A process from Paddy Moogan on how to reverse engineer successful content and learn what you can do to increase the chances of your own content being successful.

1. Reverse Engineering Successful
Content

2. Most successful content comes
down to three things

3. The story

4. The data

5. The production

6. I lied

7. An existing audience also helps

8. When you don’t have one…

9. Let’s be honest

10. This content marketing
thing is bloody hard

11. It looks so easy

12. Brainstorm

13. Choose an
idea

14. Brief a designer

15. Publish it

16. Promote it

17. Job done

18. It’s not that straightforward

20. “Let’s throw a guy
out of a spaceship”

22. Brainstorming and idea
generation isn’t as easy for
most of us

23. It needs restraints and
guidelines

24. No, not all ideas are good ideas

25. Doing it consistently is the
hardest part

26. My approach to these issues

27. I’m not a creative

30. But he can build stuff

31. We worked on our processes
from scratch

32. I had a few strong influencers

33. But at heart, I’m an SEO

34. I like processes and reverse
engineering stuff

35. Can I just reverse engineer
what others have done and do
it a little bit better?

36. Yes*

37. *Sometimes, ideas just fly and
you have no idea why or how

38. *You only learn by actually
doing this stuff

39. The whole process
is actually really big

40. I’m going to focus on a specific
part of the process

41. Feeding strong research into
your brainstorming / idea
generation stage

42. Our goal is to create a brief for
everyone involved in the
brainstorm…

43. …that contains themes, data,
visuals, guidelines and
restraints

44. The process

45. Find the stories / themes

46. Start here

47. Read this post for the basics
https://moz.com/blog/generate-content-ideas-using-buzzsumo-and-apis

48. Look at (content) competitors

49. Scan the results

50. Look for the trends

51. Look for the trends

52. It may be due (partly at least)
to Nomadic Matt having
a large existing audience

53. Run several competitors together

54. You can also use keywords

55. Export to CSV

56. Then run through URL Profiler
http://urlprofiler.com/

57. Some pivot table magic…

58. Find the most linked to domains

59. Do a deeper dive for more insights

60. Are long-form content ideas good?

61. What content types work well?

62. Paste the titles into a word cloud
http://www.wordle.net/create

63. Scan this list in your CSV

64. Can I do any of them better?
(this could be a restraint)

65. Can I update any of
them for 2016?
(this could be an opportunity)

66. Add all of this to your
brainstorming brief

67. http://epicbeat.epictions.com/

68. http://huballin.com/

69. http://huballin.com/

70. https://www.brandtale.com/

71. https://www.brandtale.com/

72. https://www.brandtale.com/

73. Find data sources

74. Know what’s available

75. Know what’s available

77. http://www.statista.com/search/?q=travel%20destinations

78. Can you get your own data?

79. Try a little bit

80. This could be a restraint (£££)

81. Add all of this to your
brainstorming brief

82. Find visuals

83. Don’t overthink this

86. Can I do it just a bit better?
(this could be a restraint
or an opportunity)

88. Has it been linked to?

89. Link

90. Yep

91. Print and add to the
brainstorming brief

92. One final tip on
setting expectations

93. “I want 10,000 Facebook Likes
and 500 Links per content
piece”

94. Fairly unlikely…

95. A takeaway for you…
www.aira.net/brainstorm

96. Get in touch if you have questions!
paddy@aira.net