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Building the Content Machine
Do you need a subtitle?

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Michael King, Founder & Managing Director
@iPullRank
Building the
Content Machine
BUILDING
THE
CONTENT
MACHINE
MIKE KING
Founder and Managing Director at iPullRank
@iPullRank

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The Problems with
Content Marketing
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CONTENT
MACHINE

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The Quest for Virality
BuzzSumo’s study indicates that 75% of
content gets 3 links or less and 202
shares or less.
Despite that, most content marketing
activations are pitched with the
expectation of going viral.
https://d380wq8lfryn3c.cloudfront.net/wp-
content/uploads/2015/09/04144737/BuzzSumo-
LinksSharesReport-v6.pdf
BUILDING
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MACHINE

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Content Marketers treat content as a series
of isolated incidents.

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We Had Plenty of Ideas, but Not Enough of a Strategy

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Internal Constraints
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MACHINE
Oftentimes a series or combination of internal constraints keeps content from achieving its potential. Most pitches are
significantly watered down and they lose their edge by the time the content sees the light of day.
Resource Process Brand

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Which yields a whole lot of this...
BRIEF CLIENT BUDGET CLIENT

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Everyone is Making Awful Stuff
BUILDING THE CONTENT MACHINE

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What IS THIS?!
BUILDING THE CONTENT MACHINE

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People Write for Length
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MACHINE
Search engines have statistical expectations of your content, but people are still shoving keywords in and optimizing for content
length. Spoiler alert: There is no magic number for content length.

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First of all, “SEO content” should not be an idea that spills from your mind. Doug Kessler called it in the early tens, there’s a lot of
crap out there.
Everyone is Making Awful Stuff

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Some of this is driven by the concept of
“SEO Content.”

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That’s why their analytics look like this:

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That’s why their analytics look like this:

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BUILDING
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CONTENT
MACHINE

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Key Barriers to Effective Execution
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MACHINE

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Lack of buy-in.

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Lack of resources.

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Lack of commitment.

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Little to no promotion investment.

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Prerequisite: A Business Case
For everything we just discussed, you
need a business case.
It does not matter if you take a top down
or bottom-up approach, but you need to
get the business aligned with
Read about our bottom-up approach in
our ROI guide:
https://landing.ipullrank.com/roi-guide/
If you have that, the remaining issue is…

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No content strategy.

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What I want to talk about is how
content strategy can save the day.

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Meet Content Strategy
BUILDING
THE
CONTENT
MACHINE

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To be continually effective
you must build a content
machine.

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To build a content machine
you need content strategy.

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Content Strategy is about building systems

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Workflows and Governance Models
BUILDING
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CONTENT
MACHINE
It’s about building workflows and governance models that keep everyone on the same page and executing effectively.

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For Many Enterprises Content is
Convoluted
Frankly, there are too many cooks in the
kitchen and getting content through to
publish takes forever.
Small businesses have the opposite
problem. There may not be enough
resources to get things done.

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Minimum Viable Producers
You may be familiar with the concept of a
Minimum Viable Product (MVP). When
building a content machine, we need to
determine the minimum viable producers.
We need to identify this for both the
enterprise and the small business.

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Enterprise Minimum Viable Content Team
BUILDING
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CONTENT
MACHINE
For most enterprises you may have or need all of these people to be effective. You may also need partners on compliance teams.
Writer(s)
Project Manager Content Strategist Marketing Coordinator
Editor
Analyst
Developer Designer

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Mid-market Minimum Viable Content Team
BUILDING
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CONTENT
MACHINE
In the mid-market you may have less of the nice to haves, but content may have less hoops to go through.
Writer(s) Content Strategist Marketing Coordinator
Analyst
Developer Designer

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Everyone Else’s Minimum Viable Content Team
BUILDING
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CONTENT
MACHINE
For the rest of us, you should be able to get by with these people. Your resources may need to wear multiple hats or you’ll need to
leverage low cost external resources.
Content Strategist…
Developer Designer

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Your organization must define its
minimum viable producers based
on goals, formats and volume.

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Content Briefing is a Must
BUILDING
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MACHINE
Effective content creation needs to begin with an effective content brief. If your content doesn’t come out the way you expect, your
briefing process may be lacking.

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The Ultimate Content Brief
Specific and performant content requires a
specific and detailed brief. Here’s what we
include:
• Content ID
• Brief Title
• Brief Description
• Audience Target
• Stage in Buyers’ Journey
• Business Objective(s)
• Timeline
• Format(s)
• Approval Process
• Voice
• Tone
• Target Channel
• CTAs
• Design requirements
• Core Strategy
• Minimum Word Count
• Target Keywords
• Co-occuring keywords
• Topics
• Entities
• Content Outline (optional)
• References
• Skyscraper Content
• Companion Content (optional)
I’ll give you a link to download or template
and an example at the end.

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Content Models
BUILDING
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CONTENT
MACHINE
Understanding the components of your content is incredibly valuable in determining what exactly needs to be created and who
needs to be involved.

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When we create and optimize
content we represent that
content in a content model so
there’s absolute clarity on what
goes where.
Content Models in Action

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Structural Content Models
There are variety of ways to
approach building out your site
architecture in support of your
various content efforts. Kane
Jamison does a great job of
illustrating them in this post:
https://www.contentharmony.co
m/blog/content-hubs/

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Structural Content Models – Hub & Spoke
BUILDING
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MACHINE
The model you’re most likely to use in local is Hub and Spoke. Identify your core topics and the questions associated.

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Identify Related Questions using SerpAPI
BUILDING
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CONTENT
MACHINE
For any given query, SerpAPI will identify the first level of questions that people also ask. This is a good way to quickly collect
topics for your Hub and Spoke strategy. https://www.serpapi.com

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Build a content strategy around what works for
your business objectives

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Content Pruning, Optimization &
Maintenance are Underutilized
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Quarterly Content Audits
• Screenshot of our content audits
BUILDING
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MACHINE
At minimum, you should be reviewing your content on a quarterly basis to determine what is still working and what is not. Check
out my Perfect Starts talk for how to do the world’s greatest content audit. https://www.slideshare.net/ipullrank/perfect-starts-
how-to-get-the-right-traffic-with-a-content-audit

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Determine What to Delete vs What to Optimize
BUILDING
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MACHINE
Whatever I’m trying to say with this slide
Understanding that content maintenance is a valuable activity, the question is often how do you know what to prune vs. what to
optimize?

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Moz’s OneMetric
Trevor Klein, previously of Moz,
introduced the concept of the “One
Metric” back in 2014. It leveraged a
variety of content metrics, including
social performance to determine a value
that indicates how well a given piece of
content performed.
We’ve applied this same concept to
determine when we need to optimize
versus when we need to prune.

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Content Performance Score
BUILDING
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CONTENT
MACHINE
During our content audits, using a series of on-page, off-page and analytics metrics we calculate a Content Performance Score to
indicate how well a given URL is currently performing.

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Content Performance Score Formula
BUILDING
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CONTENT
MACHINE
This is the formula we use to develop the Content Performance Score. We adjust the weights and features on a client or website
basis to ensure that it is an accurate reflection of the site’s performance. You should do the same.

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Also, we combine our content audit data with our keyword research data on the URL level and compute a content potential score.
Comparing this score to the content performance gives us a sense of what pages are worth optimizing vs eliminating.
Content Potential Score
BUILDING
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Content Potential Score Formula
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MACHINE
This is the formula we use to develop the Content Potential Score. It relies search volume, keyword difficulty and current rankings
as the determinant of what the value of improving content performance in Organic Search. Other channels could be used in similar
ways to compute this score.

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Develop your own scores and a series of
business rules to help drive the content
pruning vs. optimization decision.

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Content Pipelines
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A content pipeline is a workflow for
specific content execution.
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Enterprise Content Pipeline (No CMS)
BUILDING
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MACHINE
For an enterprise company with no CMS, here’s what a content pipeline may look like.

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Enterprise Content Pipeline (with CMS)
BUILDING
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CONTENT
MACHINE
For an enterprise company with a CMS here’s what a content pipeline may look like.

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SMB Content Pipeline
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MACHINE
SMBs tend to follow many of the same steps as the enterprise, but they usually have less people

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Natural Language Generation as a Pipeline
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What is Natural Language
Generation?
Natural Language Generation is the
programmatic creation of content using
machine learning models.

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You May Have Heard GPT-3
GPT-3 is a Very Sophisticated General AI
equipped with several cognitive
technologies, which are models of high-
level reasoning and learning algorithms.
These models are used to acquire
knowledge in a huge range of subject
areas (including molecular biology,
physics, mathematics, linguistics, social
sciences, and even aesthetics) and use
this knowledge to derive new insights
and derive robust plans for improving its
own reasoning skills.

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In fact…
It wrote that explanation that
was on that last slide.

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Consider having machines write your table
stakes content and have people focus on the
creative and editorial

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NLG for FAQs
@HamletBatista’s post touches
on how you can use another
model called T5 to generate
FAQs.
https://www.searchenginejourna
l.com/generate-quality-faqs-
faqpage-schemas-with-
python/380004/?ver=380004X3

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While We’re on the Subject of
Hamlet
If you weren’t aware, Hamlet
passed away recently. He was
an incredible contributor to
moving our community forward.
If you can, please give to his
GoFundMe organized by
@LilyRayNYC
http://bit.ly/gfm-hamlet

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GPT-2 for E-Commerce
I shared a blog post couple months back
on how to use it to generate copy for e-
commerce sites.
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/
generate-data-driven-copy-ecommerce-
category-pages-gpt-2/375277/

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Apply the same concept
to your non-creative content

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Collect or scrape content on your subject
matter

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Fine-tune the model

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Generate your copy

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Edit the copy that was generated

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Do not deploy generated content without
reviewing and editing it first.

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Tools That Should be on your Radar
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Contentful
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MACHINE
Whatever I’m trying to say with this slide
A headless CMS that allows you to build out your content models.

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CoSchedule for WordPress
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MACHINE
Whatever I’m trying to say with this slide
Build out your workflows and governance models within WordPress.

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Advanced Custom Fields for WordPress
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MACHINE
Build out and enforce your content models within WordPress

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Percolate
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MACHINE
Enterprise-grade content workflow and governance modeling tool

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URLProfiler
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CONTENT
MACHINE
Data collection for content audits.

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Inferkit
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MACHINE
API and interface for NLG

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Copy.AI
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MACHINE
Interface for NLG. https://www.copy.ai. There’s also https://www.snazzy.ai.

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Content Harmony
BUILDING
THE
CONTENT
MACHINE
Build out robust content briefs.

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Frase
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CONTENT
MACHINE
Whatever I’m trying to say with this slide
Build out robust content briefs and perform simple content optimization

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Searchmetrics Content Experience
BUILDING
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CONTENT
MACHINE
Whatever I’m trying to say with this slide
Build out topical content briefs and perform complex content optimization

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SEMRush SEO Writing Assistant
BUILDING
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CONTENT
MACHINE
Perform content optimization in the Google Docs environment.

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MarketMuse
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CONTENT
MACHINE
Content optimization, briefing and natural language generation first drafts.

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Enterprise Content Pipeline with Tools
BUILDING
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CONTENT
MACHINE
For an enterprise company with a CMS here’s what a content pipeline may look like.

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Wrapping Up
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MACHINE

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Align with business objectives.

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Commit to content.

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Define your resources.

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Define your governance models.

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Define your stages.

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Document everything.

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Execute and refine.

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Wrapping Up

97. When Google is processing content, they
extract and score entities. Compare your
page’s entity salience and ordering
against your competitors to identify what
you need to feature.
Do the same as you do your keyword
research.
This is our CEO
I’m Mike King.
(@iPullRank)

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10
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BUILDING
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CONTENT
MACHINE
Follow @iPullRankAgency
and get our Ultimate Content Brief template
https://bit.ly/ipr-ucb

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MACHINE
I’m writing a book called “The Science of SEO” for
Wiley Publishing. Learn more at
https://www.polymathesis.com

101. Mike King
Managing Director
@iPullRank
Mike King
Award Winning, SEO Industry Leader
Thank You | Q&A
mike@ipullrank.com
Follow us @iPullRankAgency
Get our templates: https://bit.ly/ipr-ucb
Text me, let’s chop it up:
347-391-4266
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