Your Content Is A Product Too! .and other tidbits of insight.

When I started this journey into affiliate marketing in August 2016, I must confess that I didn't quite understand the whole QUALITY CONTENT concept. I don't think this was a failing on the part of Wealthy Affiliate, it's more that I did not quite understand how consumerism works in the digital space.

While I'm a techie, I must admit (with a teensy amount of shame), that I'm still very much a brick and mortar guy. I'm more likely to go and shop around for what I want in a mall than go online to do my shopping. That said, I don't use that mode for everything. For courses and professional development items, I will definitely be online going through reviews and testimonials before purchase. In the brick and mortar setting, you kind of rely on yourself (and maybe a friend or two) to make a decision. In the digital world, your decision is effectively crowdsourced. To make a weird (but not inept) allusion to Qualmann's Socionomics, we all subconsciously believe that the crowd (that cluster of social power) can help us make smarter decisions about what's worth our time and money. This makes a massive difference to how we treat consumers once in digital territory, because your locus of control over the buyer's experience is far more distributed in a single encounter than it would be in real life. Does that sound strange? Let me explain a bit more below.

What Is A Digital Consumer?

The digital consumer is one whose primary interaction with your brand and business happens through online channels. By online channels, we could be speaking about email, social media, rss feeds, online magzines, content curators--you name it. The sheer number of channels is staggering, and while that represents a great market for us as affiliate marketers, it also means that it's a market that's extremely wise about what's valuable for any given segment.

Locally, one of our more popular markets is the Coronation Market, located in downtown Kingston, Jamaica. I bumped into one of my professors there recently and we had a brief discussion, during which he indicated that Coronation could be considered a 'perfect market economy'. That gave me cause to pause for a minute while I considered the simple elegance of his point. The natural tug of war between buyer and seller in the market actually set the value of the goods sold, such that what was considered 'value for money' became a shared concept owned by neither party. Sure I learned this in school, but I lacked context. Having been an affiliate marketer for a few months, I suddenly realised that I was still somewhat stuck in my brick and mortar setting--where we make decisions with limited information. In a global playing field, this is not the case by any means (except for very exclusive and/or new products).

Why Is This Significant?

This revelation was important to me because it meant that I could no longer look at my articles as just articles. Each of them was a product, geared towards a specific end-user with a specific need. That need could be anything, ranging from casual interest to buying intent. In any case, the level of value to the user would always be based on how relevant I made the product to the need, as against all my competition in the space. How could I gain a rough approximation of what competitive pressure looked like against a perception of value? Two words:

Keyword research.

Nothing beats having an understanding of feasibility before launching a new product. Your keyword research is a great way of validating what uptake of your content product will look like. But that's just one-third of it!

The other third is all about seeing why this may be important to your user. Where does your user live today (social channels, etc)? What do they talk about that happens to intersect with your content product interests? What stage would the average user be in, and what would delight them? You need to know your user very well if your content is to resonate the way you intend.

The final third is centered on understanding what your competition's content products look like too. Are they answering all your users' questions. What did they miss that you can capitalise on? At the end of the day, you should never miss an opportunity to provide greater value than the other players in your niche. You should also look for opportunities to partner where you realise there are synergies you can leverage...but that's a story for another time.

How Did I Prove This To Myself?

I operate in the sleep niche,and while doing some topic planning I decided to do some research on sleep studies. After tinkering around with WA's keyword research tool, I came up with 'what to expect from a sleep study', which had the results below.

Most fascinatingly, it also had a very low QSR (only 37) which made it a great long-tail keyword overall with decent traffic and low competition. But my curiosity didn't end there. How come a keyword like this could have such low competition, considering the prevalence of buyer issues like sleep apnea?

I decided to try and get a pulse on the situation. I reviewed my Google Analytics Acquisition metrics for Social Channel referral, and decided to start with Facebook (around 80% of social traffic to my site comes from FB presently). A quick search for sleep studies on FB turned up something interesting...very few results on the pages of individuals, but definitely interest in specific sleep apnea groups. I joined two such groups and began participating in their conversations. Sure enough, within a week at least two more persons joined--their first posts indicating they had been referred by their GP's for sleep studies. But that wasn't necessarily important. What was important was how their need came across...they were very nervous about it and had no idea what it would mean for them. Some wanted to know what would happen before and after the session, if it could be done at home, and what the position of insurance firms would be. I could resonate with that, and it's my wife who has sleep apnea, not me! Responses from the community showed that many other sufferers had once been in the same position. This made it obvious to me why competition was low--very few players really stopped to look in on the personal sentiment around sleep studies, instead focusing primarily on product reviews for sleep solutions. Not that this was bad (at least not for me!), but it ignored an opportunity to provide ready value to consumers in the space.

Long story short, I wrote and shared an article around the keyword of choice, and to date that article has 3x the average number of shares for every other article I have ever written.

This single experience spoke volumes to me...once I adapted product thinking to my content, it showed that the right level of research and need qualification could indeed yield big payoffs. The value should indeed meet the need and should take advantage of things your competitors missed along the way so as to delight your user. I don't think I've gotten the hang of this just yet, but I see this as a positive start.

You may say, "but there's no conversion actually happening here!" That's true, but at my level, traffic generation is what I'm about. This is all top-of-funnel, and I am figuring that with properly placed content upgrades and CTAs, I can get some subscriptions in to start dealing with targeted email marketing efforts later. We all must start somewhere, and I'd like to re-emphasise to you that your user is king! Your competitive edge in this digital age will be largely driven by your ability to anticipate needs and to go after solving problems that your competitors won't touch. Sometimes, just showing up makes all the difference.

What are your thoughts and opinions on the above? I'd love to hear your feedback. Also, if you found this informative, please feel free to share!