How to use short online articles to build authority and reach
In 2016, the internet was already rammed with articles. The ‘blog phase’ popped ten years prior, and everyone was deep into the ‘Optimise SEO’ stage. It was crowded. And still, it was an article that tipped me into buying my first business coaching program. With a tidy sum of $20k for a one year program at that.
The article was titled “Top Three Mistakes Gym Owners Make”. I already trusted the guy a bit. Then I read the article and booked a call pronto.
At that time, I’d personally been writing for a while, but that experience was a key turning point to start writing for my business.
I started with blog articles for our gym and since then it’s only accelerated. I’ve had written posts go viral on social media, sold hundreds of thousands of dollars with the written word, and have personally grown a lot from pounding the keyboard.
Anyway, now the game has changed, again.
Since the ‘great online shift’ in 2020, there’s AI copywriting bots, ChatGPT, and content seemingly everywhere.
If I open up social media, I’m blasted with the best prompts for AI, or how to get AI to write an entire book.
[Which is ironic, because I’m deep in the throes of writing ‘book two’ now, and the AI thing does sound tempting some days, even though it ain’t for me.]
And we’re largely dealing with this noise the only way we know how - avoiding the whole mess. Or, holding back because we’re told that in short order our ideas or work won’t be worth diddly because of AI.
Anyway, I love a ‘zag’, and this is exactly what I see available to service businesses right now.
While the ‘chaff’ will be neck deep with the AI noise, the high value ‘wheat’ is still rare.
Because when we look deeper, while advances in technology ‘should’ have made producing articles and online content easier, it ain’t always the case.
Personally, I don’t know anyone who has suddenly become a prolific (and effective) creator because of faster computers, AI, or anything else that’s come along.
That paradox isn’t new.
Isaac Asimov, for example, produced around 5000 print-ready words every day (much more, but they were edited down). And this was from attacking the typewriter.
More:
William Blake was a poet another hundred years plus prior. He rabidly produced content - hundreds of poems, books, art and more, through ‘relief etching’. I don’t know what that is, but it doesn’t sound fast.
And today people struggle to tap out a tweet or instagram post.
The point is, technology isn’t necessarily making people any faster or more prolific.
Because the bottleneck ain’t the typing, it’s the thinking.
Which, unless you’re completely tuned out, isn’t getting replaced any time soon. This means there’s a great opportunity, still, to ‘zag’ using online writing to stand out, build an audience, and create raving fans as a service provider.
Here are a four ways to use online articles to do exactly that.
(And one way not to use it)
Reason why not #1 ‘Do it for the SEO’
SEO is how your website ranks when we search your category. So if you’re a lawyer, and I search ‘lawyer in Sydney’, where do you come up? Truth is, if it ain’t in the top one or two, then one could argue that you’re nowhere.
My friend was telling me about the dating scene with Tinder. He said basically the top five or ten percent of the guys get almost all the girls. And the rest of the guys get nothing. I don’t know if that’s true. That sounds close to SEO to me..
So SEO ‘optimisation’ is choosing to fight tooth and nail to stay at the top.
Part of the theory is, you can produce wordy, ‘seo-friendly’ blog posts on your website, and this will help your case. So I *should* fill this post with the words ‘business coaching’ and ‘service business coaching’ as much as possible.
And all that organic content can help me move up when you search for “business coaching.”
I see that as a bonus. But not the ‘game’ itself.’
The game the Creators are playing in the modern economy, which is built on trust, is to become known specifically. So rather than search ‘business coaching’, I’m relying that you got here because you searched for my name, Creator Club, or, you are already on the email list or social media following.
So the blog thing may still help general SEO. I heard through the grapevine that it does. But to what extent, I’m not sure.
Either way, to me it’s better to use the articles in the three ways as follows.
Reason Why #1 - Populate your site to build a position of ‘helpfulness’
The law of reciprocity says that if you’re hungry, and I give you an apple, at some time in the future you’ll feel like returning the favour. Maybe if you’re generous you give me an orange because I like them more.
The problem is the way a lot of tactical marketers rely on ‘reciprocity’ is broken.
“If they download your lead magnet and you give extra value in a five-email nurture sequence, then they’ll buy”
Maybe. Not usually though.
We are looking much deeper now. And in some cases we even ‘sense and reject’ the attempts at so-called reciprocity.
But still, when I land on the MIT online learning website, and see hundreds of free courses that I can do, it creates a position in the mind. It’s memorable. I’ll go back.
When someone lands on your site and sees that you’ve done some work, and are not just trying to convert every poor soul who clicks on your URL into a sale, it creates a strong position.
I see this with my own articles all the time.
When my articles go out with an email, there are a few click-throughs. But over time, it builds. People notice the value even in the email, and they come back to the article later.
This is the goal, the ‘coming back’ part. We want to position your business in the minds of your customers, so you become the person they want to go back to, in order to go deeper and learn more.
And while we don’t track this, we find that there’s a certain ‘quality’ to the conversation we have with potential clients on the back of reading an article or from podcasts, rather than from social media.
What if people get to your site and just think you’re using AI to populate the blog?
There was an article the other day about how Christopher Nolan said he wouldn’t use CGI in one of his movies:
“I find CGI rarely is able to grab you. It tends to feel safe. Even if it’s impressive and beautify, it’s difficult to make you feel danger.”
And so it is with AI blogs. The discerning customers that you seek to serve are probably going to know the difference. And this gets into all of our character work, and personality marketing which we talk about everywhere.
Populating your site with helpful content shows that you can help, and often creates a ‘sticker’ website.
Not a shabby position at all.
Reason Why #2 - Blast to email, then take them deeper
The average email I send out is around 400 words. Sometimes longer, often shorter. The email is a one-to-one setting, the person opens it up while they’re on the couch, or at the desk. They read through it, get the insight and that’s it…
It’s a closed loop.
But when you write a longer article, focused on a specific idea, you link to it in an email, and give people a chance to go deeper.
Now they can click on the link, and dive into your world.
The trick is to make sure the front end email has enough juice in it. You want to ‘sell the consumption’ of the article, so there’s a clear reason why they would want to click through.
This gives you fodder for your email (summary, or intro to the article), but has a much longer lifecycle, because the article sits on your site for a while.
Reason Why #3 - Use as fodder to approach publications (the modern day CV).
Let’s say you’re a nutritionist, and you want to expand your audience.
One way would be to leverage ‘other people’s audience.’ One woman we work with is a movement coach online, she does this a lot through her podcast. It’s given her access to hundreds of thousands of listeners.
But you can use articles to do this too.
I’ve even had people message me even after doing an instagram post, asking if they can share the writing to their weekly email. Instantly putting more eyeballs on my stuff, which is a good thing.
Let’s say you want to go bigger. You could write to magazines, publishers, or websites to see if they’ll feature your work. But when you do that, they’re going to ask you for samples, or get you to point back to your site or other work that you’ve done.
This is where your articles come in…
If you have three, six, ten helpful articles on your site that you actually put some work into, it will help your case.
They can make a decision then and there if your style of work would suit their platform. And at the very least you’re going to make a real impression with them, rather than just reaching out for a favour out of the blue like most of the cold DM’s that try to flog you things.
Conclusion
If you’ve got that itch to write, and you’ve got a certain level of mastery in your niche, articles can be a great opportunity to connect with more people, and expand your online network.
Your articles don’t have to be long, and even still they can help you stand out dramatically.
(My articles on average have a seven minute read time).
Not only that but you can cross-publish to medium, LinkedIn, and any other platform to ‘fatten up’ your whole business world online.
Building your world out to a much deeper level than is possible just on the short form chatter.
Something to think about.
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