Finding the right topics for your first five website articles
An interesting story from a designer, who’s breaking into the car scene.
He showed me a ‘builder’ in Australia who’s known for his unique cars. It turns out, that back in 2006, this guy started to document his first car build through a simple website.
And, each step of the way, he wrote an article about it.
Soon, the car community got hold of the story, and people flocked to watch it unfold.
Now he’s got a horde of fans a half-million strong on different platforms, and has created a full-time career doing the work he loves.
The entire process, driven by one article at a time.
Not from a writing expert, but a self-taught car guy.
I’ve had a similar thing happen
In December 2017, I started to write blog articles, that were sent out as emails.
This was while I owned a gym in Melbourne. So I was writing about my perspective on health, stress, training… Everything that kind of ‘surrounded’ the gym, but wasn’t the training itself.
Before I knew it, the emails started to get replies.
And soon turned into workshops about those topics.
I was a little surprised to be honest. It wasn’t 2006 anymore, the whole internet was crowded (more on that later).
Later, the blog posts also made up about 30% of my first book.
And to this day, writing blogs and articles has been one of the most powerful tools to help create positioning.
Why do articles work so well?
They don’t all work well. There are a lot of articles that are just words…
But, there are two types of articles that work very well and cut through the noise for a story-driven biz-ness. One is where you’re helping your customers, or ‘players’ win the game. This is giving them specific learnings, or tools to move forward on your new path. Or, in basic terms, you’re teaching them how to do things, or look at things the right way.
The other type that works well is celebrating players (clients, audience, peers) that are winning the game. I like to do these with case studies.
Both of these do two specific things:
They help your people win.
And, they aren’t self serving.
So while a traditional funnel clamps around your people, and reduces the possible places for them to go (buy, or don’t buy). Expanding your article bank increases the possible places for your people to go in your world (read more on this, or go over here to learn that… and, if you want guidance, you can buy).
This is much less needy, which is why the positioning power of articles is so strong.
But everyone can write articles…
Sure can. Especially now, as AI can spit them out in seconds.
But the increase in volume is mostly at the lower end. Most of the articles out there are ‘placeholders’. Trash that people put up to try and game SEO, or look smart.
With a little practice, you don’t just write an article that adds to the noise. You write an article that stands out.
And this is something different altogether. Something people click on, look forward to reading, and come back to, because it helps them win.
There are three ‘big’ areas to focus on
If you’ve ever tried surfing, you know it ain’t easy to learn. There’s the bit that you see - someone riding a wave. But that’s maybe 20% of what’s really going on. Then there’s the other 80% that’s hidden. And this is always the case with complex tasks like surfing (or writing).
And still, if you can master three things - positioning, paddling and standing up, you’re almost there.
You won’t be Kelly Slater, but you’ll be riding some kind of wave.
And it’s the same with writing. It’s complex stuff. As Hemingway said, 80% is unseen.
But still…
If you focus on the ‘big three’, then you’re going to be pretty far along. The big three for articles include topic, structure, and the all important, entertainment or drama
Here we’ll cover ‘Topic’
This seems simple, but it’s nuanced. Because the problem is, as the expert, you’re so close to the subject matter that it can be hard to know exactly what to write about, that can be helpful for your people. So if we just ‘put out’ articles, they tend to miss the mark.
So, what we’re going to do is, break it down into three parts: writing for your clients (not for you), being specific, and staying unique to your world.
We’ll work through these specifically. Then, you can write your first five articles for your website and start to position as an authority in your niche.
First, the Skeletons…
Let’s bring some ugly skeletons out of the closet. Because it ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. Writing is a blue-collar job. It takes effort, and time.
Here are the three struggles we all face with this:
You won’t see anything happen straight away. Even if you’re a bit obsessive, and pound out all five articles and publish them today, you won’t see a radical change in inbound phone calls tomorrow. This will come over time.
The articles take a while to write at first. For me, they are pretty fast. A couple hours. But that is after hundreds of the darn things. I recommend putting a timer on it, so you spend a little time each day. And then you’ll get faster over time.
There’s a cumulative effect for positioning, not a linear effect. This means that the more you write, the stronger your position as an expert. One article will do nothing for positioning. Ten does something. At 100, you have ‘mass’.
Now that that’s out of the way, let’s dive in so you can start writing some articles and positioning like a service champion.
Step 1 - Find the Topics: ‘Write first for your clients, then for yourself’
Let’s go back to the surfing example.
In surfing, at a high level, there are two or three directions you can go. You can be a free surfer. You can be a big wave surfer. Or, you can be a competition surfer.
And of course there’s overlap. But a lot of free surfers and big wave surfers ain’t comp surfers.
Why?
There’s politics. There ain’t a lot of prize money for the most part. And there’s a lot of travel.
But most specifically, they’re surfing for a judge. And it creates a particular style of surfing, that some people don’t want to do.
In service businesses, we’re ‘surfing’ for a judge.
We are being judged by the people we want to help. Even if a few of us love to write, this isn’t fiction. So we gotta help ‘em. We put out articles for the clients. And this is our main North Star.
The article topics should stem from what your people need. Either by directly asking them, or, noticing the obstacles and behaviour of your customers.
And what about the ‘writing for yourself’ part?
Well that’s the benefit we get. The positioning comes as a result of the transformation that we make. It doesn’t come just from writing.
So this will help us to identify the topics for the first five articles.
The first task is to look in your messages and conversations for client obstacles.
In Creator Club, we use email, and a closed community platform that has posts and messages. And, there’s the calls as well. You’ll have your own platforms that you use. So if you start with your messages or emails, look through to find the obstacles or questions that people have.
Typically, the obstacles you find will be a little blurry or broad. Because people don’t tend to be perfectly specific with their questions, and they’re confused by the obstacle.
Example:
We used to own a gym, and sometimes if someone wasn’t training for a while, they might say “I’m a little burned out with work”. That’s certainly an obstacle. But it isn’t clear what that means.
It could be food, recovery, time off, training dosage et cetera. But at the moment, just write it down as it is.
If you don’t have messages with clients, or emails from them, then the next step is to talk to your clients and just listen to them. Make a mental note. Then when you’re done, go and write it down.
You’ll hear all kinds of things.
Example - one of my friends is a real estate agent. She said that one thing people talked about was the hassle of changing all the addresses for bills et cetera after buying the house. So she made a note, and sent an email out about that.
Try to accumulate ten obstacles that you’re hearing from your clients from messages or conversations.
Step 2 - Create Specificity by Drilling Down
“… A good story is in the details, the little things that most people don’t notice but enrich the entire presentation.”
- Richard Garriott
One of the things we can do to make our storytelling more powerful, is to create specific images with words.
Here’s an excerpt from Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” (1926)
“In the morning I walked down the Boulevard to the rue Soufflot for coffee and brioche. It was a fine morning. The horse-chestnut trees in the Luxembourg gardens were in bloom. There was the pleasant early-morning feeling of a hot day. I read the papers with the coffee and then smoked a cigarette. The flower-women were coming up from the market and arranging their daily stock. Students went by going up to the law school, or down to the Sorbonne. The Boulevard was busy with trams and people going to work.”
The specifics are what create the scene. And it’s processed much differently from just a series of events.
In other words, specifics create a more compelling story.
And the same is true for your articles. Your audience is reading the articles as they move through their own story in their lives. They’re dealing with specific ‘scenes’. Or obstacles that pop up. With your articles, you want to meet this level of specificity.
But the obstacles you got from the clients are pretty broad…
Exactly.
Break the obstacles down into chunks.
Let’s go back to the burned out gym person.
Well, we don’t know exactly the obstacle. It could be time management. Energy. Or, the training load.
So, you can either ask more questions (usually best by simply saying ‘interesting, tell me more about that…’ rather than trying to lead the question). Or, you can take a stab at it and outline specific obstacles that could lead to the burned out feeling.
Now, if it’s starting to feel like your articles are limited. And they ain’t solving a huge problem… Good.
They should be limited.
They should address an exclusive obstacle, that’s narrow, and demonstrates your understanding of the client’s world.
Solve for one action in the scene of the obstacle.
The overall scene is one of a burned out client. One action in that, might be how they eat, or organising the food for the week ahead, so there’s less to worry about, and they have more energy. Solve for that one action.
Another action might be setting up an evening routine for better sleep, to restore energy. Sovle for that one action with an article.
What we’re doing, is rather than looking at your client’s journey in these big sweeping strokes that make sense to you as a guide, we’re zooming in to look at the one thing that they’re dealing with, and showing them a solution for that.
Because once they have a small steps solution, they will move forward with the action, and feel confident to take another one.
And your article has done its job.
But it’s going to leave so many obstacles open…
Perfect.
Time to write another article topic.
You might have this one ‘burned out’ obstacle becoming your five topics:
Sunday food prep template so you have time and energy all week to train
How to regulate training so you ‘build’ instead of ‘burn’ your energy
Three ways to adapt your training when you have heavy work deadlines
3 Pre and post workout meal ideas to recover faster and feel fresh again
Winter endurance - how top athletes stay motivated in the colder months (it ain’t what you expect)
If we do this right, we can take a few major obstacles that the client has, and break them down into five specific topics.
Then a new obstacle will give you five more…
Step 3 - Unique to Your World
This isn’t one a lot of people talk about.
But if you think about your overall business story, it all takes place in a particular ‘world’. So for example, in my world, I don’t do a lot of video. So it wouldn’t make sense for me to write a big article about being confident on video, even if it felt like that might help solve a particular obstacle for the client.
Another example right now is the AI and ChatGPT thing.
I have peers that are yapping on about the best prompts. And how to win with that stuff. Personally, I think a lot of people are just chasing the shiny object. And I’m yet to see real good work come out of it. So I don’t write about that. I just leave it.
Same with Facebook ads.
Same with managing your tax.
Both can be important things for a service biz-ness. But they ain’t part of my world, which revolves around story-driven business and marketing. So, we leave them out.
In an interview I did with Janet Forbes, who’s the co-founder or World Anvil, an online world building platform with 2.5 million users, who describes this as sticking to your ‘Meta’
“You don't wanna build a mild wide and an inch deep. That is, that is not a good ‘world’ setting, but it's also not a good brand. You can't be everything to everyone. And so for me, that, that concept of meta is something that really applies to pretty much everything in my life, and I think a lot of stuff in, in business really extrapolated from that, which is choose what it is you're trying to do and then choose the focus points that you're going for.”
If you start to do all kinds of ‘general’ articles that are outside of your world, you’re going to blend in with the masses.
Focus on your world, and the story that you’re creating with your business, and only write articles for that.
This will start to describe your ‘system’
While we started out taking core obstacles that your client is facing, and boiling them down to small, specific steps we can help them with, we also have another opportunity here.
We are outlining parts of our system.
So even though these are just your first five articles, they should point to the general way that you do things, or your overarching system in your business.
And over time, this becomes an overarching asset that can help your clients win.
And helps you make money as a business through expert positioning.
Back when I got into strength training, the second guy I became obsessed with, was Louie Simmons, from Westside Barbell.
The first place I went to, was his website.
I spent hours gorging on his haphazardly written in Louie speak, but infinitely helpful articles, that outlined his conjugate training system.
Then I bought the book. And the training certification et cetera.
The point is, it started out with his articles. By my count, there’s over 1,000 of ‘em.
And while his articles were solving specific problems or obstacles, they were also outlining a much larger system that I was learning at the same time.
And so it is in Creator Club.
Here, for example, we’re talking about how to find the topics for your first five articles. Well, that’s a key part of our system, which is setting up your weekly long form marketing, or asset building.
Summary
The first step to writing articles, is the ability to find topics that are relevant.
And while that sounds easy, I know what this is like. I’ve written hundreds of articles, and a TON of the early ones were just made up topics. And sometimes they hit the mark. But a lot of times, they missed completely.
It’s much better to have a system for finding your topics.
The first step, is to write for your clients - listen to the obstacles or challenges they’re facing.
The second step, was to turn that into specifics. We went through one example. But the idea is the topics want to ‘feel’ almost too small. They’re helping your clients win in one little step, rather than a huge leap (which they couldn’t implement anyway).
The final step, is to stay unique to your world and system. This guarantees that you keep building brand and positioning around a core area of expertise. And it also helps the reader build a deeper relationship with you.
Want help with your copywriting?
Download 18 Point Copywriting Guide for some simple tips to help