The moral of that (shitty) story was to show you that creating thought out and linkable content will eventually be the path to getting your content ranked…..which is good news, because simply pumping out lots of blog posts all the time sounds boring and lame.

SO HOW CAN WE MAKE TIMELESS CONTENT
(or salvage a non-performing piece of content)?

I searched “Things to do in Rio De Janeiro” and clicked to the 8th page:

With a random click, I stumbled on this site called Couple Travel the World (I don’t know these people at all and have zero affiliation with them….this is just an example I found):

Here was the post I stumbled upon:

coupletraveltheworld.com/things-to-do-in-rio-de-janeiro/

Their post ranked for 17 keywords about Rio De Janeiro, but gets ZERO traffic:

Notice traffic is zero, and the highest position is #35:

So how can we salvage this post and make it bring in more traffic??
Do we make the post longer?
Do we add more images?
Do we just give up?

Nope…..none of that stuff will help us all that much. We need to breathe life into this post being a little more clever. Here’s how….

 

STEP 1.) CREATE AN “ANGLE”

Ok, the “Things to do in Rio De Janeiro” posts have been written, and judging by their stability, it’s going to be hard for a smaller blog to compete (not impossible, just hard).

The way you “sneak into the results” is by going smaller, which then might lead to going bigger.

So while looking at this particular blog, it seems to be about a couple who travels the world:

So it would kind of make sense that our angle could be something like:
😍 ROMANTIC 😍
💑 LOVE 💑
❤️ HONEYMOON ❤️

This actually seems like a pretty good angle, because there’s a decent amount of searches for this topic and angle:

 

So instead of a generic “Things to do in Rio De Janeiro” post (which is already dominated by big players like Loney Planet and Trip Advisor, what if we angle this post towards couples??

The way you “sneak into the results” is by going smaller, which then might lead to going bigger…and that’s exactly what we’ll do by angling our post towards lovers, honeymooners, and couples.

 

STEP 2.) SEX UP THAT HEADLINE!

The current headline on our article is very generic, and doesn’t match our new “angle” at all:

So let’s write out about 4 new possible headlines, and highlight the one we like best:

Headline: Romantic things to do in Rio De Janeiro

Headline: How to have a romantic trip in Rio De Janeiro (For couples, lovebirds, or honeymooners)!

Headline: Our romantic trip to Rio De Janeiro (With guides, maps, and list of things to do)

Headline: A Romantic Getaway Guide for Rio De Janeiro (Including hotels, restaurants, and things to do) 😍

That headline is much better and fits our angle perfectly. Let’s change it on our article:

 

STEP 3.) MAKE A GRABBING IMAGE

Let’s make an image that’s more in line with our new “Romantic” angle, because this image is so boring and lame…

How about we add a little “Love” and “Hearts” and pictures of the couple?? BAM!

Now if we slap our new headline and image together, we’ve got the start of something great!

Ok…..so we made a more clickbait-y headline and crazier image. Does this mean we’re done?

Oh no way! We have to really BRING IT if we want to write Timeless Content, and here’s how we’re gonna do it:

 

STEP 4.) ADD HELPFUL “MODULES” TO THE CONTENT

You see my friend, all blog posts are made up of different “Modules” you can put in to make it better. So we’re going to take you through all the different possible modules we can add into content.

 

A.) MAKE A “CHEAT SHEET” OR SUMMARY OR T.O.C.

Being the best resource in the world doesn’t mean being the LONGEST resource in the world.

Our job as copywriters is to transfer information into someone’s brain efficiently as possible. For this reason a helpful “Cheat Sheet” or “Summary” at the end of the post is super helpful.

Helpful hint: You can often turn this Summary into a helpful table of contents also!

B.) MAKE UP YOUR OWN SCALE OR RATING SYSTEM

For a post like this, you don’t have to just use lots of words to rank places, you can create your own scoring system!

So for this post, we are going to rank every place by our new score:

THE RIO ROMANCE SCORE 😍

 

C.) PLOT OUT A HELPFUL MAP

When someone is visiting a new place, they often have little idea of WHERE things are. So why not plot it out for them?

This visual map makes it easy to get a sense of where everything is, and has the bonus of being fun to look at with pictures directly on it.

 

D.) EMBED A PICTURE GALLERY

There’s lots of images in that post, but adding them together in a gallery can be a fun and easy way for people to view them:

See all our pictures (with helpful captions):

You can even embed pictures from your social accounts and get some more followers!

 

E.) MAKE A “COST BREAKDOWN”

Obviously most people’s trips are determined by how much money they are willing to spend. A trip to Rio with $100,000 budget is going to be different than with an $800 budget.

So what if we breakdown the costs, possibly day-by-day so people can know what to expect, where to go for bargains, and where to avoid:

 

F.) MAKE A CALCULATOR

Instead of TELLING people how to do something, why not JUST DO IT FOR THEM using a calculator? Here’s an example of my Product Pricing Calculator that helps people work backwards how many units they need to sell to make a specific amount of money:

 

G.) MAKE A GENERATOR

You can build a tool that generates a bunch of something for the user. For example, this Title Generator makes tons of titles for someone right away:

 

H.) SCRAPE A DATASET AND ANALYZE IT

What if you scraped a bunch of data and analyzed it for readers? This would mean ONLY YOU have the information on your post! In this post we analyzed tons of scraped data from popular YouTube channels to see how many videos they posted before making it big:

 

H2.) GOOGLE DATASET ANALYSIS OF CRIME IN RIO

In the post by the couple traveling to Rio, what if they were to answer the question “Is Rio safe?” by analyzing a bunch of data taken from the Google Datasets Search?

 

I.) MAKE BIG LISTS OR TABLES

When we wanted to analyze copywriter salaries, instead of guesstimating what people make, we literally scraped data from every copywriting job listing and published the results with extensive (and sortable) tables and even a helpful synopsis:

 

J.) MAKE SHAREABLE TEMPLATES

Instead of writing elaborate content, often times I’ll just make free templates to give away, such as this Copywriting Command Center

:

We’ve given away stuff like full copywriting portfolios, followup email templates, and even fully made one pager flyers.

 

K.) GIVE AWAY THE PDF DOWNLOAD

You can easily make a pdf out of a blog post for free by pulling it into Google Docs and saving it as a PDF.

I do this with many of my blog posts such as this:

 

L.) GET VISITORS TO TAKE ANY ACTION NEXT

If a person reads your entire post, and has nothing to do after the post is done, it’s likely they will leave your site. Instead give them something to do!

 

USEFUL CONTENT ADVICE:

Think of each post as a “product” or an “asset” that gets better over time.
You can forever change, update, and add to your posts. They are fluid, not static. 

Create big-ass piece of content first → Break up into social posts
You can then link all your social posts to the big-ass post!

Social platforms are incentivized to make you feel there’s a lot of activity.
Seeing 84 hearts or likes feels good temporarily, but doesn’t create an asset.

Use social platforms to get traffic to your own site.
Site is asset, the platforms are just free advertising for your site.

It used to be ___X___
It used to be del.ic.iois. It used to be Digg. It used to be Craigslist. It used to be Orkut. It used to be MySpace. It used to be Xanga. It used to be Geocities. It used to be Friendster. It used to be Periscope. It used to be Meerkat. It used to be LinkedIn. It used to be LinkedIn posts. It used to be Google Video. It used to be Google Plus. It used to be Google AdSense. It used be Facebook Pages. It used to be Facebook Notes. It used to be Facebook Groups. It used to be Medium. It used to be Facebook Ads. It used to be Instagram posts. It used to be Instagram stories. It used to be Instagram TV. It used to be YouTube.

If you build an audience solely on one platform, it’s countdown till you’re fu****!

A random Instagram post doesn’t turn into a large piece of content…
…but a large piece of content can become countless social posts:

 

SUMMARY OF THIS ENTIRE POST: