How drive more users, sales, and revenue with less content

Helloooo content connoisseurs.

It’s Perrin from Content Bites.

Today, we’re going to talk about how to win with less content. Not just managing to do okay, but using less content to create more value. And then we’re going to talk about how a TV network got into the affiliate site game (and why the little guys still compete).

• Main course: How to get more out of your content campaign with LESS content

• Snack: What happens when a TV network starts a website

• Morsels: Links from CMI, Ann Hadley, Contently, and more…

Let’s dig in.

Main Course: How to get more out of your content campaign with LESS content

Raise your hand if you’ve heard this before: “If you want to win in content marketing, you need to post a lot.”

We all have, right?

And look — I’m absolutely not going to argue that posting a bunch of content isn’t good overall.

What I’m going to argue is that it’s only one way to win.

I’m also going to argue that you can sometimes get even more value out of a content campaign by publishing less instead of more.  

If it seems counter-intuitive, just bear with me.

Here’s the idea: find a few pieces of content that work really & spend almost all your time on promotion instead of creating new stuff.

It’s sometimes better to find a FEW pieces of content that are working — content that:

• Converts well

• Drives engagement

• Pushes people into the funnel

• Attracts shares, press, links

• And so on…

That’s not always easy to land on, but most of us will have at least a handful of those in our body of work.

…and then spend resources promoting the living hell out of that content over and over again.

To be clear, I’m recommending doing this instead of spending time and energy producing lots of new content. Content is a game of resource allocation, in lots of cases those resources are best spent on promotion.

Here’s another way to look at it. Suppose we had 100 hours to spend. Resource allocation might look like this:

• Conventional wisdom: Spend 80 hours researching and producing new content; spend 20 hours promoting content

• What I’m proposing: Spend 20 hours creating some new content; spend 80 hours promoting and re-promoting our very best content

Basically: if you drastically favor promotion and distribution over new content creation, you can typically turn your content into something that looks a lot more like a revenue-generating machine.

And guys… this is VERY powerful.

Firstly, in the scope of a content campaign, it allows us to be way, way more active.

We’re not just posting-and-praying. We’re leveraging content we know works and spending our energy getting it in front of as many eyeballs as possible.

Secondly, though, because we’re spending so much time promoting instead of writing, we usually end up spending a lot more time engaging with our audience. And good content + real engagement is how we drive trust and action.

Is a 80% promotion-based strategy always the right answer? No.

But it’s often the right answer, and it sure as hell gives us a lot more control when we need it most.

When to use this (and who should be using this tactic)

Almost every business can use some version of this.

And, if you’re newer to content marketing, the quickest way to traffic and revenue is almost certainly to produce a few great pieces of content and then to spend a massively outsized portion of your time (or your team’s time) promoting it.

But here’s who it’s really great for:

Anyone launching anything. If you’ve got a new business/product/feature/whatever about to leave the launch pad, it makes way more sense to produce a handful of value-add, high-impact pieces of content than it does to promote.

Single marketers or small teams. If you don’t have many hands on deck, you’ll usually create more of an impact and drive more revenue by spending most of your time promoting a few pieces of content than you will creating larger quantities of content.

Businesses with a few pieces of content that CRUSH conversion. If you have a few pieces of content that convert like crazy, it doesn’t make sense to try to reinvent the wheel; just promote the stuff that already works.

Who isn’t this good for?

That said, it’s not for everyone. Here are a few people who probably shouldn’t be doing this (at least not all the time).

Companies with heavily SEO-driven acquisition. SEO does require volume. You can usually promote a few key pieces of content in tandem, but but if you’re trying to build a large audience via search engines, you need a large library of content. It’'s usually not feasible for SEO-driven businesses to go buck-wild-80/20 on promotion. I do think SEO-based operations usually need more promotion than they do, but it should typically be closer to 50/50.

People who don’t know their customers yet. Seed-stage startups, for example, probably need to do a bit of work identifying who their customers really are and what problems they’re trying to solve before trying to crowbar content into their spaces; basically, just like you need product-market fit, you need content-market fit before really doubling down on promotion.

But truly, y’all: even in these circumstances almost everyone benefits from just trying this for a few weeks and measuring results — even if it’s just a small percentage of overall resource allocation.

Step #1: Audit your content for the pieces that drove the most revenue

Ideally, you’ve got some data happening on the backend, and you can see which content drives the most revenue or leads or trials or whatever.

If you don’t have that set up, you probably have at least some kind of instinct about it (but you should also get this set up).

Look for your highest-impact pieces, and pick the best ones.

I usually limit it to three pieces of proven content.

Remember, we’re trying to concentrate our promotion activities into a focal point, so having more than three pieces of content defeats the purpose.

Inversely, we generally want more than one piece of content because we don’t want to fatigue our audiences.

Step #2: Put those pieces in a rotating promotion / distribution schedule

When you find your best content, we want to put it into a rotating distribution calendar.

Most people don’t have an actual distribution calendar.

Instead, they have a checklist of where to post content after it’s published.

That’s not what we’re doing here.

We are getting our friggin’ tookuses out into the world and actively promoting our stuff.

This is an art unto itself, but if you’re unfamiliar with this kind of thing, the very, very distilled version of it is:

• Find the places our audience hangs out (you can use tools like SparkToro to do that)

• Do whatever we can to get our content in front of them in those in places in a way that feels like we’re adding value instead of selling

Yes, we need to promote on media we own (our social channels, etc.).

But that does not take a long time.

When I’m talking about spending 80 hours out of 100 promoting content, most of it will go into active promotion in external places.

Whether we’re posting, commenting, paying for ads, or even just straight up DM’ing people… the idea is to actively promote.

Importantly, we want our content to rotate.

If we’re going to be super involved in these spaces, we can’t just push the same one piece of content all day. We want to rotate our content and our distribution channels to give each audience a break while still being able to keep the promotion going overall.

Step #3: Iterate on the content based on data & feedback to make it even better

Because we’re doing so much promotion, we should also be getting feedback.

Questions, comments, ideas, etc.

We can use that to make our content even better.

And then, we can go back to those same communities, tell them we listened, and promote our stuff again.

Quick note here…

I’m not suggesting we abandon new content creation.

Creating new stuff is still important. No arguments here. I’m suggesting that there are lots of users/leads/revenue to be won by focusing our whole machine on promotion — even if temporarily — and creating new content to fuel our promo.

Summary of how to do this today:

• Find your best content

• Temporarily STOP writing new content

• Promote the sh*t out of your best content

• Measure the business result

• If it has an outsized impact, keep it going, but allocate 20% if your resources to new content creation instead of 80%.

Snack: What happens when a TV network starts a website

What happens when a TV network gets into the affiliate site business?

The Joe Schmoe affiliate marketers learn a very hard lesson, that’s what.

Quick story for context:

Since ancient times, there have always been SEO-driven affiliate marketers making money on Google.

But that particular style of affiliate marketing — ranking in Google with a website & driving people to another site and earning a commission if they bought a product — really started to pick up momentum around 2013.

Around 2013, affiliate marketers all started to realize the power of “review”- and “best”-style keywords.

Think: “best safety razors” or “best dog food”.

There was a massive gold rush for these sorts of keywords, especially in the higher-commission industries.

And for a while, all the rinkydink amateurs settled into a nice, phat paycheck essentially writing listicles about random products (…including yours truly).

After a while, the big media companies started to notice, and it didn’t take long for them to jump into the fray.

CNET started reviewing “best” computer stuff.

The Wire Cutter grew so fast that it was acquired by the New York Times.

Hearst media, who owns Elle, Vogue, Car & Driver, and a roster of other household names up’n started BestProducts.com — purely targeting these kinds of keywords.

And in that same vein, a little company called Nextstar Media Group joined the Fray.

If you haven’t heard of them (and I’m not sure why you would have), Nexstar is a media company that operates a big portion of their business on TV. They own The CW and Rewind TV. They also own some large radio stations.

So it was a bit of a shock when they wanted to get into the SEO-driven affiliate marketing game.

But they did.

And here’s the lesson we all learned: there’s always going to be a little room for smaller affiliates to gain a tiny piece of the pie, but it will always be difficult to compete in a real way against the BIG media companies.

Because that’s what Nextstar did: they came in and started throwing TV money around.

The result?

A TV company now owns one of the largest reviews on earth — a site that generates about 36 million visits per year (screenshot)

Having been in that world, using standard EPMs on a well-monetized site, I estimate they earn $4.6 million per year from their website alone.

Amazing.

Well, it’s amazing to me. But is it worth all that effort for a larger media company? I’m really on the fence. Reply and let me know what you think.

For what it’s worth, this didn’t deter the small fish. Plenty of my friends and colleagues who never left the affiliate world still make fantastic livings building smaller affiliate sites and competing with these guys.

But good gravy.

We certainly learned what it meant to see a large, capable media company spend the resources to do exactly what we were doing, but in the biggest possible way.

How I’d use this for my own content marketing:

This is actually a good lesson. It’s difficult to go as big as these companies. But the lesson many of us learned was that there’s always room to capture some market share — even when monstrously large companies are playing in your space.

So, if that’s you, do this:

• Find pockets of low competition

• Compete more viscously for more focused traffic

• Use those revenues to build bigger market share

• Use your market share to create partnerships with bigger players

• Measure & repeat

Morsels: Content marketing links

• With Gated Content, Trust Goes Both Ways. Don’t Ask Until You’ve Earned It (link)

• How to Write Like Robots Can’t (link)

• Luxury Brand and Talent Powerhouses Predict Future of Marketing for Every Industry (link)

• Brilliant Creative on a Tiny Budget (link)

• Digital Content Marketing: Why Email Is Your Secret Weapon for Content Amplification (link)

• How to Create Successful Case Studies That Turn Prospects Into Buyers (link)

Quick ask before I go: I’d like to build something for you guys; would you please tell me what you’re most interested in?

I really don’t want to ever sell ads in this newsletter.

Instead, I’d eventually like to turn this newsletter into a business that provides value to you guys.

But I’d probably only have bandwidth to do one of these.

So would you help me understand what would help you most by taking a quick poll? You can just click to vote (it’ll take you to a confirmation page, but that’s it).

That’s the issue.

If you missed the last issue, you can read it here: How to 10x the value of content marketing traffic you’re already getting.

Go forth & conquer.

—Perrin