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madgastronomer · 3 years

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Hey, I know this is kind of out the blue but I like your blog a lot (especially when you talk about food), and I was wondering if you knew any good recipes for making things like pot pies from scratch or knew where to find any. Wanted to try something new this year for my family, can you help?

Long post ahead! Because I'm not going to give you a recipe, I'm going to tell you how to build your own recipe.

I am a big proponent of the methodological approach to cooking. That is, I believe in teaching people methods of cooking, and how flavors go together, and then once you have those two things, you can invent recipes easily.

So I'm assuming you want a chicken pot pie, or maybe turkey to use up leftovers. Awesome! The basic parts of a bird pot pie are: bird meat, cooked; vegetables; white gravy; seasonings; crust. That's a nice short list.

So how much you're going to make depends on how many you're trying to feed. Rule for this is, .25lbs of meat per person per meal. I'm going to write this up as 4 people for 1 meal (no leftovers).

Make your crust before you start any of this, but I'm discussing crust options at the end.

Preheat your oven to 400F.

You will want, for 4 people, 1lb of bird meat. Use leftover turkey, or one of those rotisserie chickens from the market and shred that, or cube some chicken breasts and then salt and sautee them until they're not pink, or take some loose ground chicken or turkey sausage and brown it.

Next, veg. You want some combination of:

1 large yellow onion, chopped

2 large carrots, chopped

2 stalks of celery, chopped

8oz crimini mushrooms, quartered

2 cups shelled green peas (I use frozen, but thaw ahead)

1 cup chopped spinach (unusual, but nice)

Pick 4-5, but unless there's an allergy, use the onion.

Gravy time! You want chicken stock or broth and whole milk in a 3:1 ratio, for 4 servings call it 1.5c broth and .5c milk. Put that in a small saucepan with 1t kosher salt and start it warming over medium heat. Do NOT let it boil.

Then you want equal parts by volume butter and flour. For 4 servings, 3T of each. This is to make a roux. If you've never made roux, DON'T PANIC, this is not hard, it's just French.

First, take 1 tablespoon of butter and melt it over medium heat in a large frying pan. When it's melted, add the onion, and, if you're using it, the celery. Do not turn up the heat. Sweat the onion until it's translucent. Throw in the rest of the veg and cook through. Add the rest of the butter and melt it completely. Then add the flour and whisk to combine. You want the flour and butter to make a paste, which will coat the veg. Cook for another five or seven minutes, until the roux starts to turn a little golden.

Take hot milk-and-broth stuff and pour it in slooooowly, whisking the whole time, getting out all the lumps if you can. Pour with your writing hand, it's stronger to hold the heavy pot, and gives you better control over the pour. Whisk with your off hand. Trust me.

Simmer the whole thing until the gravy gets thick. Dump everyting into a 9x13" baking dish OR a 10-12" cast iron skillet OR several individual ramekins, and mix 'em up real good. Taste it, see if it needs salt.

Wait, seasonings? What seasonings? What do you mean we haven't covered that yet? Blast.

OK, fine.

Some options for bird-seasoning include:

thyme, tarragon (.5t each, dried), and 2 cloves garlic, minced

sage (dried, .75t)

lemon zest (zest of 1 lemon) and tarragon (.5t)

garlic and rosemary (3 cloves, .5t)

curry powder (should be mixed with the flour for the roux), (at least 1t)

If sausage, more of whatever's in the sausage

Anything else you like in your chicken

Black pepper works with any of the above, except the curry powder.

If you want to give it a little kick and a little sweetness, add like .5t of Sri Racha hot sauce. Goes with any of the above.

Totally go crazy with lots more garlic, too, these are minimums not absolutes.

Right. Now we talk about crust.

There are basically three routes you can go: classic pie crust, for which there is a recipe below; homemade or frozen puff pastry, and I say go for frozen; and biscuit dough, about which I am super lazy, but I'll include an actual recipe for that, too. Not providing a puff pastry recipe, though.

What I *actually* do for biscuit dough is either buy pre-made biscuit dough and use that, or take Bisquick, mix in some of the same seasonings that're in the pie, some shredded cheese, add just enough milk to make it stick, roll it out and cut it in squares, or else just do drop biscuits. Fuck it. But you want to have squares or rounds of dough and put them on top of the filling, not touching. If you're doing ramekins, just cut it large enough to cover the top.

Alton Brown's Grandmother's biscuits

2 cups all-purpose flour

4 teaspoons baking powder

1/4 teaspoon baking soda

3/4 teaspoon kosher salt

2 tablespoons unsalted butter, chilled

2 tablespoons unflavored shortening, chilled

1 cup buttermilk, chilled

In a large mixing bowl, combine flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Using your fingertips, rub butter and shortening into dry ingredients until mixture looks like crumbs. (The faster the better, you don't want the fats to melt.) Make a well in the center and pour in the chilled buttermilk. Stir just until the dough comes together. The dough will be very sticky.

Turn dough onto floured surface, dust top with flour and gently fold dough over on itself 5 or 6 times. Press into a 1-inch thick round. Cut out biscuits with a 2-inch cutter, being sure to push straight down through the dough. Place biscuits on baking sheet so that they just touch. Reform scrap dough, working it as little as possible and continue cutting. (Biscuits from the second pass will not be quite as light as those from the first, but hey, that's life.)

The following is a double-crust recipe, but you're using a big baking dish, so do the whole thing and trim it. Or use ramekins and you'll probably have more left over. Cover the whole dish(es), drape it over just a little. and trim. Ignore all the stuff about blind baking, it's irrelevant. Cut slits, possibly in a pretty pattern, into the crust, to make steam vents.

Karen Barker's Basic Pie Crust

Basic Pie Crust

Makes enough pastry for 2 single-crusted pies or 1 double-crusted pie.

I like to use a combination of butter and vegetable shortening in my crust. The butter contributes wonderful flavor, and the vegetable shortening gives the crust just the right amount of flakiness. I also thoroughly endorse the substitution of lard for the vegetable shortening. This recipe gives you a generous amount of pastry to allow for easy rolling.

About This Recipe

Yield: Makes enough pastry for 2 single-crusted pies or 1 double-crusted pie.

Ingredients

2 2/3 cups flour

3/4 teaspoon kosher salt

3/4 tablespoon sugar

4 ounces (8 tablespoons) chilled butter, cut into pieces

4 ounces (1/2 cup + 1 tablespoon + 2 teaspoons) chilled vegetable shortening, cut into pieces

Approximately 1/3 to 1/2 cup water, as needed

Procedures

1. Place the flour, salt, and sugar in the bowl of a food processor with a steel blade. Pulse to combine.

2. Add the chilled butter and shortening; pulse until the fat is evenly cut in and the mixture resembles coarse cornmeal. Remove to a mixing bowl.

3. Working quickly, add enough cold water, while tossing and stirring with a fork, until the dough just begins to come together. Divide the dough into 2 equal portions, flatten into rounds, wrap in plastic, and chill for several hours or overnight.

4. Baker's Note: I always use regular Crisco shortening and Land O Lakes unsalted butter for my pie crusts. You can also substitute chilled lard for the vegetable shortening--this produces a distinctive, flavorful, and ultra flaky crust.

5. A Note on Blind Baking: When making single-crusted pies and tarts, I always partially bake my crusts prior to filling them. This process promotes a crispier bottom crust and is commonly known as "baking blind." It is an extra step that many recipes may not stipulate, but I find that it is worth the effort.

Roll out the crust and fit it into the pan. Chill, or preferably freeze, the dough until it is firm. Place a generous sheet of parchment paper or aluminum foil over the crust (there should be overhang on all sides to facilitate easy removal), fit it into the shell, and fill it with rice, beans, or reusable pie weights. Place the weighted crust into a 375 degree oven and bake it for approximately 20 minutes, until the edges just start to pick up some color and the bottom no longer looks raw.

Carefully remove the liner and weights, and return the shell for an additional 8 minutes or so. The pastry may puff up once the weights are removed. If this occurs, gently prick any air bubbles with a fork. Check the shell several times, re-pricking it as needed.

Remove the partially baked shell from the oven when the bottom is set and dry to the touch. Do not over bake or cracks may develop.

I seal my pastry shells as soon as they come out of the oven by brushing them with a bit of egg white. This helps keep the bottom crisp and usually fills in any small holes that might have been made when you pricked the pastry. Any large cracks can be repaired with reserved dough scraps; this is particularly important when using a very liquid filling. If you've forgotten to save your scraps, an emergency patching kit can be made by mixing a bit of flour with some water to form a paste that can be lightly spread on the shell as needed. It is best to try and time the blind baking process so that the partially baked shell is filled immediately upon being removed from the oven and placed back in the oven to complete the baking process.

However you have topped your pot pie, put it in the oven. Bake until the filling is bubbling and the top is a pretty color, hopefully around 20 minutes, possibly as little as 15, possibly as much as 30.

Now, go forth, and make excellent pot pie.

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recentanimenews · 5 years

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What is Tower of God? A Beginner's Journey to the Phenomenon

It’s finally happening: on April 1, 2020, Crunchyroll and Telecom Animation Film are adapting the megahit WEBTOON Tower of God into an anime. Tower of God is the closest WEBTOON has to a Naruto or Bleach-sized hit shonen comic. A series that’s been going strong for ten years, with a fanbase that includes both curious new readers investigating this new “Webtoon” thing as well as older readers with warm and fuzzy feelings for that cool Korean comic they found once.

Up to this point, I’d never read very far into the series myself. But I’ve always been curious. The world of Korean comics is vibrant—comics optimized to read on your phone which vacillates between professional work and endearingly amateur productions. I’ve heard good things about Tower of God over the years from a former coworker of mine who recommended it especially highly. With the anime about to air in just two weeks, I figured it was time to blast through the first season of the comic (about 80 or so chapters) and discover the truth:

What is Tower of God?

Well, now I know. Tower of God is the story of Rak, a huge and arrogant crocodile man. With his mighty spear he aims to defeat all challenges and conquer the world of.........nah, just kidding.

Tower of God is the story of Bam, a young boy chasing his friend Rachel, up a tower featuring countless floors of tests and challenges. But it’s also the story of the ruthless king Zahad and his adopted daughters, murderous princesses who wield the legendary weapons known as the 13 Months. One of these princesses is Anak, a headstrong lizard girl with a secret. And then there’s Khun Aguero Agnis, the runaway scion of a royal family of schemers and assassins.

Tower of God features plenty of tropes and ideas familiar to fans of Shonen Jump comics and their ilk. There’s an emphasis on solving games and puzzles familiar to any fan of Hunter x Hunter (for that matter, Khun begins as a dead ringer for Killua.) There’s the team-based interplay of Naruto, where mismatched heroes are forced to work as a team against dangerous foes. The 13 Months are introduced as living weapons right out of Bleach, though that angle is dropped quickly (at least in part 1.) There’s even a section where Tower of God becomes a magical school story, as one of its many tests forces the cast to train and study in close quarters.

In my mind, Tower of God stands out from the pack in two ways. The first is in its emphasis on scale and lore. The world where the story takes place is a big one, filled with creatures that dwarf Bam from the very first chapter. The 13 Months grow and shrink, filling the whole of the long and thin WEBTOON display with their power. The world of Tower of God is also a weird one—much of the cast are cool and stylish teens, but there are also lizard people, devil men, folks with multiple eyes and a full range of conniving royal families and insignia. There aren’t just separate powers, artifacts, and abilities, but individual character classes that play different roles in battle. Fans of Type-Moon properties and of Kinoko Nasu (the writer of Fate/stay night and Tsukihime) should get a kick out of the endless flow of proper nouns and concepts introduced, contextualized, and retrofitted every other chapter.

The Secret to Tower of God's Success

This leads me to Tower of God's second distinguishing feature, which is its exuberance. On its publication in 2010, series creator SIU (short for Slave. In. Utero.) claimed it was only the first story in the Talze Ulzer series. Years later, none of those other stories have come to fruition, just as the Ogre Battle Saga remains incomplete and fans of Xenogears continue to trawl its millennia-long history in search of clues. Reading through the first arc of the series, I began to suspect that Tower of God was a stand-alone story that spun out of control, a narrative that despite its author’s obsessive planning features its share of dead ends. Compared to One Piece or even Bleach, projects managed by editors and hammered into marketability by constant reader surveys, Tower of God gives the impression in its first few chapters of a webcomic in its first phase, the author casting around for inspiration before settling into a groove.

Based on my research, this is almost exactly what happened: Tower of God came into being as ideas and drawings scribbled in a notebook the author worked on during mandatory military service. And this isn’t a bad thing! ONE was a webcomic artist who drew One-Punch Man as a one-off joke, and from there took the world by storm. Tower of God may be a tangle of monsters and tests and ideas and powers, but that tangle is genuine. You get the sense reading it that the author crammed every one of their favorite ideas into the strip, even if not all of them fit perfectly. There’s something refreshing about that compared to the almost aggressively polished and formulaic storytelling (with all due respect to its effectiveness) you find in a Shonen Jump comic. Tower of God became popular not because it was a market-tested, efficient Rube Goldberg machine of cliffhangers, but because readers across the world responded to the author’s scrambling passion and gave their sketch-filled notebook a life of its own. SIU’s hobby became too big to fail. And now it’s an anime.

I’m curious to see how the new adaptation cuts and refines the comic’s original story. Of course, I hope that the staff does what is best for the purposes of the medium, rather than slavishly recreate the comic. The nature of webtoons themselves, a long film-strip of discrete moments, already lends a “cinematic” feeling. But part of me hopes that the spirit of those early chapters is kept intact—just like the adaptations of ONE’s work went to great lengths to keep the source material’s DIY spirit alive. Either way, I’m excited to see the new adventures of Rak: the noble crocodile who, as we all know, is the true hero of Tower of God.

Are you a fan of Tower of God? Are you looking forward to the upcoming anime? Is Black March more or less powerful than King Arturia's Excalibur? Let us know in the comments!

---

Adam W is a Features Writer at Crunchyroll. His favorite comic on Webtoon is Your Letter. He sporadically contributes with a loose coalition of friends to a blog called Isn't it Electrifying? Find him on Twitter at: @wendeego

Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features!

By: [email protected]

#Anime #News #Latest in Anime News by Crunchyroll!

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digitalnirmalpanwar · 4 years

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14 Free Ways To Increase Website Traffic To Your Website (Get Instant Traffic)

In this post, I’m going to show you 14 Free Ways To Increase Website Traffic for Your Website.

Are you facing the problem of not getting traffic from google?

Many new bloggers not getting traffic on their website, but after reading this article you get definitely drive more traffic free.

I personally use this strategy or believe me its works crazy.

SO don’t wasting your time Let’s dive right in,

1) Use engaging blog post title

We all know the first impression is the last impression. if you blog title impress and engaging user definitely click on this and read all about this blog post.

So make sure to make engaging blog post title that drives more clicks and traffic.

Engaging blog post title also performs good on SERP and looks different from another blog post.

Here are tips for writing engaging blog titles-

use coschedule tools: I write my all blog titles using these amazing tools coschedule its help to An analysis of the overall structure, grammar, and readability of your headline.

Save

Add Brackets in your blog title: Adding brackets to headlines can improve CTR up to 38%.

See this blog post on my blog

Ex- SEMrush vs Ahrefs: The Best Keyword Research Tools For SEO [2020 Reviews]

Ex-The best time for a post on Instagram in 2020 (get more engagement )

Use Numbers: use numbers on your blog post that. it will make your blog post more engaging and get more CTR.

Add Power Words: when we add powerful words (top, ultimate, best, amazing, proven ) it definitely helps to more clicks and more traffic on your blog post.

Improve your blog EMV score: EVM stands for (EMV=” Emotional Marketing Value”) when you finally write blog title now time to check your EVM score its help to get more shareable content on a different social media platform.

I try to get my EMV score to at least 25%.

Save

EVM Headline Analyzer

2) Improve your On-page SEO

On-page SEO is no 1 ranking factor for any website. If you do proper on-page SEO you definitely rank your website on google.

What Are The Factors Which Helps Us To Rank?

Here is some important factor to rank your site on SERP and get more traffic.

Let Start,

Title tags -after creating post optimize your title tag with the help of Yoast and rank math plugins .use your main keywords in H1 and H2 tags. so google crawler essay find out what is your main and targeted keywords.

Optimize your meta description- meta description is all about your post user is essay identify what about this post.

Its help to Increase your CTR ,Improve your ranking on SERP

Speed up your website- google considers speed is a ranking factor. Low website speed no one stays there and leave it and increase your bounce rate.

How Can I Boost My Website Speed?

I compressed all my website images with help of tinypng tool.

Chose the best hosting providers I highly recommend Go with Wpx Hosting because it has one feature turbo boost, which helps you increase website speed.

Compressed your CSS and HTML pages.

Write quality content: we all know content is king. If your content is full fill user intent you definitely get more traffic and share.

So focus and write more than 2000 to 3000 words long-format content. It definitely helps to grow fast your blogs.

3) Build backlinks with off-page SEO

off-page SEO is also known as link building its help to increase website traffice free and ranking in google.

After doing on-page SEO now time to create quality backlink for the website.

I will discuss some and important SEO factors which helps you to boost your ranking,

Let’s start

Social bookmarking-social bookmarking is the best way to create quality backlink its help to get rank your website

Ex-Reddit

Tumbler

Scoopit

Instapaper etc.

Blog promotion - blog promotion is way best to get more traffic on your get traffic from different websites like Medium and LinkedIn.

Image Submission-Image submission is one of the best ways to build link as well as branding of your website . its give huge impacts on your website traffic.

Video Submission-Video is high engaging content now a day make sure to make a youtube channel related to your niche and create video content its help to branding tour website as well as website traffic.

blog commenting-Blog commenting author way to build strong backlinks.

It helps to build a relationship with your niche related competitor and get high-quality backlinks.

4) Focus on long-tail keywords

long-tail keywords perform better on your ranking point of view.

I highly recommend for newbies bloggers to works on long-tail keywords.

Here example of long-tail keywords

1.how to improve your website speed

2.how to write guest post on another website

Save

backlinko image source

Long-tails keywords give you high conversion rates.

5) Use good themes and hosting

if you are serious about your online business and blogging. chose right themes give a huge kick on your business.

Good and lightweight themes always improve your Ux/Ui as well as organic SEO traffic.

If you are deal with free and ugly themes no one trusts your business and blog.

I highly recommend and personally use generatepress themes my this is customized my using generate press themes and I am happy with this

Hosting is also give your huge impact for your website speeds and technical SEO, cheap and bad support hosting is not good for your websites is not good for many point link

Customer support

Speeds of websites

CDN many more

6) Write long content

writing long content is an art its give a huge impact on your websites as well as your website ranking.

According to buzz sumo and okdork study about 3000 and more words content perform well at google. see this image

Save

image source okdork

When you write long-format content the average share ratio is increased and is give a huge impact on the ranking of your website.

Many newbie bloggers not focusing on long-format content but. I suggested you make and write high quality and problem-solving content.

7) Use Best Plugins

choosing a best plugins is to improve your website traffic as well as your works and time management

There are many plugins available in the market but do know which plugins I used to create better and authority site

Yoast plugins

WP rocket

Smush

Click to tweets

Wp check

Tabel of content

Thrive architect

8) DO guest post

Guest blogging is evergreen link building techniques many pro bloggers use this technique to improve our website ranking.

Guest posting is all about t posting your content on another person’s blog. You provide good quality content to other’s blogs, and in return, you receive an external backlinks and broader exposure.

If you are using this technique for your blog and website is definitely improves your website ranking organically.

9) Use Quora

quora is a website where you can get a high-quality backlinks giving an answer for your niche related asker and helping other

Save

Quora is the number 1 platform for question-answer you can easily find out your niche related account and help for their query and get a backlinks fro them.

Many newbies are avoiding the quora platform and they miss the huge amount of traffic from there.

So I highly recommend create a quora account and use it to get grow your website and lets more sales for them.

Tips for increasing traffic from Quora

give the answer to your niche related query.

Add your value in the answer

add your blog URL in the quora profile.

Earn quality backlinks fro them

10) Start Email Marketing

Email marketing is every green technique to get your leads. many pro bloggers collect email subscribers list and get sales if they want.

If you using email marketing techniques it definitely helps for your sales as well as your website quality traffic.

Why Email marketing is important for a website

email marketing is helping to get more sales

its help for drive quality traffic for your website

its help for quality leads captures

Now time to collect email id through your website here is some tips for getting email subscriber :

use Email popups on your blog website.

provied theme weekly knowledge.

Don’t force them to buy there product.

11) Create Facebook groups

Creating a Facebook group is another very good strategy to build a brand and get more traffic through Facebook.

Save

You can dive a huge amount of traffic through Facebook groups.

Many pro bloggers make VIP Facebook groups and share amazing articles and knowledge in facebook groups and automatically group members interact with their content and drive direct traffic through facebook groups.

You can also drive huge amount of traffic through Facebook groups using this amazing strategy.

join your niche related facebook groups and share your articles and knowledge in their groups.

create your own groups and share your article and knowledge.

create poll ask question answers and communicate with audiences in groups

This techniques definitely help to grow your facebook groups as well as your website traffic

If you not joining my facebook group.join here now

Join facebook group

12) Create youtube channel

Youtube is the second largest search engine in the world.

Youtube is all about creating video content and build our community related to niches.

Many bloggers like Neil Patel, Brian Dean are uploading youtube videos and drive a lot of traffic.

Youtube gives you a huge amount of website traffic is you consistently deliver quality content via video.

Let’s discuss how to drive quality traffic through youtube?

make a video related to your niche and add your website and social media profile.

go live with your youtube channel once a week a solve your audience problem.

use cache thumbnails for your videos

add affiliate link in your video in description bar get more sales.

"Want to know which blogging & SEO tools I’m using to run this blog successfully. Then must check this page.

Many of these tools are FREE."

13) Chose the best social sharing plugins

if you want to gain more traffic through the social media platform than you should be used the best social sharing plugins on your website.

Benefits of Using Social Snap pro:-

its very essential and easy to used plugins.

It is fast and gives High Performance.

You can even share Counts via Click Tracking.

We use social snapp sharing plugins in my website It is a tool that gives you full stats and allows you to manage how your visitors share & see the content.

14) Republish Old Articles on Medium and LinkedIn

LinkedIn and medium is a high authorities website. You can use this to the website and republish your old post on Linkedin groups and the medium helps to drive lots of traffic on your blog.

#websitetraffic #seo

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meraenthusiast · 4 years

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13 Lessons From Think And Grow Rich Napoleon Hill

The older I get, the more I try to learn new information for personal development in a way that takes the least amount of time and energy.

How? By not trying to reinvent the wheel.

For instance, with the coronavirus crisis, it seemed that everyone became an instant stock market “guru” overnight.

Emails bombarded my inbox telling me what stocks to dump and which ones to go “all in” on.

With so much noise and confusion, I simply looked at what the top investors in the world were doing.

For example, I noticed that Warren Buffett began buying different airline stocks (Delta, Southwest), GE Electric and Goldman Sachs. It’s safe to say that if I invested in single stocks (which I don’t), I would’ve been wise to follow his lead.

My main two avenues of education now come from:

listening to podcasts

reading

Speaking of reading, one of the first books I read when it came to investing and learning about money was Think And Grow Rich Napoleon Hill wrote in 1937.

One amazing fact was that until Napoleon Hill’s death in 1970, Think and Grow Rich sold over 15 million copies. That’s impressive.

Before we get too deep into his book, let’s first take a look at some of the groups of people that read and why they do it.

Millionaires Read A Lot

It should come as no surprise that millionaires and billionaires have certain habits that make them wealthy.

Research shows that the majority of them devote at least 30 minutes daily to read 3-5 or more books a month.

What are you reading?

If rich people read more and you want to become rich, then don’t you think you should start doing the same?

Millionaire reading stats

Here’s a few millionaire stats I found while searching the web:

From Dave Ramsey:

“President Harry Truman once said, “Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.” One of the reasons millionaires become millionaires is because of their constant desire to learn. To them, leadership books and biographies are much more important than the latest reality show or who got kicked off the island. When they have free time, they use it wisely—by reading.”

From Medium:

You may not have heard of Arthur Blank, but you’ve definitely heard of the store that he co-founded: Home Depot. Blank reads two hours a day and has amassed a current fortune of $1,300,000,000.

Mark Cuban reads 3 hours a day. That adds up to about 1,000 hours a year. Say the average book takes 5 hours to read, that means Cuban is reading 200 books a year.

New York Times best-selling author, Tim Ferriss, says that he reads 3 to 4 books a week. That adds up to 150 to 200 books a year.

From Millionaire Foundry:

88% of self-made millionaires read at least 30 minutes every day, focused on self education.

From the Huffington Post:

When Warren Buffett was once asked about the key to success, he pointed to a stack of nearby books and said, “Read 500 pages like this every day. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it.”

Buffett takes this habit to the extreme — he read between 600 and 1000 pages per day when he was beginning his investing career, and still devotes about 80 percent of each day to reading.

From the book Rich Habits:

Successful people read for self-improvement. They are perpetual students. Each day they devote blocks of time to better themselves by studying subject matter that will improve them in some way and better enable them to perform their jobs.

Think And Grow Rich Inspiration

Think and Grow Rich is one of those books you see most often on the recommended reading list of people who have achieved tremendous amounts of success and wealth.

The first word of the title, “Think” shows us that it’s mainly about developing a mindset.

The book is centered around the thirteen steps to riches which he claimed to be the secret to building wealth.

In 1908, Hill was hired by a magazine to seek out and interview famous people to learn about their success.

One of the first people he interviewed happened to be one of the wealthiest men in the world at that time, Andrew Carnegie.

Not only did Carnegie share his secrets to success with Hill, but he also connected him with over 500 other successful business leaders to learn their secrets, too.

Some of those “other” famous people included:

Alexander Graham Bell

John D. Rockefeller

Thomas Edison

J.P. Morgan

Henry Ford

Wilbur Wright

Theodore Roosevelt

Howard Taft

Some twenty years later, Napoleon Hill turned the lessons he learned into the thirteen steps to riches, which he outlined in Think and Grow Rich.

13 Lessons From Think And Grow Rich Napoleon Hill

image courtesy of www.fearlessmotivation.com

If you plan on reading the book (which I recommend) then you’ll notice it’s broken up into sections that cover the 13 principles based on interviews Hill had with successful people.

If you don’t plan on reading it, then here’s a detailed summary of the book that should get you up to speed on what it’s about.

#1 Desire

Hill first mentions the principle of “Desire” as it’s no doubt the most important one.

How many times have you heard someone say, “I wish I had more…”

Maybe it was more money, time or success.

It’s not about wishing but about wanting. If someone wants to achieve success and wealth, there has to be a burning desire within them to cause them to take action. That’s the key – taking ACTION.

That’s the entire focus of Grant Cardone’s book, The 10X Rule.

How many people want to lose weight or get “ripped” before their beach vacation? Probably most, right? But….how many actually take action? Very few.

One of the first things I ask new members of the Passive Investors Circle is, “Why do you want to start investing in real estate?”

Those that truly desire to and have specific reasons end up seeing success in a few short months.

#2 Faith

If you want your desire to come true, you must exhibit faith. Faith is the trust you have in yourself that your desire/goal is achievable. Hill noticed that when you do this, it starts manifesting into its physical self.

If you want to get what you desire but are lacking in the faith department, try improving it through self-suggestion.

Practice convincing your mind of the opportunity to realize that goal, and after a while, your mind will start to subconsciously act on behalf of your belief system. In a nutshell, you become what you think about.

“If you can DREAM IT, you can DO IT.” – Walt Disney

#3 Auto Suggestion

Hill once pointed out: “If you do not see great riches in your imagination, you will never see them in your bank balance.”

Hill’s techniques of auto-suggestion are more commonly today known as meditation or visualization. The more specific we can realize our desires, the more likely it’ll happen.

If you desire to get rich, then see yourself in possession of that money. But it’s not enough to just wish for riches. Hill recommends that you must also fill yourself with the willingness to work for it, and make sure that the effort and reward are so closely linked that you never lose sight of what you should be doing.

#4 Specialized Knowledge

Have you ever heard the phrase, “There’s riches in niches“? With today’s technology, any information we could ever imagine is at our fingertips.

For instance, if I search for the best college football team in 2019, then the LSU Tigers will be on top of the list. 🙂

But if all we had to do was acquire knowledge and it would ensure success, then teachers and professors would be the wealthiest people of all. However, that is as far from the truth as possible.

The simple fact of having knowledge won’t make you anymore intelligent or successful. It’s what we do with that knowledge that makes the difference.

Hill suggests we focus on specialized knowledge which in turn will make us an expert of whatever we want.

For instance, when I started this blog, I didn’t know much about real estate investing. I made it my goal to try to become the expert in this area so I can teach other doctors and high-income professionals about it.

#5 Imagination

“Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.” –Napoleon Hill

The power of imagination is the key to getting the life you want.

Where desire is the catalyst for achievement, imagination is necessary to give it physical form.

At Walt Disney, they created Imagineers to perform the Imagineering. This is the creative engine that designs and builds all Disney theme parks, resorts, attractions, and cruise ships worldwide, and oversees the creative aspects of Disney games, merchandise product development, and publishing businesses.

If it works for Disney, shouldn’t we try it too?

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” – Albert Einstein

#6 Organized Planning

Are you ready to compete in your first fitness competition? Great, what’s your plan? What, you don’t have one?

If you want to succeed in achieving what you truly desire, Hill states that we must have a concrete plan to help get there. From becoming a golf pro to a brain surgeon, without a plan, the likelihood of failure is high.

If you want to become financially independent, you have to work a plan just like this one:

7 Steps – How To Become Financially Independent

Spend time putting pen to paper and writing down your plan. Once you do, the chances of it becoming a reality increase.

#7 Decision

The enemy of those of us that desire success is the exact opposite of decision….procrastination.

Unfortunately, most of us are hard wired to wait until the last minute to do something. If I tell you I want you to write a one page report on everything you know about how to invest money and it’s due in exactly ten days, guess what? More than likely you’ll finish it on day #9 (or the morning of day 10).

Research shows that successful people make BIG decisions fast and change them slowly whereas unsuccessful people make BIG decisions slow but change them constantly.

The point is to get used to making decisions quickly but don’t give up on them too quickly.

The #1 cause of failure: Lack of decision making

#8 Persistence

If you’re like me, you’ve experienced your share of failures.

When I started off investing in real estate, I thought I knew what I was doing but boy was I wrong.

Related article: RealtyShares – What I Learned From Losing $50,000

Too many people give up on their first attempt at trying new things so their likelihood of succeeding is next to zero.

In order to succeed, there should be an unwavering quality to remain persistent to the desire you want.

If you really want something out of life, you got to work hard, and expect to get knocked down/fail but show persistence until you reach your goals.

#9 Power of the Master mind

“Without counsel, plans fail, but with many advisers, they succeed.” – Proverbs 15:22

“Where no counsel [is], the people fall: but in the multitude of counselors [there is] safety.” – Proverbs 11:14

As someone that has attended several mastermind meetings, I can tell you firsthand that I was at first a bit skeptical. I’m not into mystical terminology and “mastermind” initially sounded alarm bells in my head.

What’s a mastermind? Hill described the Mastermind principle as:

“The coordination of knowledge and effort between two or more people who work towards a definite purpose in a spirit of harmony…no two minds ever come together without thereby creating a third, invisible intangible force, which may be likened to a third mind”, also known as, the Mastermind.

By creating this so-called “third mind” then the minds within the group become something more than the sum of their parts and greater things can be achieved.

For instance, I recently attended a mastermind meeting for other dental practice owners. It’s amazing what happens when one person poses a problem to the group and how lots of people (both men and women) can work much quicker and smarter to resolve it than one person only.

#10 Sex Transmutation

When I first read Think and Grow Rich, I was surprised to see a chapter dedicated to sex, especially on how it relates to having success.

Hill goes on to tell us that sexual impulse is one of the most important/strongest desires we experience as human beings. And because of this, we should learn how to channel those desires towards enhancing our creative works.

It’s all about channeling sexual energy towards your goals as it allows you to be more creative during the process.

Hill found that an above-than-average sexual nature is a typical feature of highly successful people from those that he interviewed.

#11 The Subconscious Mind

“You are what you think.”

Hill states that the subconscious mind registers all of our thoughts both positive and negative in nature. You can’t think of something positive and negative at the same time.

In other words, you can’t think about being appreciative for something (i.e. health, family, etc) at the same time you’re thinking negative thoughts.

Because of this, we should continuously focus our thoughts on only positive things.

Your subconscious mind does what YOU tell it today. If you want wealth and success, focus on only feeding your brain affirmations and thoughts that will guide you down that path.

#12 The Brain

In Think and Grow Rich Napoleon Hill compares the brain to a radio as they both operate at a specific set of frequencies.

You’ve heard of having brainwaves before, right? These brain frequencies are our emotions such as:

love

hate

despair

fear

confidence

A radio can only provide sound when the transmitter and receiver are set to the same frequency. I was recently reminded of this while watching Stranger Things with my kids as characters in the show used ham radios in a handful of episodes.

In the same way, if you want your brain to provide wealth, then you have to make sure that your emotions reflect that frequency.

#13 The Sixth Sense

The sixth sense is thought to be a mysterious sensing ability that can give you thoughts and ideas to help you become a receiver of information instead of only a transmitter.

Similar to Hill’s other mystical theories, the reader chooses to either accept it not.

Maybe this is something like having a “gut feeling” when faced with uncertainty?

The Secret Of Think And Grow Rich Napoleon Hill

The #1 secret of the book is not so secretive….it’s this:

You are in total control of the one thing that enables you to have the life of your dreams.

Whether that’s financial freedom to spend more time with your family, a pair of matching McClarens, or 3,000 units of real estate.

So what is that one thing we’re in control of?

It’s your mindset of course!

The secret of Think and Grow Rich is that your thoughts control your mindset, which creates your reality.

So if you want an abundant mindset, make it a point to broadcast feelings of appreciation, fulfillment and joy.

The post 13 Lessons From Think And Grow Rich Napoleon Hill appeared first on Debt Free Dr..

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isearchgoood · 5 years

Text

How to Scale Your Content Marketing: Tips from Our Journey to 100,000 Words a Month

Posted by JotFormmarketing

In the fall of 2018 our CEO had a simple yet head-exploding request of the JotForm marketing and growth teams: Produce 100,000 words of high-quality written content in a single month.

All types of content would count toward the goal, including posts on our own blog, help guides, template descriptions, and guest posts and sponsored articles on other sites.

In case you don’t think that sounds like a lot, 100,000 words is the length of a 400-page book. Produced in a single month. By a group of JotFormers who then numbered fewer than eight.

Why would on Earth would he want us to do all that?

My colleague and I trying to calculate how many blog posts it would take to reach 100,000 words.

It’s important to understand intent here. Our CEO, Aytekin, isn’t a crazy man. He didn’t send us on a mission just to keep us busy.

You see, for many months we’d dabbled with content, and it was working. Aytekin’s contributed posts in Entrepreneur magazine and on Medium were big hits. Our redesigned blog was picking up a lot of traction with the content we already had, and we were starting to understand SEO a lot better.

Still. Why would any software company need to produce that much content?

The answer is simple: infrastructure. If we could build a content engine that produces a high volume of quality content, then we could learn what works well and double down on creating great content. But in order to sustain success in content, we needed to have the pieces in place.

He allocated a sufficient budget and gave us the freedom to hire the staff we needed to make it happen. We were going to need it.

A full year later, I’m very proud to say we’ve officially crossed over the 100,000-word count in a single month [hold for applause].

However, it didn’t come without some painful learnings and mistakes.

Here’s what I figured out about scaling content through this process.

Develop a system early

Our old editorial calendar was a Google sheet. I started it back when JotForm was publishing one or two blogs per week and needed a way to keep it organized. It worked.

Back then, the only people who needed to view the editorial calendar were three people on the marketing staff and a couple of designers.

However, no spreadsheet on earth will be functional when you’re loading up 100,000 words. It’s too complicated. We discovered this right away.

After much discussion, we migrated our editorial workflow into Asana, which seemed like the closest thing to what we needed. It has a nice calendar view, the tagging functionality helped keep things orderly, and the board view gives a great overview of everyone’s projects.

This is where our marketing team lives.

Counterintuitively, we also use Trello, since it’s what our growth team had already been using to manage projects. Once the marketing team finishes writing a post, we send a request to our growth team designers to create banners for them using a form that integrates with their Trello board.

The system is intricate, but it works. We’d be lost if we hadn’t spent time creating it.

Style guides are your friends

Speaking of things to develop before you can really grow your content machine. Style guides are paramount to maintaining consistency, which becomes trickier and trickier the more writers you enlist to help you reach your content goals.

We consider our style guide to be a sort of living, ever-changing document. We add to it all the time.

It’s also the first thing that any legitimate writer will want to see when they’re about to contribute something to your site, whether they’re submitting a guest post, doing paid freelance work, or they’re your own in-house content writer.

Things to include in a basic style guide: an overview of writing style and tone, grammar and mechanics, punctuation particulars, product wording clarifications, and formatting.

Cheap writing will cost you, dearly

If you want cheap writing, you can find it. It’s everywhere — Upwork, Express Writers, WriterAccess. You name it, we tried it. And for less than $60 a blog post, what self-respecting marketing manager wouldn’t at least try it?

I’m here to tell you it’s a mistake.

I was thrilled when the drafts started rolling in. But our editor had other thoughts. It was taking too much time to make them good — nay, readable.

That was an oversight on my end, and it created a big bottleneck. We created such a backlog of cheap content (because it was cheap and I could purchase LOTS of it at a time) that it halted our progress on publishing content in a timely manner.

Instead, treat your freelance and content agencies as partners, and take the time to find good ones. Talk to them on the phone, exhaustively review their writing portfolio, and see if they really understand what you’re trying to accomplish. It’ll cost more money in the short term, but the returns are significant.

But good writing won’t mask subject ignorance

One thing to check with any content agency or freelancer you work with is their research process. The good ones will lean on subject matter experts (SMEs) to actually become authorities on the subjects they write about. It’s a tedious step, for both you and the writer, but it’s an important one.

The not-so-good ones? They’ll wing it and try to find what they can online. Sometimes they can get away with it, and sometimes someone will read your article and have this to say:

That was harsh.

But they had a point. While the article in question was well-written, it wasn’t written by someone who knew much about the subject at hand, which in this case was photography. Lesson learned. Make sure whoever you hire to write will take the time to know what they’re talking about.

Build outreach into your process

Let’s be real here. For 99.9 percent of you, content marketing is SEO marketing. That’s mostly the case with us as well. We do publish thought leadership and product-education posts with little SEO value, but a lot of what we write is published with the hope that it pleases The Google. Praise be.

But just publishing your content is never enough. You need links, lots of them.

Before I go any further, understand that there’s a right and a wrong way to get links back to your content.

Three guidelines for getting links to your content:

1. Create good content.

2. Find a list of reputable, high-ranking sites that are authorities on the subject you wrote about.

3. Ask them about linking or guest posting on their site in a respectful way that also conveys value to their organization.

That’s it. Don’t waste your time on crappy sites or link scams. Don’t spam people’s inboxes with requests. Don’t be shady or deal with shady people.

Create good content, find high-quality sites to partner with, and offer them value.

Successful content is a numbers game

One benefit to creating as much content as we have is that we can really see what’s worked and what hasn’t. And it’s not as easy to predict as you might think.

One of our most successful posts, How to Start and Run a Summer Camp, wasn’t an especially popular one among JotFormers in the planning stage, primarily because the topic didn’t have a ton of monthly searches for the targeted keywords we were chasing. But just a few months after it went live, it became one of our top-performing posts in terms of monthly searches, and our best in terms of converting readers to JotForm users.

Point being, you don’t really know what will work for you until you try a bunch of options.

You’ll need to hire the right people in-house

In a perfect world JotForm employees would be able to produce every bit of content we need. But that’s not realistic for a company of our size. Still, there were some roles we absolutely needed to bring in-house to really kick our content into high gear.

A few of our content hires from the past 12 months.

Here are some hires we made to build our content infrastructure:

Content writer

This was the first dedicated content hire we ever made. It marked our first real plunge into the world of content marketing. Having someone in-house who can write means you can be flexible. When last-minute or deeply product-focused writing projects come up, you need someone in-house to deliver.

Editor

Our full-time editor created JotForm’s style guide from scratch, which she uses to edit every single piece of content that we produce. She’s equal parts editor and project manager, since she effectively owns the flow of the Asana board.

Copywriters (x2)

Our smaller writing projects didn’t disappear just because we wanted to load up on long-form blog posts. Quite the contrary. Our copywriters tackle template descriptions that help count toward our goal, while also writing landing page text, email marketing messages, video scripts, and social media posts.

Content strategist

One of the most difficult components of creating regular content is coming up with ideas. I made an early assumption that writers would come up with things to write; I was way off base. Writers have a very specialized skill that actually has little overlap with identifying and researching topics based on SEO value, relevance to our audience, and what will generate clicks from social media. So we have a strategist.

Content operations specialist

When you aim for tens of thousands of words of published content over the course of a month, the very act of coordinating the publishing of a post becomes a full-time job. At JotForm, most of our posts also need a custom graphic designed by our design team. Our content operations specialist coordinates design assets and makes sure everything looks good in WordPress before scheduling posts.

SEO manager

Our SEO manager had already been doing work on JotForm’s other pages, but he redirected much of his attention to our content goals once we began scaling. He works with our content strategist on the strategy and monitors and reports on the performance of the articles we publish.

The payoff

JotForm’s blog wasn’t starting from scratch when Aytekin posed the 100,000-word challenge. It was already receiving about 120,000 organic site visitors a month from the posts we’d steadily written over the years.

A year later we receive about 230,000 monthly organic searches, and that’s no accident.

The past year also marked our foray into the world of pillar pages.

For the uninitiated, pillar pages are (very) long-form, authoritative pieces that cover all aspects of a specific topic in the hopes that search engines will regard them as a resource.

These are incredibly time-consuming to write, but they drive buckets full of visitors to your page.

We’re getting more than 30,000 visitors a month — all from pillar pages we’ve published within the last year.

To date, our focus on content marketing has improved our organic search to the tune of about 150,000 additional site visitors per month, give or take.

Conclusion

Content isn’t easy. That was the biggest revelation for me, even though it shouldn’t have been. It takes a large team of people with very specialized skills to see measurable success. Doing it at large scale requires a prodigious commitment in both money and time, even if you aren’t tasked with writing 100,000 words a month.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t find a way to make it work for you, on whatever scale that makes the most sense.

There really aren’t any secrets to growing your content engine. No magic recipe. It’s just a matter of putting the resources you have into making it happen.

Best of all, this post just gave us about 2,000 words toward this month’s word count goal.

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theinjectlikes2 · 5 years

Text

How to Scale Your Content Marketing: Tips from Our Journey to 100,000 Words a Month

Posted by JotFormmarketing

In the fall of 2018 our CEO had a simple yet head-exploding request of the JotForm marketing and growth teams: Produce 100,000 words of high-quality written content in a single month.

All types of content would count toward the goal, including posts on our own blog, help guides, template descriptions, and guest posts and sponsored articles on other sites.

In case you don’t think that sounds like a lot, 100,000 words is the length of a 400-page book. Produced in a single month. By a group of JotFormers who then numbered fewer than eight.

Why would on Earth would he want us to do all that?

My colleague and I trying to calculate how many blog posts it would take to reach 100,000 words.

It’s important to understand intent here. Our CEO, Aytekin, isn’t a crazy man. He didn’t send us on a mission just to keep us busy.

Still. Why would any software company need to produce that much content?

He allocated a sufficient budget and gave us the freedom to hire the staff we needed to make it happen. We were going to need it.

A full year later, I’m very proud to say we’ve officially crossed over the 100,000-word count in a single month [hold for applause].

However, it didn’t come without some painful learnings and mistakes.

Here’s what I figured out about scaling content through this process.

Develop a system early

Our old editorial calendar was a Google sheet. I started it back when JotForm was publishing one or two blogs per week and needed a way to keep it organized. It worked.

Back then, the only people who needed to view the editorial calendar were three people on the marketing staff and a couple of designers.

However, no spreadsheet on earth will be functional when you’re loading up 100,000 words. It’s too complicated. We discovered this right away.

This is where our marketing team lives.

The system is intricate, but it works. We’d be lost if we hadn’t spent time creating it.

Style guides are your friends

We consider our style guide to be a sort of living, ever-changing document. We add to it all the time.

Things to include in a basic style guide: an overview of writing style and tone, grammar and mechanics, punctuation particulars, product wording clarifications, and formatting.

Cheap writing will cost you, dearly

I’m here to tell you it’s a mistake.

I was thrilled when the drafts started rolling in. But our editor had other thoughts. It was taking too much time to make them good — nay, readable.

But good writing won’t mask subject ignorance

The not-so-good ones? They’ll wing it and try to find what they can online. Sometimes they can get away with it, and sometimes someone will read your article and have this to say:

That was harsh.

Build outreach into your process

But just publishing your content is never enough. You need links, lots of them.

Before I go any further, understand that there’s a right and a wrong way to get links back to your content.

Three guidelines for getting links to your content:

1. Create good content.

2. Find a list of reputable, high-ranking sites that are authorities on the subject you wrote about.

3. Ask them about linking or guest posting on their site in a respectful way that also conveys value to their organization.

That’s it. Don’t waste your time on crappy sites or link scams. Don’t spam people’s inboxes with requests. Don’t be shady or deal with shady people.

Create good content, find high-quality sites to partner with, and offer them value.

Successful content is a numbers game

One benefit to creating as much content as we have is that we can really see what’s worked and what hasn’t. And it’s not as easy to predict as you might think.

Point being, you don’t really know what will work for you until you try a bunch of options.

You’ll need to hire the right people in-house

A few of our content hires from the past 12 months.

Here are some hires we made to build our content infrastructure:

Content writer

Editor

Copywriters (x2)

Content strategist

Content operations specialist

SEO manager

The payoff

A year later we receive about 230,000 monthly organic searches, and that’s no accident.

The past year also marked our foray into the world of pillar pages.

For the uninitiated, pillar pages are (very) long-form, authoritative pieces that cover all aspects of a specific topic in the hopes that search engines will regard them as a resource.

These are incredibly time-consuming to write, but they drive buckets full of visitors to your page.

We’re getting more than 30,000 visitors a month — all from pillar pages we’ve published within the last year.

To date, our focus on content marketing has improved our organic search to the tune of about 150,000 additional site visitors per month, give or take.

Conclusion

But that doesn’t mean you can’t find a way to make it work for you, on whatever scale that makes the most sense.

There really aren’t any secrets to growing your content engine. No magic recipe. It’s just a matter of putting the resources you have into making it happen.

Best of all, this post just gave us about 2,000 words toward this month’s word count goal.

from The Moz Blog https://ift.tt/2Gc5Aem via IFTTT

#IFTTT #The Moz Blog

0 notes

drummcarpentry · 5 years

Text

How to Scale Your Content Marketing: Tips from Our Journey to 100,000 Words a Month

Posted by JotFormmarketing

In the fall of 2018 our CEO had a simple yet head-exploding request of the JotForm marketing and growth teams: Produce 100,000 words of high-quality written content in a single month.

All types of content would count toward the goal, including posts on our own blog, help guides, template descriptions, and guest posts and sponsored articles on other sites.

In case you don’t think that sounds like a lot, 100,000 words is the length of a 400-page book. Produced in a single month. By a group of JotFormers who then numbered fewer than eight.

Why would on Earth would he want us to do all that?

My colleague and I trying to calculate how many blog posts it would take to reach 100,000 words.

It’s important to understand intent here. Our CEO, Aytekin, isn’t a crazy man. He didn’t send us on a mission just to keep us busy.

Still. Why would any software company need to produce that much content?

He allocated a sufficient budget and gave us the freedom to hire the staff we needed to make it happen. We were going to need it.

A full year later, I’m very proud to say we’ve officially crossed over the 100,000-word count in a single month [hold for applause].

However, it didn’t come without some painful learnings and mistakes.

Here’s what I figured out about scaling content through this process.

Develop a system early

Our old editorial calendar was a Google sheet. I started it back when JotForm was publishing one or two blogs per week and needed a way to keep it organized. It worked.

Back then, the only people who needed to view the editorial calendar were three people on the marketing staff and a couple of designers.

However, no spreadsheet on earth will be functional when you’re loading up 100,000 words. It’s too complicated. We discovered this right away.

This is where our marketing team lives.

The system is intricate, but it works. We’d be lost if we hadn’t spent time creating it.

Style guides are your friends

We consider our style guide to be a sort of living, ever-changing document. We add to it all the time.

Things to include in a basic style guide: an overview of writing style and tone, grammar and mechanics, punctuation particulars, product wording clarifications, and formatting.

Cheap writing will cost you, dearly

I’m here to tell you it’s a mistake.

I was thrilled when the drafts started rolling in. But our editor had other thoughts. It was taking too much time to make them good — nay, readable.

But good writing won’t mask subject ignorance

The not-so-good ones? They’ll wing it and try to find what they can online. Sometimes they can get away with it, and sometimes someone will read your article and have this to say:

That was harsh.

Build outreach into your process

But just publishing your content is never enough. You need links, lots of them.

Before I go any further, understand that there’s a right and a wrong way to get links back to your content.

Three guidelines for getting links to your content:

1. Create good content.

2. Find a list of reputable, high-ranking sites that are authorities on the subject you wrote about.

3. Ask them about linking or guest posting on their site in a respectful way that also conveys value to their organization.

That’s it. Don’t waste your time on crappy sites or link scams. Don’t spam people’s inboxes with requests. Don’t be shady or deal with shady people.

Create good content, find high-quality sites to partner with, and offer them value.

Successful content is a numbers game

One benefit to creating as much content as we have is that we can really see what’s worked and what hasn’t. And it’s not as easy to predict as you might think.

Point being, you don’t really know what will work for you until you try a bunch of options.

You’ll need to hire the right people in-house

A few of our content hires from the past 12 months.

Here are some hires we made to build our content infrastructure:

Content writer

Editor

Copywriters (x2)

Content strategist

Content operations specialist

SEO manager

The payoff

A year later we receive about 230,000 monthly organic searches, and that’s no accident.

The past year also marked our foray into the world of pillar pages.

For the uninitiated, pillar pages are (very) long-form, authoritative pieces that cover all aspects of a specific topic in the hopes that search engines will regard them as a resource.

These are incredibly time-consuming to write, but they drive buckets full of visitors to your page.

We’re getting more than 30,000 visitors a month — all from pillar pages we’ve published within the last year.

To date, our focus on content marketing has improved our organic search to the tune of about 150,000 additional site visitors per month, give or take.

Conclusion

But that doesn’t mean you can’t find a way to make it work for you, on whatever scale that makes the most sense.

There really aren’t any secrets to growing your content engine. No magic recipe. It’s just a matter of putting the resources you have into making it happen.

Best of all, this post just gave us about 2,000 words toward this month’s word count goal.

0 notes

whitelabelseoreseller · 5 years

Text

How to Scale Your Content Marketing: Tips from Our Journey to 100,000 Words a Month

Posted by JotFormmarketing

In the fall of 2018 our CEO had a simple yet head-exploding request of the JotForm marketing and growth teams: Produce 100,000 words of high-quality written content in a single month.

All types of content would count toward the goal, including posts on our own blog, help guides, template descriptions, and guest posts and sponsored articles on other sites.

In case you don’t think that sounds like a lot, 100,000 words is the length of a 400-page book. Produced in a single month. By a group of JotFormers who then numbered fewer than eight.

Why would on Earth would he want us to do all that?

My colleague and I trying to calculate how many blog posts it would take to reach 100,000 words.

It’s important to understand intent here. Our CEO, Aytekin, isn’t a crazy man. He didn’t send us on a mission just to keep us busy.

Still. Why would any software company need to produce that much content?

He allocated a sufficient budget and gave us the freedom to hire the staff we needed to make it happen. We were going to need it.

A full year later, I’m very proud to say we’ve officially crossed over the 100,000-word count in a single month [hold for applause].

However, it didn’t come without some painful learnings and mistakes.

Here’s what I figured out about scaling content through this process.

Develop a system early

Our old editorial calendar was a Google sheet. I started it back when JotForm was publishing one or two blogs per week and needed a way to keep it organized. It worked.

Back then, the only people who needed to view the editorial calendar were three people on the marketing staff and a couple of designers.

However, no spreadsheet on earth will be functional when you’re loading up 100,000 words. It’s too complicated. We discovered this right away.

This is where our marketing team lives.

The system is intricate, but it works. We’d be lost if we hadn’t spent time creating it.

Style guides are your friends

We consider our style guide to be a sort of living, ever-changing document. We add to it all the time.

Things to include in a basic style guide: an overview of writing style and tone, grammar and mechanics, punctuation particulars, product wording clarifications, and formatting.

Cheap writing will cost you, dearly

I’m here to tell you it’s a mistake.

I was thrilled when the drafts started rolling in. But our editor had other thoughts. It was taking too much time to make them good — nay, readable.

But good writing won’t mask subject ignorance

The not-so-good ones? They’ll wing it and try to find what they can online. Sometimes they can get away with it, and sometimes someone will read your article and have this to say:

That was harsh.

Build outreach into your process

But just publishing your content is never enough. You need links, lots of them.

Before I go any further, understand that there’s a right and a wrong way to get links back to your content.

Three guidelines for getting links to your content:

1. Create good content.

2. Find a list of reputable, high-ranking sites that are authorities on the subject you wrote about.

3. Ask them about linking or guest posting on their site in a respectful way that also conveys value to their organization.

That’s it. Don’t waste your time on crappy sites or link scams. Don’t spam people’s inboxes with requests. Don’t be shady or deal with shady people.

Create good content, find high-quality sites to partner with, and offer them value.

Successful content is a numbers game

One benefit to creating as much content as we have is that we can really see what’s worked and what hasn’t. And it’s not as easy to predict as you might think.

Point being, you don’t really know what will work for you until you try a bunch of options.

You’ll need to hire the right people in-house

A few of our content hires from the past 12 months.

Here are some hires we made to build our content infrastructure:

Content writer

Editor

Copywriters (x2)

Content strategist

Content operations specialist

SEO manager

The payoff

A year later we receive about 230,000 monthly organic searches, and that’s no accident.

The past year also marked our foray into the world of pillar pages.

For the uninitiated, pillar pages are (very) long-form, authoritative pieces that cover all aspects of a specific topic in the hopes that search engines will regard them as a resource.

These are incredibly time-consuming to write, but they drive buckets full of visitors to your page.

We’re getting more than 30,000 visitors a month — all from pillar pages we’ve published within the last year.

To date, our focus on content marketing has improved our organic search to the tune of about 150,000 additional site visitors per month, give or take.

Conclusion

But that doesn’t mean you can’t find a way to make it work for you, on whatever scale that makes the most sense.

There really aren’t any secrets to growing your content engine. No magic recipe. It’s just a matter of putting the resources you have into making it happen.

Best of all, this post just gave us about 2,000 words toward this month’s word count goal.

from The Moz Blog http://tracking.feedpress.it/link/9375/13177281

#The Moz Blog

0 notes

gamebazu · 5 years

Text

How to Scale Your Content Marketing: Tips from Our Journey to 100,000 Words a Month

Posted by JotFormmarketing

In the fall of 2018 our CEO had a simple yet head-exploding request of the JotForm marketing and growth teams: Produce 100,000 words of high-quality written content in a single month.

All types of content would count toward the goal, including posts on our own blog, help guides, template descriptions, and guest posts and sponsored articles on other sites.

In case you don’t think that sounds like a lot, 100,000 words is the length of a 400-page book. Produced in a single month. By a group of JotFormers who then numbered fewer than eight.

Why would on Earth would he want us to do all that?

My colleague and I trying to calculate how many blog posts it would take to reach 100,000 words.

It’s important to understand intent here. Our CEO, Aytekin, isn’t a crazy man. He didn’t send us on a mission just to keep us busy.

Still. Why would any software company need to produce that much content?

He allocated a sufficient budget and gave us the freedom to hire the staff we needed to make it happen. We were going to need it.

A full year later, I’m very proud to say we’ve officially crossed over the 100,000-word count in a single month [hold for applause].

However, it didn’t come without some painful learnings and mistakes.

Here’s what I figured out about scaling content through this process.

Develop a system early

Our old editorial calendar was a Google sheet. I started it back when JotForm was publishing one or two blogs per week and needed a way to keep it organized. It worked.

Back then, the only people who needed to view the editorial calendar were three people on the marketing staff and a couple of designers.

However, no spreadsheet on earth will be functional when you’re loading up 100,000 words. It’s too complicated. We discovered this right away.

This is where our marketing team lives.

The system is intricate, but it works. We’d be lost if we hadn’t spent time creating it.

Style guides are your friends

We consider our style guide to be a sort of living, ever-changing document. We add to it all the time.

Things to include in a basic style guide: an overview of writing style and tone, grammar and mechanics, punctuation particulars, product wording clarifications, and formatting.

Cheap writing will cost you, dearly

I’m here to tell you it’s a mistake.

I was thrilled when the drafts started rolling in. But our editor had other thoughts. It was taking too much time to make them good — nay, readable.

But good writing won’t mask subject ignorance

The not-so-good ones? They’ll wing it and try to find what they can online. Sometimes they can get away with it, and sometimes someone will read your article and have this to say:

That was harsh.

Build outreach into your process

But just publishing your content is never enough. You need links, lots of them.

Before I go any further, understand that there’s a right and a wrong way to get links back to your content.

Three guidelines for getting links to your content:

1. Create good content.

2. Find a list of reputable, high-ranking sites that are authorities on the subject you wrote about.

3. Ask them about linking or guest posting on their site in a respectful way that also conveys value to their organization.

That’s it. Don’t waste your time on crappy sites or link scams. Don’t spam people’s inboxes with requests. Don’t be shady or deal with shady people.

Create good content, find high-quality sites to partner with, and offer them value.

Successful content is a numbers game

One benefit to creating as much content as we have is that we can really see what’s worked and what hasn’t. And it’s not as easy to predict as you might think.

Point being, you don’t really know what will work for you until you try a bunch of options.

You’ll need to hire the right people in-house

A few of our content hires from the past 12 months.

Here are some hires we made to build our content infrastructure:

Content writer

Editor

Copywriters (x2)

Content strategist

Content operations specialist

SEO manager

The payoff

A year later we receive about 230,000 monthly organic searches, and that’s no accident.

The past year also marked our foray into the world of pillar pages.

For the uninitiated, pillar pages are (very) long-form, authoritative pieces that cover all aspects of a specific topic in the hopes that search engines will regard them as a resource.

These are incredibly time-consuming to write, but they drive buckets full of visitors to your page.

We’re getting more than 30,000 visitors a month — all from pillar pages we’ve published within the last year.

To date, our focus on content marketing has improved our organic search to the tune of about 150,000 additional site visitors per month, give or take.

Conclusion

But that doesn’t mean you can’t find a way to make it work for you, on whatever scale that makes the most sense.

There really aren’t any secrets to growing your content engine. No magic recipe. It’s just a matter of putting the resources you have into making it happen.

Best of all, this post just gave us about 2,000 words toward this month’s word count goal.

https://ift.tt/2tG2zjJ

0 notes

nutrifami · 5 years

Text

How to Scale Your Content Marketing: Tips from Our Journey to 100,000 Words a Month

Posted by JotFormmarketing

In the fall of 2018 our CEO had a simple yet head-exploding request of the JotForm marketing and growth teams: Produce 100,000 words of high-quality written content in a single month.

All types of content would count toward the goal, including posts on our own blog, help guides, template descriptions, and guest posts and sponsored articles on other sites.

In case you don’t think that sounds like a lot, 100,000 words is the length of a 400-page book. Produced in a single month. By a group of JotFormers who then numbered fewer than eight.

Why would on Earth would he want us to do all that?

My colleague and I trying to calculate how many blog posts it would take to reach 100,000 words.

It’s important to understand intent here. Our CEO, Aytekin, isn’t a crazy man. He didn’t send us on a mission just to keep us busy.

Still. Why would any software company need to produce that much content?

He allocated a sufficient budget and gave us the freedom to hire the staff we needed to make it happen. We were going to need it.

A full year later, I’m very proud to say we’ve officially crossed over the 100,000-word count in a single month [hold for applause].

However, it didn’t come without some painful learnings and mistakes.

Here’s what I figured out about scaling content through this process.

Develop a system early

Our old editorial calendar was a Google sheet. I started it back when JotForm was publishing one or two blogs per week and needed a way to keep it organized. It worked.

Back then, the only people who needed to view the editorial calendar were three people on the marketing staff and a couple of designers.

However, no spreadsheet on earth will be functional when you’re loading up 100,000 words. It’s too complicated. We discovered this right away.

This is where our marketing team lives.

The system is intricate, but it works. We’d be lost if we hadn’t spent time creating it.

Style guides are your friends

We consider our style guide to be a sort of living, ever-changing document. We add to it all the time.

Things to include in a basic style guide: an overview of writing style and tone, grammar and mechanics, punctuation particulars, product wording clarifications, and formatting.

Cheap writing will cost you, dearly

I’m here to tell you it’s a mistake.

I was thrilled when the drafts started rolling in. But our editor had other thoughts. It was taking too much time to make them good — nay, readable.

But good writing won’t mask subject ignorance

The not-so-good ones? They’ll wing it and try to find what they can online. Sometimes they can get away with it, and sometimes someone will read your article and have this to say:

That was harsh.

Build outreach into your process

But just publishing your content is never enough. You need links, lots of them.

Before I go any further, understand that there’s a right and a wrong way to get links back to your content.

Three guidelines for getting links to your content:

1. Create good content.

2. Find a list of reputable, high-ranking sites that are authorities on the subject you wrote about.

3. Ask them about linking or guest posting on their site in a respectful way that also conveys value to their organization.

That’s it. Don’t waste your time on crappy sites or link scams. Don’t spam people’s inboxes with requests. Don’t be shady or deal with shady people.

Create good content, find high-quality sites to partner with, and offer them value.

Successful content is a numbers game

One benefit to creating as much content as we have is that we can really see what’s worked and what hasn’t. And it’s not as easy to predict as you might think.

Point being, you don’t really know what will work for you until you try a bunch of options.

You’ll need to hire the right people in-house

A few of our content hires from the past 12 months.

Here are some hires we made to build our content infrastructure:

Content writer

Editor

Copywriters (x2)

Content strategist

Content operations specialist

SEO manager

The payoff

A year later we receive about 230,000 monthly organic searches, and that’s no accident.

The past year also marked our foray into the world of pillar pages.

For the uninitiated, pillar pages are (very) long-form, authoritative pieces that cover all aspects of a specific topic in the hopes that search engines will regard them as a resource.

These are incredibly time-consuming to write, but they drive buckets full of visitors to your page.

We’re getting more than 30,000 visitors a month — all from pillar pages we’ve published within the last year.

To date, our focus on content marketing has improved our organic search to the tune of about 150,000 additional site visitors per month, give or take.

Conclusion

But that doesn’t mean you can’t find a way to make it work for you, on whatever scale that makes the most sense.

There really aren’t any secrets to growing your content engine. No magic recipe. It’s just a matter of putting the resources you have into making it happen.

Best of all, this post just gave us about 2,000 words toward this month’s word count goal.

0 notes

lakelandseo · 5 years

Text

How to Scale Your Content Marketing: Tips from Our Journey to 100,000 Words a Month

Posted by JotFormmarketing

In the fall of 2018 our CEO had a simple yet head-exploding request of the JotForm marketing and growth teams: Produce 100,000 words of high-quality written content in a single month.

All types of content would count toward the goal, including posts on our own blog, help guides, template descriptions, and guest posts and sponsored articles on other sites.

In case you don’t think that sounds like a lot, 100,000 words is the length of a 400-page book. Produced in a single month. By a group of JotFormers who then numbered fewer than eight.

Why would on Earth would he want us to do all that?

My colleague and I trying to calculate how many blog posts it would take to reach 100,000 words.

It’s important to understand intent here. Our CEO, Aytekin, isn’t a crazy man. He didn’t send us on a mission just to keep us busy.

Still. Why would any software company need to produce that much content?

He allocated a sufficient budget and gave us the freedom to hire the staff we needed to make it happen. We were going to need it.

A full year later, I’m very proud to say we’ve officially crossed over the 100,000-word count in a single month [hold for applause].

However, it didn’t come without some painful learnings and mistakes.

Here’s what I figured out about scaling content through this process.

Develop a system early

Our old editorial calendar was a Google sheet. I started it back when JotForm was publishing one or two blogs per week and needed a way to keep it organized. It worked.

Back then, the only people who needed to view the editorial calendar were three people on the marketing staff and a couple of designers.

However, no spreadsheet on earth will be functional when you’re loading up 100,000 words. It’s too complicated. We discovered this right away.

This is where our marketing team lives.

The system is intricate, but it works. We’d be lost if we hadn’t spent time creating it.

Style guides are your friends

We consider our style guide to be a sort of living, ever-changing document. We add to it all the time.

Things to include in a basic style guide: an overview of writing style and tone, grammar and mechanics, punctuation particulars, product wording clarifications, and formatting.

Cheap writing will cost you, dearly

I’m here to tell you it’s a mistake.

I was thrilled when the drafts started rolling in. But our editor had other thoughts. It was taking too much time to make them good — nay, readable.

But good writing won’t mask subject ignorance

The not-so-good ones? They’ll wing it and try to find what they can online. Sometimes they can get away with it, and sometimes someone will read your article and have this to say:

That was harsh.

Build outreach into your process

But just publishing your content is never enough. You need links, lots of them.

Before I go any further, understand that there’s a right and a wrong way to get links back to your content.

Three guidelines for getting links to your content:

1. Create good content.

2. Find a list of reputable, high-ranking sites that are authorities on the subject you wrote about.

3. Ask them about linking or guest posting on their site in a respectful way that also conveys value to their organization.

That’s it. Don’t waste your time on crappy sites or link scams. Don’t spam people’s inboxes with requests. Don’t be shady or deal with shady people.

Create good content, find high-quality sites to partner with, and offer them value.

Successful content is a numbers game

One benefit to creating as much content as we have is that we can really see what’s worked and what hasn’t. And it’s not as easy to predict as you might think.

Point being, you don’t really know what will work for you until you try a bunch of options.

You’ll need to hire the right people in-house

A few of our content hires from the past 12 months.

Here are some hires we made to build our content infrastructure:

Content writer

Editor

Copywriters (x2)

Content strategist

Content operations specialist

SEO manager

The payoff

A year later we receive about 230,000 monthly organic searches, and that’s no accident.

The past year also marked our foray into the world of pillar pages.

For the uninitiated, pillar pages are (very) long-form, authoritative pieces that cover all aspects of a specific topic in the hopes that search engines will regard them as a resource.

These are incredibly time-consuming to write, but they drive buckets full of visitors to your page.

We’re getting more than 30,000 visitors a month — all from pillar pages we’ve published within the last year.

To date, our focus on content marketing has improved our organic search to the tune of about 150,000 additional site visitors per month, give or take.

Conclusion

But that doesn’t mean you can’t find a way to make it work for you, on whatever scale that makes the most sense.

There really aren’t any secrets to growing your content engine. No magic recipe. It’s just a matter of putting the resources you have into making it happen.

Best of all, this post just gave us about 2,000 words toward this month’s word count goal.

0 notes

evempierson · 5 years

Text

How to Scale Your Content Marketing: Tips from Our Journey to 100,000 Words a Month

Posted by JotFormmarketing

In the fall of 2018 our CEO had a simple yet head-exploding request of the JotForm marketing and growth teams: Produce 100,000 words of high-quality written content in a single month.

All types of content would count toward the goal, including posts on our own blog, help guides, template descriptions, and guest posts and sponsored articles on other sites.

In case you don’t think that sounds like a lot, 100,000 words is the length of a 400-page book. Produced in a single month. By a group of JotFormers who then numbered fewer than eight.

Why would on Earth would he want us to do all that?

My colleague and I trying to calculate how many blog posts it would take to reach 100,000 words.

It’s important to understand intent here. Our CEO, Aytekin, isn’t a crazy man. He didn’t send us on a mission just to keep us busy.

Still. Why would any software company need to produce that much content?

He allocated a sufficient budget and gave us the freedom to hire the staff we needed to make it happen. We were going to need it.

A full year later, I’m very proud to say we’ve officially crossed over the 100,000-word count in a single month [hold for applause].

However, it didn’t come without some painful learnings and mistakes.

Here’s what I figured out about scaling content through this process.

Develop a system early

Our old editorial calendar was a Google sheet. I started it back when JotForm was publishing one or two blogs per week and needed a way to keep it organized. It worked.

Back then, the only people who needed to view the editorial calendar were three people on the marketing staff and a couple of designers.

However, no spreadsheet on earth will be functional when you’re loading up 100,000 words. It’s too complicated. We discovered this right away.

This is where our marketing team lives.

The system is intricate, but it works. We’d be lost if we hadn’t spent time creating it.

Style guides are your friends

We consider our style guide to be a sort of living, ever-changing document. We add to it all the time.

Things to include in a basic style guide: an overview of writing style and tone, grammar and mechanics, punctuation particulars, product wording clarifications, and formatting.

Cheap writing will cost you, dearly

I’m here to tell you it’s a mistake.

I was thrilled when the drafts started rolling in. But our editor had other thoughts. It was taking too much time to make them good — nay, readable.

But good writing won’t mask subject ignorance

The not-so-good ones? They’ll wing it and try to find what they can online. Sometimes they can get away with it, and sometimes someone will read your article and have this to say:

That was harsh.

Build outreach into your process

But just publishing your content is never enough. You need links, lots of them.

Before I go any further, understand that there’s a right and a wrong way to get links back to your content.

Three guidelines for getting links to your content:

1. Create good content.

2. Find a list of reputable, high-ranking sites that are authorities on the subject you wrote about.

3. Ask them about linking or guest posting on their site in a respectful way that also conveys value to their organization.

That’s it. Don’t waste your time on crappy sites or link scams. Don’t spam people’s inboxes with requests. Don’t be shady or deal with shady people.

Create good content, find high-quality sites to partner with, and offer them value.

Successful content is a numbers game

One benefit to creating as much content as we have is that we can really see what’s worked and what hasn’t. And it’s not as easy to predict as you might think.

Point being, you don’t really know what will work for you until you try a bunch of options.

You’ll need to hire the right people in-house

A few of our content hires from the past 12 months.

Here are some hires we made to build our content infrastructure:

Content writer

Editor

Copywriters (x2)

Content strategist

Content operations specialist

SEO manager

The payoff

A year later we receive about 230,000 monthly organic searches, and that’s no accident.

The past year also marked our foray into the world of pillar pages.

For the uninitiated, pillar pages are (very) long-form, authoritative pieces that cover all aspects of a specific topic in the hopes that search engines will regard them as a resource.

These are incredibly time-consuming to write, but they drive buckets full of visitors to your page.

We’re getting more than 30,000 visitors a month — all from pillar pages we’ve published within the last year.

To date, our focus on content marketing has improved our organic search to the tune of about 150,000 additional site visitors per month, give or take.

Conclusion

But that doesn’t mean you can’t find a way to make it work for you, on whatever scale that makes the most sense.

There really aren’t any secrets to growing your content engine. No magic recipe. It’s just a matter of putting the resources you have into making it happen.

Best of all, this post just gave us about 2,000 words toward this month’s word count goal.

0 notes

paulineberry · 5 years

Text

How to Scale Your Content Marketing: Tips from Our Journey to 100,000 Words a Month

Posted by JotFormmarketing

In the fall of 2018 our CEO had a simple yet head-exploding request of the JotForm marketing and growth teams: Produce 100,000 words of high-quality written content in a single month.

All types of content would count toward the goal, including posts on our own blog, help guides, template descriptions, and guest posts and sponsored articles on other sites.

In case you don’t think that sounds like a lot, 100,000 words is the length of a 400-page book. Produced in a single month. By a group of JotFormers who then numbered fewer than eight.

Why would on Earth would he want us to do all that?

My colleague and I trying to calculate how many blog posts it would take to reach 100,000 words.

It’s important to understand intent here. Our CEO, Aytekin, isn’t a crazy man. He didn’t send us on a mission just to keep us busy.

Still. Why would any software company need to produce that much content?

He allocated a sufficient budget and gave us the freedom to hire the staff we needed to make it happen. We were going to need it.

A full year later, I’m very proud to say we’ve officially crossed over the 100,000-word count in a single month [hold for applause].

However, it didn’t come without some painful learnings and mistakes.

Here’s what I figured out about scaling content through this process.

Develop a system early

Our old editorial calendar was a Google sheet. I started it back when JotForm was publishing one or two blogs per week and needed a way to keep it organized. It worked.

Back then, the only people who needed to view the editorial calendar were three people on the marketing staff and a couple of designers.

However, no spreadsheet on earth will be functional when you’re loading up 100,000 words. It’s too complicated. We discovered this right away.

This is where our marketing team lives.

The system is intricate, but it works. We’d be lost if we hadn’t spent time creating it.

Style guides are your friends

We consider our style guide to be a sort of living, ever-changing document. We add to it all the time.

Things to include in a basic style guide: an overview of writing style and tone, grammar and mechanics, punctuation particulars, product wording clarifications, and formatting.

Cheap writing will cost you, dearly

I’m here to tell you it’s a mistake.

I was thrilled when the drafts started rolling in. But our editor had other thoughts. It was taking too much time to make them good — nay, readable.

But good writing won’t mask subject ignorance

The not-so-good ones? They’ll wing it and try to find what they can online. Sometimes they can get away with it, and sometimes someone will read your article and have this to say:

That was harsh.

Build outreach into your process

But just publishing your content is never enough. You need links, lots of them.

Before I go any further, understand that there’s a right and a wrong way to get links back to your content.

Three guidelines for getting links to your content:

1. Create good content.

2. Find a list of reputable, high-ranking sites that are authorities on the subject you wrote about.

3. Ask them about linking or guest posting on their site in a respectful way that also conveys value to their organization.

That’s it. Don’t waste your time on crappy sites or link scams. Don’t spam people’s inboxes with requests. Don’t be shady or deal with shady people.

Create good content, find high-quality sites to partner with, and offer them value.

Successful content is a numbers game

One benefit to creating as much content as we have is that we can really see what’s worked and what hasn’t. And it’s not as easy to predict as you might think.

Point being, you don’t really know what will work for you until you try a bunch of options.

You’ll need to hire the right people in-house

A few of our content hires from the past 12 months.

Here are some hires we made to build our content infrastructure:

Content writer

Editor

Copywriters (x2)

Content strategist

Content operations specialist

SEO manager

The payoff

A year later we receive about 230,000 monthly organic searches, and that’s no accident.

The past year also marked our foray into the world of pillar pages.

For the uninitiated, pillar pages are (very) long-form, authoritative pieces that cover all aspects of a specific topic in the hopes that search engines will regard them as a resource.

These are incredibly time-consuming to write, but they drive buckets full of visitors to your page.

We’re getting more than 30,000 visitors a month — all from pillar pages we’ve published within the last year.

To date, our focus on content marketing has improved our organic search to the tune of about 150,000 additional site visitors per month, give or take.

Conclusion

But that doesn’t mean you can’t find a way to make it work for you, on whatever scale that makes the most sense.

There really aren’t any secrets to growing your content engine. No magic recipe. It’s just a matter of putting the resources you have into making it happen.

Best of all, this post just gave us about 2,000 words toward this month’s word count goal.

0 notes

daynamartinez22 · 5 years

Text

How to Scale Your Content Marketing: Tips from Our Journey to 100,000 Words a Month

Posted by JotFormmarketing

In the fall of 2018 our CEO had a simple yet head-exploding request of the JotForm marketing and growth teams: Produce 100,000 words of high-quality written content in a single month.

All types of content would count toward the goal, including posts on our own blog, help guides, template descriptions, and guest posts and sponsored articles on other sites.

In case you don’t think that sounds like a lot, 100,000 words is the length of a 400-page book. Produced in a single month. By a group of JotFormers who then numbered fewer than eight.

Why would on Earth would he want us to do all that?

My colleague and I trying to calculate how many blog posts it would take to reach 100,000 words.

It’s important to understand intent here. Our CEO, Aytekin, isn’t a crazy man. He didn’t send us on a mission just to keep us busy.

Still. Why would any software company need to produce that much content?

He allocated a sufficient budget and gave us the freedom to hire the staff we needed to make it happen. We were going to need it.

A full year later, I’m very proud to say we’ve officially crossed over the 100,000-word count in a single month [hold for applause].

However, it didn’t come without some painful learnings and mistakes.

Here’s what I figured out about scaling content through this process.

Develop a system early

Our old editorial calendar was a Google sheet. I started it back when JotForm was publishing one or two blogs per week and needed a way to keep it organized. It worked.

Back then, the only people who needed to view the editorial calendar were three people on the marketing staff and a couple of designers.

However, no spreadsheet on earth will be functional when you’re loading up 100,000 words. It’s too complicated. We discovered this right away.

This is where our marketing team lives.

The system is intricate, but it works. We’d be lost if we hadn’t spent time creating it.

Style guides are your friends

We consider our style guide to be a sort of living, ever-changing document. We add to it all the time.

Things to include in a basic style guide: an overview of writing style and tone, grammar and mechanics, punctuation particulars, product wording clarifications, and formatting.

Cheap writing will cost you, dearly

I’m here to tell you it’s a mistake.

I was thrilled when the drafts started rolling in. But our editor had other thoughts. It was taking too much time to make them good — nay, readable.

But good writing won’t mask subject ignorance

The not-so-good ones? They’ll wing it and try to find what they can online. Sometimes they can get away with it, and sometimes someone will read your article and have this to say:

That was harsh.

Build outreach into your process

But just publishing your content is never enough. You need links, lots of them.

Before I go any further, understand that there’s a right and a wrong way to get links back to your content.

Three guidelines for getting links to your content:

1. Create good content.

2. Find a list of reputable, high-ranking sites that are authorities on the subject you wrote about.

3. Ask them about linking or guest posting on their site in a respectful way that also conveys value to their organization.

That’s it. Don’t waste your time on crappy sites or link scams. Don’t spam people’s inboxes with requests. Don’t be shady or deal with shady people.

Create good content, find high-quality sites to partner with, and offer them value.

Successful content is a numbers game

One benefit to creating as much content as we have is that we can really see what’s worked and what hasn’t. And it’s not as easy to predict as you might think.

Point being, you don’t really know what will work for you until you try a bunch of options.

You’ll need to hire the right people in-house

A few of our content hires from the past 12 months.

Here are some hires we made to build our content infrastructure:

Content writer

Editor

Copywriters (x2)

Content strategist

Content operations specialist

SEO manager

The payoff

A year later we receive about 230,000 monthly organic searches, and that’s no accident.

The past year also marked our foray into the world of pillar pages.

For the uninitiated, pillar pages are (very) long-form, authoritative pieces that cover all aspects of a specific topic in the hopes that search engines will regard them as a resource.

These are incredibly time-consuming to write, but they drive buckets full of visitors to your page.

We’re getting more than 30,000 visitors a month — all from pillar pages we’ve published within the last year.

To date, our focus on content marketing has improved our organic search to the tune of about 150,000 additional site visitors per month, give or take.

Conclusion

But that doesn’t mean you can’t find a way to make it work for you, on whatever scale that makes the most sense.

There really aren’t any secrets to growing your content engine. No magic recipe. It’s just a matter of putting the resources you have into making it happen.

Best of all, this post just gave us about 2,000 words toward this month’s word count goal.

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camerasieunhovn · 5 years

Text

How to Scale Your Content Marketing: Tips from Our Journey to 100,000 Words a Month

Posted by JotFormmarketing

In the fall of 2018 our CEO had a simple yet head-exploding request of the JotForm marketing and growth teams: Produce 100,000 words of high-quality written content in a single month.

All types of content would count toward the goal, including posts on our own blog, help guides, template descriptions, and guest posts and sponsored articles on other sites.

In case you don’t think that sounds like a lot, 100,000 words is the length of a 400-page book. Produced in a single month. By a group of JotFormers who then numbered fewer than eight.

Why would on Earth would he want us to do all that?

My colleague and I trying to calculate how many blog posts it would take to reach 100,000 words.

It’s important to understand intent here. Our CEO, Aytekin, isn’t a crazy man. He didn’t send us on a mission just to keep us busy.

Still. Why would any software company need to produce that much content?

He allocated a sufficient budget and gave us the freedom to hire the staff we needed to make it happen. We were going to need it.

A full year later, I’m very proud to say we’ve officially crossed over the 100,000-word count in a single month [hold for applause].

However, it didn’t come without some painful learnings and mistakes.

Here’s what I figured out about scaling content through this process.

Develop a system early

Our old editorial calendar was a Google sheet. I started it back when JotForm was publishing one or two blogs per week and needed a way to keep it organized. It worked.

Back then, the only people who needed to view the editorial calendar were three people on the marketing staff and a couple of designers.

However, no spreadsheet on earth will be functional when you’re loading up 100,000 words. It’s too complicated. We discovered this right away.

This is where our marketing team lives.

The system is intricate, but it works. We’d be lost if we hadn’t spent time creating it.

Style guides are your friends

We consider our style guide to be a sort of living, ever-changing document. We add to it all the time.

Things to include in a basic style guide: an overview of writing style and tone, grammar and mechanics, punctuation particulars, product wording clarifications, and formatting.

Cheap writing will cost you, dearly

I’m here to tell you it’s a mistake.

I was thrilled when the drafts started rolling in. But our editor had other thoughts. It was taking too much time to make them good — nay, readable.

But good writing won’t mask subject ignorance

The not-so-good ones? They’ll wing it and try to find what they can online. Sometimes they can get away with it, and sometimes someone will read your article and have this to say:

That was harsh.

Build outreach into your process

But just publishing your content is never enough. You need links, lots of them.

Before I go any further, understand that there’s a right and a wrong way to get links back to your content.

Three guidelines for getting links to your content:

1. Create good content.

2. Find a list of reputable, high-ranking sites that are authorities on the subject you wrote about.

3. Ask them about linking or guest posting on their site in a respectful way that also conveys value to their organization.

That’s it. Don’t waste your time on crappy sites or link scams. Don’t spam people’s inboxes with requests. Don’t be shady or deal with shady people.

Create good content, find high-quality sites to partner with, and offer them value.

Successful content is a numbers game

One benefit to creating as much content as we have is that we can really see what’s worked and what hasn’t. And it’s not as easy to predict as you might think.

Point being, you don’t really know what will work for you until you try a bunch of options.

You’ll need to hire the right people in-house

A few of our content hires from the past 12 months.

Here are some hires we made to build our content infrastructure:

Content writer

Editor

Copywriters (x2)

Content strategist

Content operations specialist

SEO manager

The payoff

A year later we receive about 230,000 monthly organic searches, and that’s no accident.

The past year also marked our foray into the world of pillar pages.

For the uninitiated, pillar pages are (very) long-form, authoritative pieces that cover all aspects of a specific topic in the hopes that search engines will regard them as a resource.

These are incredibly time-consuming to write, but they drive buckets full of visitors to your page.

We’re getting more than 30,000 visitors a month — all from pillar pages we’ve published within the last year.

To date, our focus on content marketing has improved our organic search to the tune of about 150,000 additional site visitors per month, give or take.

Conclusion

But that doesn’t mean you can’t find a way to make it work for you, on whatever scale that makes the most sense.

There really aren’t any secrets to growing your content engine. No magic recipe. It’s just a matter of putting the resources you have into making it happen.

Best of all, this post just gave us about 2,000 words toward this month’s word count goal.

0 notes