Module 1 Video 2 Transcript

Hey everyone it’s Derek Halpern and welcome to the second video in Module One
of Blog that Converts.

When you develop your Superpower Solution that’s the reason why people visit
your blog for the first time, but if you want them to continue to read your blog so
that they eventually buy your products and services you’ve got to give them a
reason why they should do that also.

And the question is how do you give them that reason why?

Well, the secret lies in how you pick your blog’s topic, or, how you rework your
existing blog’s topic for those of you who already have a blog. And here’s the deal:
there are more than 160 million blogs out there and when you are working to
attract your first 1,000 or 10,000 readers you can’t just start blogging about a
broad topic like fitness or real estate or marketing or any of those types of broad
topics. You can’t do it! You can’t do it.

Breaking into a broad topic like that is impossible, it’s impossible. And if you’re
going to try as a new blogger with no reach and no audience it’s a death sentence.

New visitors will come to your blog and think – you know they’ll come to your
blog because of the Superpower Solution – and then they’ll think “Well this is just
a lackluster version of this other blog that I read.” That’s why you can’t focus on
those broad topics because you can’t really own that. And then they’d leave your
site and never come back. They’re not going to stick around.

So the question is what can you do? Well, that’s where what I call the “Divide &
Conquer Technique” comes into play.

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 Here’s the short of it: instead of competing in one of those broad topics you
divide up your main topic into several different subtopics and you conquer each
subtopic one at a time.

Now before I walk you through how this works with blogging let me tell you how I
came up with this idea to begin with. Back in 2004 Facebook was a brand new
website. The dominant force was MySpace and people thought Facebook really
didn’t stand a chance. It’s funny to think about that now actually, but back then
that was the reality. So what did Facebook do? Think about it, what did Facebook
do?

Well, their target market was people who wanted to use social networking. But
instead of targeting everyone – which was what MySpace had already owned, that
was the broad topic that MySpace owned – as you know, they picked specific
colleges. They started at Harvard. They conquered it. Then they went to other Ivy
League schools and conquered them too. Then they branched out into other
colleges and conquered them one at a time. And then they branched out into high
schools, conquered the high schools and then they went to the world.

They divided up the market and conquered it one specific subtopic at a time.
They simply took a broad topic of people who use social networking and instead
of going for everyone at once they went for specific colleges. Now while I’m not
sure if this was a happy accident or if it was planned, it laid the foundation for
how I start blogs now.

Let’s look at Social Triggers for example. Instead of going for broad-based
internet marketing, which was a huge, broad topic with a ton of competition, I
divided it up into subtopics. There was blogging, SEO, pay-per-click advertising,
content marketing, email marketing, conversion testing, list building, persuasion

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 psychology, web design, copywriting… I took the whole idea of internet marketing
and I broke it up into subtopics.

Then instead of going after all of the topics at once I went after just one specific
topic. Just one. As the saying goes,

“You can’t strike oil by digging 100 one-foot holes.

So that’s what I was going to do with my content. I was going to dig one 100-foot
hole by focusing on just one specific topic.

Now as you know that topic was persuasion psychology. And then when I
conquered that I branched out into another topic, which as you also probably
know was blog conversion rates. And then I did it again with list building. So I
went from persuasion psychology to blog conversion rates to list building.

The exact types of articles I wrote about on Social Triggers was methodical. I
divided the market up and conquered individual topics by building expertise up
in each topic before moving on to the next. Very similar to how Facebook went
through the world with colleges, high schools, etcetera.

Now the question is how did I know or how can you know when you can move
from one topic to the next? Well, I followed just a simple three-step formula.

Step one, I picked the topic that I wanted to conquer. Step two, I wrote some base
content around that topic.

Alright now before we move on what is base content? Base content is a

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 Step three, I went out and promoted my website using the promotion strategies
which you are going to learn in Module Three of this course. Well more on that
later.

Step #1: ! Pick the topic that you want to conquer first.
Step #2: ! Write base content around that topic.
Step #3:! Use the promotional strategies that I cover in Module 3 of this course.

But now let’s take this back to you. Whether you’re just starting your blog or
you’ve been blogging for a while this strategy still works.

For new blogs it’s easy. Just divide up your market and conquer each individual
topic one at a time. If you’ve been blogging for a while you likely already have
those three to seven articles and that’s great! All you gotta do is just package them
up into what I call a Resource Page, which you can read about below this video.
There’ll be a short description.

What is A Resource Page?

A resource page is, quite simply, a WordPress page that groups up 3-7 articles around
one specific topic. It’s not a category page, because that’s often listed from newest
articles to oldest articles. A resource page, on the other hand, is simply your BEST
article around one specific topic, with an accompanying email opt-in form.

As an example, look at List Building and Increase Online Sales on Social Triggers.

For more, you can read this article.

And then you can move through the promotional strategies that you’ll learn later
in this course to help establish your expertise in that particular topic. Because the
promotional strategies really are key, because you can be an expert in what you

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 do and have some content on your site to prove it, but it’s a whole other thing to
be an expert at what you do and be known as an expert at what you do. The latter
is much more preferable obviously and to achieve that you really need to use the
promotional strategies in Module Three of this course.

But now, you may be wondering “Does this really work everywhere? Does the
Divide & Conquer Technique work?”

Absolutely! I used it, but let’s also look at the mega marketing blog, Copyblogger.
Back in 2006 Copyblogger launched as a blog that taught bloggers how to learn
copywriting. That was it. It soon branched into information marketing, search
engine optimization, web design, social media marketing, and loads of other
topics also. So that’s what they did, they started up with one topic, divided it up
and conquered.

Or take a look at Mashable. They launched as a website that talked about social
media and they even had things on their site like MySpace layouts. You know,
back in the day [laughs]. They then branched out into covering news about start-
ups and then into the broad-based tech industry and now they pretty much write
about every topic that you could ever imagine.

So another example, look at Huffington Post. It’s the same exact thing. Same
exact thing! It started as a political blog and slowly branched out into other
verticals.

What’s the thread of similarity here? Well, huge sites, or huge blogs, become huge
not by trying to take everything all at once. Instead they simply divide up their
market into subtopics and slowly conquer each subtopic. And I believe you
should do the same exact thing.

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 Now the question is how can you do this? How do you know what topics you can
cover? Well, luckily, right? This is where the worksheet comes into play. I’m
going to walk you through how you can use the Divide & Conquer Technique for
your blog. And like the first worksheet in this Module this worksheet will be just
as helpful, and it’s going to be tough to complete, ok?

So go download the worksheet below and make sure you finish it before you
begin watching the third video – it’s totally worth it.

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