The Evergreen Profits Content Calendar And Content Management Process
We recently switched up our business model a little bit to focus on giving more value for free. We shut down all of our info-products in the marketing / entrepreneur space and started making everything available for free here on the blog.
With this switch, came a massive focus on content marketing and SEO.
At the moment, we release three new pieces of content per week on this blog. A blog post every Monday, a podcast every Wednesday, and either a video or another blog post every Friday…
With this schedule, there is a lot to keep up with.
Every single blog post needs to help build our list, every single blog post needs to help us earn some money, every single blog post needs promotion to get eyeballs on it. It's a lot of work that has required us to build systems and a content calendar to stay on top of it all.
Right now, we use Trello to organize our content calendar and we use Google Sheets to manage and systematize all of the list building, monetization, and SEO efforts.
It wasn't easy to build and it took me forever to really dial in a system but, thanks to podcast guests like David Sinick, we've finally built a system that works for us.
How We Monetize
Last week, I wrote about the new direction of EGP. Yet, we still get questions about how it all fits together. We still get questions about how we make money without selling our courses and our newsletter anymore.
Since I just laid out our systems in the above video, here's a quick breakdown of how we now make money…
- Through affiliate marketing – We mention products throughout our blog posts and through our emails that earn us affiliate commissions. This is currently about 50% of our income at the moment.
- Coaching and consulting – We do not sell info-products anymore about marketing but we still work privately with clients to tailor our business strategies to their specific needs. (We actually have a massive discount on coaching right now for people who get in before the end of the year). This accounts for about 20% of our income at the moment.
- Info-products – Wait… Didn't I just say we stopped selling info-products? We stopped selling info-products about marketing, business, entrepreneurship, etc. We still practice what we preach and sell info-products in niches outside of the business world. We actually buy, ramp-up, and sell other info-businesses, using our techniques. This accounts for roughly 15% of our business right now.
- Partnerships – We consult and help build other people's businesses on an equity basis. This isn't always a consistent cashflow for us and we likely won't see the big bucks from it until the companies we work with sell. However, this still accounts for roughly 10% of our income.
- Advertising – You'll notice that we do have some ads floating around on our blog now that weren't there before. We're testing out Adsense on our blog to see if it can be a consistent stream of revenue for us. It's still very new and hasn't been very significant yet but it generates probably less than 5% of our current income.
- Investing – We do hold cryptocurrency (and will continue to hold them despite the bloodbath of the past 24 hours). We are also learning to actively trade options, thanks to Phil Newton. On top of that we both hold diversified investment portfolios in things like stocks, ETFs, and some real estate.
Finally, we are growing a list with this site. We add roughly 100 people per day to our list from this site now… This allows us to bring people back to the site, earn more revenue off affiliate promotions, get people excited about hiring us for coaching, vet out more potential partnerships, and sell more advertising on the site.
As you can see, we've got plenty going on. We really have no need to sell courses on marketing or how to make money from the internet. We'd rather just practice what we preach and do the preaching for free.
How We Drive Traffic
Since I showed our process above, I figured I'd quickly break down how we drive traffic to this site as well. In fact, most people think of us and think either “the content guys” or “the affiliate marketing guys”. We've kind of become known for one or both of those terms among the people that follow us. However, both of those have one thing in common. We're good at driving traffic. We're good at content marketing because we can drive a ton of people to our content and grow our list. We're good at affiliate marketing because we know how to drive a ton of traffic to affiliate offers.
In our minds, we're the “traffic guys”. Traffic is what we feel is our true super power…
Anyway, here's a handful of the ways we drive traffic currently:
- SEO – Believe it or not, despite having a fairly large list, Google is still our #1 traffic source. Despite mailing almost daily, Google still beats our list with the amount of traffic it drives. Because of this, we're putting a massive focus on optimizing SEO even further this coming year.
- Our List – Our list grows at a rate of roughly 100 subscribers per day right now. This list gives us the ability to point traffic at whatever we want, whenever we want.
- Social Media Sharing – We have a Facebook group, we have a Facebook page, we have our personal profiles, we have Twitter, and we have LinkedIn… All of these drive traffic back to our site when we simply share links. Organic social media currently drives more traffic for us that paid social media. Hopefully, that's simply a testament to the quality of our content. 🙂
- Paid Social Media – We do boost every piece of content we make on our page. We boost to fans of the page plus friends of fans. We've tested different audiences and that simple default boost option is what's been working the best. (Thanks to Jenny Durose for that tip)
- Repurposed Content – After we create content on this blog, we typically repurpose all of it or parts of it on sites like Medium, LinkedIn, Slideshare, and lately, even SteemIt. We link back to the original post and it drives some additional eyeballs.
- Push Notifications – We use PushCrew and it automatically sends out a browser push notification every time a piece of content goes live. It's quickly becoming a large driver of the repeat traffic to our site.
That's just a handful of the largest impact things that we do. Most are shown in the process video above. We experiment with new traffic strategies constantly, ramping up the winners and ditching the losers.
Anyway, I think that's a pretty good breakdown of our content calendar, process, monetization strategy, and traffic strategy.
If you have any questions or want to discuss this topic further, make sure you're a member of our free Facebook group and let's chat about it there.
(I'm working on making versions of my spreadsheets and Trello board available. They will be live for you soon. I'll post in the Facebook group once they are online for you.)
