The American psyche seems to prefer circus and bread over power. At least from this little brain training I have done. Of course, the statement is provocative and generalized, but hey, from time to time i might as well spice it up a little to get the blood stirring as this seems to be good marketing since the dawn of men. I hope you enjoy the read and take a thing or two away from them (including the title which I build on coschedule from the words I researched).

 

 

I have recently been asked to outline how I stay productive as I post on social media on a regular basis and publish a blog post with 1000 words+ almost every day. Basically, this boils down to challenging yourself and having a plan. Once you have the plan, you have to stick to it and believe in it. From time to time you go back and look at your assumptions when you do not meet your goals. 

 

Good tools to know are

 

Buyer Personas

Content plans

Answer the public

Google trends

Fiverr

99 designs

Making use of your research phase

 

and many things which Tim Ferriss also uses and explains on his blog and in his books. I will not go into everything and only outline the use of Buyer personas and how to use Google trends to optimize your content plans for reach. The very, very basic principle of being very productive is to change your mindset from a consumer to a producer. If you play a video game you consume something someone else made. If you write the code, you are producing. If you play it with the plan to write a review about it, you are at least somehow productive. I am guilty of many wasted hours of video game consumption, as my wife can attest. Back to the topic regarding the American psyche and what led me to look into it.

 

I have set my goal to bring my blog to 10.000 visitors a month by end of 2017 to then go into a second phase of optimizing the conversion rates to get to 100 leads a month. Currently, I am sitting at about 8.000 visitors and 30 leads a month with a growth rate of 5% month over month on visitors. Leads are a bit more patchy as they have a single source on my site, but this is statistics and I won't bore you further with this now. (Download the Wendler 531 calculator. People seem to love this one the most.)

 

As there are only two months left in the year I have to act if I do not want to accept defeat as with current growth rates I will end up about a thousand visitors short. (8000x1.05= 8.400, 8400*1.05= 8.820). I think coming only 1.000 short would be pretty annoying. In my German mind, I am also opposed to cheating my way into winning by buying some pay per click ads as this would be what people with a lot of money would do. Especially if the site has no product to return revenue from.

 

The first thing I did is to pull content I have already produced from Q118 into Q417. As I had some time I wrote 20 blog posts about kettlebells which I had distributed out up until the end of March 18. By fastening up my publishing I should get more views this year at the expense of regularity as I now ripped a gap into the Q1 content plan by speeding up. Here you can see how some management decisions can create problems down the line as I now have to plug that hole at a later stage.

 

This being said I dabbled around with Google trends a little before I started writing these 20 posts and found out that I will address a bigger audience with writing about kettlebells than about barbells and dumbbells. As I also recently read a book of Pavel Tsatsoulins on the very topic this came in handy. Always pick the topic to write about which you have knowledge in and has the biggest potential. Out of the three kettlebells, it was. 

 

So here I am and I am getting a bit annoyed about my blog not scaling as I would like it to. A good way of optimizing my time is to think a bit harder about what to write about and get the most bang for the buck or, in my case, the most addressable reach per word written. Time to get smarter and then, maybe, outsource the writing to someone else.

 

So on the way to meet my cousin on Tempelhof field in Berlin I got out my Evernote and wrote down the three major areas of interest in fitness

 

Looks

Performance

Health

 

this is one of the tasks you would do when formulating your buyer persona for your marketing plan. I recommend the content you find on the Hubspot blog if you want to dig deeper into the topic. The next step was to think about what kind of words and phrases a person interested in one of these three areas would use to talk about what they are doing or search on the internet. Here is what I came up with on the 45-minute train track:

 

Looks

 

 

Performance

 

Sport, training, gym, power, strength, speed, grip, grapple, sprint, jump, tackle, rugby, football, endurance, win, lose, competition, performance, fitness, personal best, improve, progress, track, field, Olympic, record, workout, lift, snatch, clean, jerk, bench press, deadlift, squat, result, system , team, coach, trainer, athlete, motivation, determination, fast, strong, effective, efficient, system, monitor, analyse, one repetition maximum,test , leagues, game, try , defeat, victory, wrestle, fight, struggle, grind, progression, junior, senior, pro, amateur, athletics, equipment, circuit, interval, tough, tournament, barbell, dumbbell, kettlebell, marathon, Crossfit, row,  wod, doping, games

 

Health

 

Rehabilitation, injury, recovery, illness, heal, break, sick, health, sickness, rebuild, restructure, operation, prevention, cause, doctor, nutrition, nutrionist, age, old, tissue, cardiac arrest, heart attack, obesity, obese, overweight, stress, burnout, loneliness, suicide, depression, mental health, psychology, happiness, mindfulness, structure, social, friends, break, bone, tissue, ligament, tear, rip. Replace, surgery, rest, physiotherapist, physiotherapy, massage, sore, pain, chronic, tension, blood, fail, hypochondriac, pressure

 

The good thing about me being by myself is that I do not need approval from anyone whether these are the right words. The corporate world can sometimes be gruelingly slow. The bad thing is that I am only picking one and not many brains. After working on these word uds I put the words which are fat into google trends to see where the most interest is generated.

 

 

Google trends is a free tool which lets you test what is being searched most for on Google. You can break down by year, location and compare different topics. You can always argue that the data is a bit skewed as people who search for a certain location are not necessarily born there or live there. The even more cynical among you will even argue that Google's algorithm is flawed anyway. All fair, but does not necessarily help me reach my goal (more constructive ideas than just doubting the data always welcome in the comment section.).

 

When you put the words and phrases into Google trends, put the timeframe to 2004 to present and filter location to the US of A you get the following ranking in interest:

 

 

Some interesting insight for me is here that the gym and training seem to be more interesting to Americans then winning or losing. I will also get slightly better results to use the word strong instead of strength and the word grip for tackle where it is possible. I should stop writing any content around endurance (marathons) and solely focus on topics on how to increase fitness, power, speed, training for footballers and how to make them fast. Quite an eye-opener once you have it in front of you black and white (well in Google colors, a bit more fun). Donald Trump will be pleased to know that people are a lot more interested in football than in power. Juvenal seems to have been right about "bread and circuses".

 

 

Google Trends is one source so next, I ran the data through the HubSpot keyword tool to get a better grip on monthly searches and also how hard these keywords are to address. Again you can criticize the method and how the data was collected and the process I used to collect and weigh it. Still, this took me another hour to complete and I think the picture is quite coherent. I took the Google data and each phrase got points from 1 - 22. I ranked them the same way in terms of monthly searches and difficulty. Only thing I did for difficulty is that the one with the lowest got the least points and the one with the highest difficulty the most. Wrapping it up I added the three scores. Lowest count wins for content production. The best score you can get is three. The worst 66 (3x22). Here are the results:

 

 

 

As you can see some of these are surprising and also telling. If you want to stay in power, better make sure that the NFL is running in the USA, otherwise, interest might shift. As long as grown men chase a ball you can go on about your business in the White House. For me this little exercise helps for the next year to get better at getting the most out of more hours invested in my blog to build it up even further and improve my personal brand.