Month: November 2016

More on validating content before you create it

Yesterday I wrote about a tool for content marketers that’s build to predict how your content idea will perform. Today, I’ll talk about a way of validating content ideas that doesn’t require this tool.

It’s based on this post by Sujan Patel:

  1. Your idea isn’t original. Someone else had this idea before. That’s great news! Because you can now check out how their idea performed and use that to gauge how your idea will perform. Do a (broad) google search for your idea and look at the results that come up and that look like they’re similar to your idea.
  2. Analyze how the post performed using Buzzsumo or ahrefs Content Explorer. (Just put in the URL and see the results)
  3. Do outreach before you write the post. Then measure the responses you get. This way you’ll have a great way of gauging how interested other people are in your content before you actually write it.
  4. Survey your audience (website visitors, blog readers, email subscribers, customers) what content they want.
  5. Learn the basic principles of content that performs. Buzzsumo did an analysis of content that performs well. Here’s what they found:
    * It inspired awe, laughter, or amusement in its audience.
    * It appealed to its audience’s narcissistic side (think personality quizzes).
    * It’s long-form.
    * It’s presented in list form or as an infographic.
    * It looks professional and trustworthy.
    * It contains visuals.

Now, one thing that IS for sure is that there’s no way of predicting how successful your content will be. No content marketer can tell in advance. Just like no music producer can tell in advance how successful a song will be, no movie production company can tell in advance how much a movie will gross.

But you can build a process that allows you to better gauge the success of your content. That’s what you should aim for: continuous learning.

Predict blog post idea performance: A tool that tells you how likely a content idea is to succeed

This is one of the biggest frustrations in content marketing: Not being able to tell how well a given piece of content will perform.

(Of course, the same could be said about life… Whatever you do is an investment of something—your time, money, energy, mindshare, attention, care—and you can’t ever know whether it’s worth it or not. But let’s not go off on that tangent.)

The team at Priceonomics built a little tool aimed to solve this problem. It basically will test your content ideas by showing it to a real audience, A/B different variations.

This isn’t of course a perfect way, but it will give you more data points than just guessing. And it could be a really good addition to doing your research on buzzsumo or whichever tool you use to figure out what kind of content performs and what wasn’t.

It seems like the product isn’t publicly available yet, but you can reach out to them and request an invite. Read more.

Sales tools with a “schedule email” / “send later” feature

If you’re doing a lot of sales via email, then you know how important it is to get emails in your prospects’ inbox at the right time.

Oftentimes sales people now work at unusual business hours but don’t want to send emails at that time.

Here’s a list of sales apps that you can use to schedule emails to be sent later: