Blogging isn’t as easy as it used to be. 5 years ago, an expert could write a short, 500-word article on a topic and expect hundreds, if not thousands of readers to find it online.
Content marketers were quick to notice how impactful blogging can be and began pushing out new articles as often as possible. This approach worked for some a short time, but the SEO game has changed.
Today, the “Field of Dreams” mentality of “if you build it, they will come” no longer rings true in SEO.
I know this because I have seen this failed approach first-hand at one of my previous employers. Each week, I was required to write short, 500-word articles for a handful of our clients. I often cringed as I tallied up the meager 5-10 views each of these posts would receive on a monthly basis.
Gone are the days of short-form content ranking at the top of the SERPs. Content length, domain authority, relevancy, and social signals now play a larger role in rankings than ever before. In fact, a study done by Backlinko’s Brian Dean revealed that the average first-page Google result contains 1,890 words.
So we’re left with the burning question: How can I get people to find my content if I don’t have any of the following?
- A massive social media following
- Relationships with the top influencers in your industry
- A large promotional budget
Drumroll, please….
Today, we’re proud to share the Twitter Leapfrog Method – a proven framework that helps you deliver your newly published articles to hundreds of highly targeted readers, many of whom will reshare that article with their followers.
Twitter Leapfrog Pre-Work
1. Identify a topic that you can write extensively about.
We won’t get too deep into content ideation, but here are a few suggestions for finding a topic to write about:
- Review industry-leading blogs to see what topics influencers are frequently writing about
- Talk to your sales and customer service teams to understand the most common questions or concerns they hear from customers
- Read through the most popular questions about your industry on Quora to see what topics people are asking about
2. Pick a theme/industry that this topic relates to (ex. blogging).
3. Create a Twitter account to promote the article with
Start by coming up with a name for a Twitter handle that relates to your industry or theme. In the case of content promotion, I might create a Twitter handle called “Blogging Advice”.
Next, upload a profile photo to this Twitter account to make it seem more legitimate (I recommend using Unsplash or Stocksnap to find a high-quality image). Do a Twitter search for this theme/industry and follow 50 Twitter accounts that appear in search results. Similarly, you can search for one popular publication in your industry like Inc. or Business Insider and follow 50 Twitter handles that follow this publication.
Create a Buffer account for this Twitter profile (the free version is fine) and set up 2 posting times per day (The exact times won’t matter much – I would suggest 10am and 3pm each day).
Also see: Your Guide to Rebuilding Your Internal Marketing Efforts
Sign up for Quuu with your newly created Twitter account and select 2-3 topics that relate to your Twitter account theme/industry (ex. Blogging Tips, Business Strategy, and Content Marketing). Tell Quuu to schedule 2 posts per day.
You now have a Twitter account that will Tweet 2 relevant articles every day on top of your content promotion efforts, thus making the account seem much more reputable, and decreasing the likelihood of being marked as a spammer.
The Twitter Leapfrog Process
At a Glance:
- Write 1 Badass Article
- Identify People Who Have Shared Similar Content on Social Media
- Share Your Article With These People
1. Write 1 Badass Article
After identifying your topic, the next step is to write your badass article. A few things to keep in mind as you write:
- Aim for 1,500-2,000 words
- Use high-quality imagery
- Make it insanely actionable
- Ensure it passes the readability test
Some examples of badass content would be definitive guides (ex. “The Advanced Guide to Link Building“), influencer insight posts (ex. “18+ Experts Share their Best Tips on competing against E-Commerce Giants using SEO“), and step-by-step techniques (ex. this post).
Want more examples of badass content? Then check out any article written by Brian Dean or Noah Kagan. Seriously, these guys are my heroes. Everything that they write is pure gold.
2. Identify People Who Have Shared Similar Content on Social Media
Ok, so you’ve published your article. The next step is to identify the people that will find your article most helpful.
Start by identifying 2-3 themes that describe the contents of your article. For this post, my themes were “content promotion”, “blog promotion” and “social media promotion”.
After determining these themes, search for each on Google and open the top 10 search results for each term. Here, finding blog articles is much more important than finding website pages that rank for these terms, so use the search parameter “inurl:blog” to narrow your search results to only pages that have “blog” in the URL.
For the content promotion search, you would type ‘inurl: blog “content promotion”‘ into Google.
After identifying the top 10 articles that pop up, sign up for an account on BuzzSumo, and plug each of these URLs into the BuzzSumo search bar. Next, click “View Sharers” for each of these 10 URLs. From here, export the entire list that appears on the following page.
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You now have a list of every Twitter handle that shared the specific URL. In the event that some of these articles have a low share count, go to the BuzzSumo search bar and type in your content themes, then sort the results by the number of Twitter shares. You can then export the Twitter handles that shared any relevant articles.
3. Share Your Article with These People
Many large publications create dozens of fake Twitter accounts that are simply intended to promote their newest articles, we next want to eliminate any low-quality sharers. Compile all of the exported Excel docs into one sheet, and delete any Twitter handles that have a reply ratio of 0 or a retweet ratio of 100.
Also see: The 17+ Essential Tools that Every Marketer Needs to Succeed
The Twitter Leapfrog Outreach Process
1. Open up the exported Excel documents, and copy and paste the Twitter handles (without the “@” symbol) into column A of a new Excel sheet.
2. Move to column B and type out a Tweet in the format of “, saw your tweet about [insert topic of the article] and thought you’d enjoy this too: [insert URL of your article]” – I would suggest using a URL shortening tool like Bit.ly to shrink this URL. Otherwise, you may run into an issue with the Tweet length. On top of this, using a tool like bit.ly allows you to track how many clicks you receive on your article, so you can evaluate whether or not this method works for you.
3. Copy and paste the contents of this cell into the remaining cells in column B
4. Move to column C and type “=CONCATENATE(“@”,A1,B1)”
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5. Copy and paste the contents of this cell into the remaining cells in column C.
6. Select and copy every cell in column C and paste the contents into column D as “Values” (right click in column D, select “Paste Special…” and then click “Values”). You should now have a list of Tweets, customized for every Twitter account that you exported in step 5.
7. And just like that, you’ve built a massive list of highly targeted social media accounts that you can share personalized messages with.
From here, we could manually send a Tweet out to all of these Twitter accounts, which might take an hour to send out 100 Tweets, or we could automate this process in 15 minutes to send out 300 Tweets.
Want to access our free guide to automating this process? Grab our automation template here.
How did this technique work for you? Feel free to share your successes (and failures) with pat@intercompany.co. Interested in receiving future strategies before the masses? Join our mailing list to be the first to receive these insights.