I continue writing about it for myself. I wanted to make sure that I have a valid article and I wanted to make sure that I showed you, I led by example, and taught you how to do these things firsthand.

So right here, I have an intro, a conclusion, and in between, I have four different points. I could have done three, but again, I wanted to make sure I was adding as much value as possible and I felt like a fourth point was important and totally called for for this particular subject matter.

So this was my outline; and from this outline, I came up with this article. And you can see, again, the title is up here and I kind of go through and I go through my intro. And you can also see… I want to point out I mentioned…. well I’ll mention it in a later video… that you can see how small these chunks are. It’s almost like I’m writing in sentences. A lot of that has to do with the fact that it’s kind of spread across the entire screen right now. This is a more accurate representation of how long these paragraphs are because this is closer to the width for content on my website. But you’ll notice that I wrote in fairly small chunks and I just… we’ll talk about this later… but I want to call your attention to it now so that you can think back to it later.

But I just went through and this is a very rough draft. Another thing that I found over the years is if you edit extensively while you’re writing, you hurt your efficiency dramatically. So the first time, just write what comes to mind and write, write, write, write, write. Don’t think about it too much, don’t judge yourself too much, and then go back and edit it later.

So you can see that I typed this all up. And if you’re not typing directly into WordPress, I would recommend typing up in a plain text document. Because if you try and copy paste from Microsoft Word, some kind of funky things happen with the code (as I mentioned previously) and I just don’t recommend that. So this is a plain text document. It looks pretty ugly. But what I do is I’ll take this entire thing… because I’ve kind of got my headlines written throughout the content… I’ve got a headline there, I’ve got a headline there, I’ve got a headline there… and we’ll see these in the last video in this section in WordPress and how I work with this. But what I do is I type it all up in a text document and then I’ll paste it into WordPress and I’ll go through and I’ll edit it and format it and add images all at once. And that really helps boost your productivity and your efficiency and helps you get out more work in the same amount of time between outlining and between just writing.

I’ve seen people talk about using… they’re called like Hemingway something or another… they’re a type of word processor that you can use specifically for writing and some of them even disable your delete key. They go that extreme because it’s known in the writing community that if you just write and you worry about editing later, you’re going to write so much more, you’re going to be so much productive.

And between outlining the content and going through and making a password, you just write and then coming back and editing, adding images, and formatting later; your productivity will be twice that of another person that’s just getting started on this journey and hasn’t followed this training and isn’t going through these processes and these best practices because they’re just going to do it all at once. They’re going to think about something, they’re going to do research, write a little, do research, write a little, then they’re going to figure out “What is my next section about?” and then they’re going to delete and edit as they go through it. And I’ve seen this as I’ve trained my own writers.

This is the best strategy for efficiency and it’s the best way to get the maximum amount of high-quality work out of whatever hours you’re putting in. So if you’re putting in 10 hours a week or if you’re putting in 20 hours per week, if you follow these strategies when writing your content, you’re going to be twice as productive, you’re going to get twice as much out as you would have if you were just starting off without any direction on how to go about this.

So that’s been my experience in my own business when I’m writing and also my experience with the writers that I train.

So if you went through this article, you may see a bunch of typos, et cetera. Again, I’m editing this later. But the important thing was to get the content out there to just write it and I can perfect it later.

So you would see that this outline ties perfectly to the article that I created because, again, what I did was I deleted this right here, I wrote the headline, and then I wrote a paragraph or two about this, wrote a paragraph or two about this, wrote a paragraph or two about this… okay, that section’s done. On to the next one. Wrote my headline, paragraph or two, paragraph or two, paragraph or two… sometimes three paragraphs… and then before you know it, you’ve spent two hours and you’ve got this super high-quality piece of content – which in this particular case is just over 2,000 words – and that will help you tremendously in your business and I hope it helps you as much as it’s helped me as I’ve come up with these strategies over the years.

So that is a kind of a quick overview about how to create high-quality content. Again, we’ve got more to go through here. So this is just about creating an outline. In the next video, we’re going to talk a little bit about which we’ve touched on here, about how to format content for the web, and then we’ll go through a few more lessons, and we’ll talk about where to get high-quality images, how to add them – all that stuff. And by the time you’re done with this section in the next few videos, you will have no questions about how you create a high-quality content that you can build a very, very profitable internet business off of.

So if you have questions, as always, feel free to ask them in the members-only Facebook group. And I will see you over there and I’ll see you in the next video.

6.1 “Inch Wide, Mile Deep” — How to Create High-Quality Content

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In this video I discuss:

  • Who needs high-quality content on their websites and who doesn’t
  • The best “rule of thumb” for writing high-quality content
  • How much high-quality content you need on your site before beginning promotion

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

 

6.1 Transcript Below

Howdy again, folks! Today, we are finally going to talk about high-quality content.

I have said over and over and over again in the sections leading up to this how essential high-quality content is for an internet marketing business, and now, we are finally going to talk about how to do that and it all begins with “Inch Wide, Mile Deep” – and I promise that is more than the world’s worst pick-up line.

How do you create high-quality content?

As I’ve mentioned, it is another crucial component to an internet marketing business. Technically… I want to specify this again for the people that may be watching this that are really experienced or that have followed someone else and go: “Someone else told me that this is not at all required…” and yeah, that’s technically true. You don’t need high-quality content to get ranked. Technically. If you have some very complex SEO skills and know how to game Google without getting caught – which (can’t emphasize this enough in today’s search climate) is incredibly difficult to do unless you are very well-trained and practiced.

But for the average person (if we’re keeping this as simple as possible and we’re playing by the rules) high-quality content is a must for any internet marketing business. Even if you’re not going the SEO route, high-quality content is a must if you’re going to promote your business successfully in other methods that we’ll discuss later.

This is another crucial opportunity to accumulate momentum. We’ve talked about how an internet marketing business is cumulative and your efforts over time will stack on top of each other and over time amplify your results if you keep getting kind of every tier along the way correct. And this is absolutely another one of those crucial kind of opportunities along the way that will help amplify your business’ success and how quickly you see success. And it makes everything, like I said just now, everything else about succeeding much easier if you have high-quality content and you focus on high-quality content. Ultimately, it makes succeeding in internet marketing dramatically easier.

And I also want to emphasize that this does not just have to be written content. A couple of the other most common types of content in this industry are video which we’ll talk about in the next section a little bit. I’m not going to get super in-depth. I would like to dig into it more down the road but I at least want to talk about how to create really high-quality video content that gets ranked and stuff like that on YouTube.

And then on top of that, another really common one is podcasting which there are tons of great resources online for creating podcast. So if you have an idea that might really go well in the podcasting community or is something that the market is missing right now, that is also an excellent form of high-quality content that many people build very profitable internet marketing businesses off of.

But how does someone create high-quality content, right? That’s what this freakin’ lesson’s supposed to be about. I want to take a moment to say this training is not about how to write. This is not about the English grammar and punctuation and how to compose a really well-written sentence.

I think a lot of us experienced that in our traditional education and it’s going to (A) bog down the training if I even tried, and (B) I am not an English teacher, it is not something that I am equipped to teach. Even when I hire writers in my own business, that is something that I have to have in the writer; because I can teach them everything about how to research, I can teach them everything there is to know about the topic that they’re going to be writing on, I can teach them everything about WordPress – I cannot take the time to teach people how to write.

So if you are going to build a business that is built on written content (and that’s kind of the path you’re trying to take to succeeding in internet marketing over video or over podcasting) and you don’t know how to write really good English… it’s something I’ve seen a handful of people overcome without working on their English, but I would strongly advise picking up some materials and learning how to write a little bit better as if you were a native speaker at least.

For those of you that go, “I’m not a very good writer,” but you know how to write in English – that’s not a big deal. Don’t worry. I think by the end of this section you’re going to feel very well-equipped to write high-quality content and you just don’t have to be an incredible writer to do well in this industry but you do have to write… I take that back… as I mentioned there have been a few exceptions that I’ve seen over the years. It’s much more helpful for you success if you know how to write as if English is your first language. Proper grammar, proper punctuation, good spelling, you know how to edit your own writing, etc.

So that’s not what this video is about. I’m not going to teach that at all in this training. I would strongly recommend that you seek help elsewhere. You know, buying books on Amazon or researching it more on YouTube and through other sources online because there’s a lot of really good information out there on it.

And if you’re trying to become a better writer and you want your writing to be more interesting, a really good book for that (even though it’s not directly applied to blogging) is Stephen King has a book on writing called ‘On Writing’. So that is a really, really good book. The audio book is excellent as well and it can really help amplify your writing.

And we’ll talk about copywriting and stuff hopefully down the road. I’d like to give that its own section and that will be helpful as well, but long story short, this is not about how to write in English. This is about how to create high-quality content if you already know how to write in English as if it were your first language.

So the key to producing high-quality content (whether it’s written or podcast or something else) is if you focus on value and adding value into your follower’s life, your website visitor’s life, your podcast subscribers’ lives… if you focus on value, you will do great. You will write very high-quality content. And that’s just… the key is trying to help them. (I’m so like… I’m so screwed up today for some reason… like my wires are crossed or something. I apologize.)

Another perfect example is this training. I know a lot from this industry over the years and by focusing above all else on giving you this information in a really easy to understand, easy to digest format and kind of focusing my efforts there, this quality is through the roof. I hope. For all I know, you’re hating it. But hopefully, if you’ve gotten this deep, you’re enjoying it a little bit and learning a lot.

If you focus on value… so I’m just trying to give you everything I’ve got and really, really trying to just build the value and I know if I do that, everything else will follow. And the same will be true in your business no matter what niche you go into. If you focus on value above all else, you will do very, very well in this industry.

And just like anything else, practice makes perfect. I can’t even remember what it was like when I was writing when I first started in this industry over 10 years ago. Fortunately, I had a grandma that was an English teacher for 32 years and as far as writing English, creating written word, I was always pretty decent with that. I always had kind of a knack for that.

But I guarantee, when I first started writing blog posts, it was nothing like it is now. And I could knock them out really quickly now. I think the posts that I wrote for this section that I’m going to share in a later video, I probably knocked out in about two hours and there was definitely a time where that would have taken me a full day. So just know, you will make progress every single time you sit down and you write something else. You will make progress, you will get better, and practice makes perfect.

I just mentioned this: it will get faster and easier every time as well.

And don’t try to write about everything about a given topic in a single post. That is a mistake that a lot of people try to make. So you take this broad topic and then you try to write about everything there is for that broad topic. And what you end up doing is creating such a watered-down piece of content because you tried to talk about so much that it hurts the value of the content overall. Once you’re finished with the article, it’s not as high quality as it would have been if you were just focused on a tiny segment within that very broad topic. So it’s better to kind of flesh out everything about a very specific question or pain point than try and discuss everything there is about that particular topic.

Coming back to laser tattoo removal, I don’t want to try and write an article about everything there is to know about laser tattoo removal, at least not in the beginning. I don’t want to write an article about how much it hurts and how much it costs and the technology and all of these different things. I don’t want to write about all of those in one big post.

I want to write about all of those individually and then once that’s done, I might create something that’s commonly referred to in the industry as ‘cornerstone content’ where I talk about everything kind of in smaller chunks and link out to the articles that breakdown and go really in-depth for each one of those individual topics.

So it’s not always the case that you’re going to get very specific… and I’ll talk about this I think it’s towards the end of this slide actually… it’s not always that you’re going to get super, super specific; but the vast majority of the time, that’s going to produce the highest quality content – and that’s where “Inch Wide, Mile Deep” comes in.

It’s kind of a visualization. A lot of people have a tendency when they sit down to write, they want to do the opposite of this. They want to go “Mile Wide, Inch Deep” and that is not typically how high-quality content on the web is created. If you pay more attention as you’re researching topics in your own life, you will find that a lot of the content that you find very, very helpful follows this strategy that kind of follows this mantra “Inch Wide, Mile Deep”.

It talks a lot about one very specific topic and carries you through everything there is to know and maybe even more information than originally you were seeking on that topic. But it’s very, very helpful for the kind of place you are in and the problems you’re facing to be researching that topic in the first place.

So if you pay attention (I think you’ll see this across the web), every authority website does this very consistently even if you seek case studies that write 5,000 words about one very specific thing that their business did very well. So “Inch Wide, Mile Deep” should become a mantra in your business and should kind of be built into your defaults for everything you do in this industry and that will help you a lot in creating really high-quality content.

As I mentioned, this isn’t true 100% of the time, but more often than not, it’s an incredibly good rule of thumb. Sometimes you will have cornerstone content that covers a much larger area that targets like a really competitive keyword or something like that. And you link out to each one of your kind of islands that you’ve written about – really, really high-quality content about one very specific topic. Again, “Inch Wide, Mile Deep”. So you may do those pieces of cornerstone content every once in a while. But most of the time in your business, you’ll probably want to focus on “Inch Wide, Mile Deep”.

So I also want to emphasize that this alone will make your business successful. There are other ways to build a successful internet marketing business (and we’ll talk about those in Section 7), but this is a very, very effective and valid approach to succeeding in internet marketing. If you do this along with the other things that I’ve kind of discussed, it’s going to get you to success in this industry – if you stick with it. It’s just a matter of time.

Every site needs a foundation of at least seven to ten pieces of high-quality content before promoting. You could probably get away with four or five, but the idea here is you have your core pages which we discussed when we were setting up our website. So you have your core pages and you probably want at least four to five. I would even (like I said) stretch it to seven to ten pieces of really high-quality content before you start promoting your website, because otherwise, it’s just going to dilute you promotional efforts.

If you send this website to people and you have one or two or three high-quality articles on it, it doesn’t matter how high-quality they are, it’s going to look like a brand new website and it’s not going to be demonstrative of the level of authority you’re trying to build within your niche. And that’s going to hurt your promotional efforts to the point that maybe you jumped the gun a little bit, and next time they see an email when your site actually does have a sufficient amount of quality content to be impressive, they say, “Oh, I already heard from this guy,” and they don’t even click the link, they don’t even check out your website.

So I would say your focus – after you get launched, your website’s going, you’ve got your keywords, etc. – should be producing seven to ten really high-quality pieces of content before you step into promotion which is Section 7.

And you know, I’ve talked about a lot here… I’ll talk about even more specifics and methods and kind of how-to step-by-step that I go through in my own business… and in time, you’re going to settle into your own style and your own rhythm and that’s going to be the most efficient thing for you. But I will share my process throughout this section and that should be at least a good starting point for you going forward in your own business so that you can begin to settle into your own style.

So what I share here in Section 6 is my exact formula for successful SEO-based websites. And this is what I train my personal writers to do when I hire someone onto my team. This is what I do when I write high-quality content myself these days. And I can’t even imagine how long it took me to settle into this, but the processes that I share here are the same processes that I used to train people in my own business so that I can build profitable websites.

So I hope you enjoy it. I hope you find it helpful. And this kind of is a high-level overview and kind of the introduction to this topic, but we’re going to get dig in deep to the specific strategies in these coming videos. So I hope you found this video helpful.

As always, if you have questions, feel free to post them in the members-only Facebook group and I will see you there and I’ll see you in the next video.

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