Part 5. How to prioritise your list of content ideas
If you were taking action while watching this lesson,
I'm sure your spreadsheet of content ideas is full of golden nuggets.
Which should feel quite satisfying already.
But how do you decide which of them you should tackle first?
Well, in the early lessons of this course I promised that we're going to focus on the business value of blogging.
What's the point of investing your time and resources to bring people to your website,
if these people won't buy from you?
So we need to add one more column to our spreadsheet and name it Business value.
To fill a cell in this column you'll need to ask yourself:
"What are the chances that a person, looking for that thing in Google and reading my article
on that topic would become my customer?"
I usually give my content ideas a score from 0 to 3,
where 3 means that my product or service is an absolutely irreplaceable solution
for a target search query, which leads to an easy sell;
2 means that my business will help people with what they are searching for, but it's
not essential in solving their search query;
1 means that my business can only be mentioned
in passing, because the search query is only slightly related to what I sell.
And 0 means that there's not even a chance to squeeze a single mention of my business
into the article.
Early in this course I told you that with Ahrefs blog we never had a goal to grow monthly
amount of traffic.
We wanted to make our blog a customer aquisition channel and grow the monthly number of leads
that it generates.
That's why we often had to ignore topics with huge traffic potential in favour of topics
with huge business potential.
Let me explain that with a very vivid example.
Most likely you've heard about HubSpot.
They are one of the biggest brands in digital marketing software field.
They have 1,800 employees and a huge content marketing team that runs their blog.
According to Ahrefs, HubSpot blog gets almost 2M visits per month from Google.
Which is an absolutely staggering number.
So let's look at their best-perfoming articles using the Top pages report in Ahrefs.
And here's their best article, that brings them almost 80,000 visitors per month
in the US alone and accounts for 8% of their entire blog traffic:.
"How to Make an Animated GIF in Photoshop."
Yeah, it's not a mistake.
Their best performing article is a tutorial on making a gif image.
Does this article grow their business?
Well, the product that HubSpot sells can be described as a "marketing CRM".
And if you ask me, the road of someone looking for tutorial on making a GIF image to becoming
a paid user of a "marketing CRM" is kind of a maze.
I mean, people who are searching Google for "how to make a gif" are clearly not their dream customers.
So this content idea would get a business potential score of 0 from me.
Now, let's examine our own blog and see if we practice what we preach.
Here are the articles that bring the most search traffic to Ahrefs blog:
"Keyword research," "Top google searches," "Website traffic," "SEO tips," "SEO audit," etc.
Obviously, these articles are nowhere near "how to make a GIF" guide in terms of traffic numbers.
But they convert readers into customers of Ahrefs very well.
Here's a tweet from last week to prove it.
This guy took Ahrefs free trial after reading our guide to long tail keywords.
And a few weeks later he tweeted that he became our paid customer.
This is exactly what we're looking to achieve with almost every article that we publish
on our blog.
And it is utterly important to keep this in mind at all times.
Search volume doesn't equal business opportunity.
The searchers' intent behind your search query does.
That is why marketers are so obsessed with keywords that have the word "buy"
(or it's synonims) in them:
"best place to buy dslr camera," "hire a business coach," "rent an apartment in london."
These searches clearly indicate that the person behind them is one step away from pulling
money from their wallet.
But in all honesty, you should not ignore their generic versions with much higher search volume
just because the search traffic coming from them would be harder to convert into cusomers:
Especially if you have some experience writing good sales copy and persuading peope to buy
what you sell.
A person searching for "business coach" might not be ready to hire one right away,
but it is your article that could persuade them to do so.
So if the more specific search query with a clear buying intent gets a business value of 3,
the generic one would still get 2 from me.
All you need to do is just stay reasonable with your business value scores and don't
fall for writing guides on how to create a GIF image,
unless of course you sell some kind of software for creating gifs.
And that's the end of the lesson #4.
Now, you should have a perfect understanding of where to get almost unlimited content ideas
and how to vet them for search traffic potential, ranking difficulty, and business value.
And in the next lesson I'll show you how to make sure that your article is properly optimized
for the search query that you're targeting.
Sounds good?
Then I'll see you in lesson #5.