The content strategy that works for me
By Christopher Kokoski
Image Credit – Author, via Canva
Over the last six months, I’ve used five content types to scale my beginner blog to between 7,000 – 10,000 page views per month.
It’s been a monumental climb for me. I struggled for years to figure out a process that actually worked. All the gurus sold me shortcuts, but I found that sticking to a simple game plan worked best for me. Looking back at my life, it’s what has always worked for me: study successful people who are already getting the results you want and copy their strategies.
“Success leaves clues” is one of my favourite quotes by Tony Robbins. In my experience, it is absolutely true.
There is no secret to my method. I simply perform keyword research and repeat these article types over and over again. Anyone who understands basic SEO and is a decent writer can likely steal my strategy and get similar results.
Success might not be easy, but it is repeatable.
These are the five content types.
- Army Ants Content
This is the newest content type I’ve discovered. I first heard the term from successful blogger, Morton Storgaard. Some other bloggers call this the FAQ method, with FAQ meaning “frequently asked questions.”
When doing keyword research, sometimes you find simple beginner questions that don’t necessarily need a full article response. For example, a recent question I found was, do you italicize article titles? The answer is essentially, “No.”
The same question was asked in about a dozen different ways focused on very specific circumstances:
- Do you italicize article titles in MLA?
- Do you always italicize article titles?
- Do you italicize article titles in APA?
- Do you italicize article titles in journals?
So I collected all of these similar but slightly different questions. Then I put them all into one article. All of the tiny questions represent the ants. Together, they make a whole army of ants, a whole article where I answer all of the questions.
How you can create Army Ants content:
- Choose any topic
- Find 6 to 12 tiny questions that don’t deserve a full article (there is really no magic number)
- Create a single piece of content that answers all of those questions
If you’re wondering how to title such an article, I suggest something like “Do you italicize article titles? (11 Answers That You Should Know).” Another example I’ve heard from Morten is “Email and Spam: 7 things you need to know.”
- Battleship Content
I learned this method from a blogging course I took called Income School (not an affiliate link). The creators of the course run a popular YouTube channel where they mentioned the Battleship Method.
The title comes from the classic game, Battleship.
In the game, when you hit one of your opponent’s ships, you typically keep focusing on the area of the board around where you got the hit. That way, you can hopefully get a series of additional hits. With any luck, you might even sink their battleship.
Applying the concept to content, I analyze my best-performing content on my website. When I get a hit with one of my articles, I focus on writing a batch of other content on that same topic.
For me, a “hit” with content means I’m getting a lot of traffic or making a lot of money through display ads or affiliate sales.
For example, one of my best-performing articles is about how to become a writer for Saturday Night Live.
As soon as I found my hit, I created a batch of articles about becoming different types of writers. So far, I’ve written articles on how to become a fortune cookie writer, Disney writer, and Nickelodeon writer.
My article on fortune cookie writers is my second best performing article so far on my website.
How to create Battleship content:
- Study your analytics (I use Google Analyticsfor my website).
- Locate your best-performing articles (most amount of monthly page views or highest payout for display ads or affiliate sales).
- Write more content around the same or similar topics.
- Superman Content
One of the ways that I outrank competitor articles is to create Superman content. When I perform competitor analysis on a keyword, I always look at the top articles ranking for the phrase.
A few things that I look for include the length of the article, what multimedia is used, and how the article is formatted. What I like to see are very short articles with thin content and no images or video.
I kid you not that I’ve seen articles that are basically long blocks of text or packed with tiny text that’s hard to read.
Once I decide to go for a particular keyword, my mission is to outperform the other articles by every metric. If the top competing article is 500 words, I’ll write an article that is 1,500 words, 2,500 words, or even 3,000 words.
I always use at least one image and one video. It seems to help with SEO. And I make sure that my article is formatted with lots of white space and subheadings for easy scannability.
I especially want my articles to be easy to read on mobile devices.
By taking these steps, I create what I call Superman content. Other bloggers have called this “skyscraper content” because it’s bigger and more valuable than any of the competition.
How you can create Superman content:
- Choose a keyword or topic.
- Look at the top 10 results for that keyword or topic that show up on the first-page search results of Google.
- Find out the word count of the top competing article (I use a free Chrome extension, Word Counter Plus, to easily get the word count of competing articles).
- Write an article that is at least twice as long as the top competing article.
- Include at least one image and one video in the top 50% of the article.
- Format your content with lots of subsections and lots of white space.
- KGR Content
KGR stands for keyword golden ratio. It’s a content type that I found out about just this year. So far, it’s blown my mind. To be honest, I felt very skeptical about it at first.
But the more I dug into it, the more sense it made. Then I started to see my own results. Now I’m sold that KGR content is a practical way to write content that brings traffic and profit.
The keyword golden ratio is a specialized formula developed by Doug Cunnington. The gist of KGR is to find low competition topics that you can easily rank for within days or weeks.
Typically it can take up to 4 to 8 months for Google to rank new articles. So KGR can significantly cut down on ranking time.
The keyword golden ratio formula is:
Allintitle divided by search volume = Keyword Golden Ratio
There are a few important parameters:
- Allintitle: Allintitle is a special Google search that tells you how many other articles on the internet use your keyword in their title. The theory is that articles that use your exact keyword in their title are trying to optimize for that keyword. You enter “allintitle: search term” into the Google search bar.
- Search Volume: KGR works best when the search volume is under 250 searches per month.
- Ratio: If the KGR formula produces a result that is .25 or lower, you have found yourself a KGR keyword. Anything higher is not considered a KGR keyword.
When Doug experimented with different search volumes, he found that under 250 searches per month produced the most KGR keywords with the fastest ranking and the best earnings.
In his many articles and YouTube videos discussing KGR, he shares that a great way to find these KGR keywords is to type simple phrases into Google search.
You can use KGR content for informational articles or buyer intent articles with affiliate links.
Two of the best phrases to find KGR keywords are:
- The best X for Y
- The backs X for Y under Z
For example, I recently found a KGR keyword, the best kids desk and chair for writing. I could probably also have done the best kids desk and chair for writing under $300.
Why is KGR content great for scaling websites?
According to Doug himself:
If the KGR is less than 0.25, then you should rank in the top 50 as soon as your page is indexed.
How you can create KGR content:
- Choose a topic or product type.
- Type the best X [product] for Y [role] into Google search.
- Google will auto-suggest possible options for your content.
- Find the search volume for the phrase using a keyword tool (I use Ahrefs, but it is expensive. There are cheaper options like KW Finder or
- Make sure the search volume is under 250 searches per month.
- Find the allintitle number by typing “allintitle: search term” into Google (If you perform a batch of these searches in a row, Google might ask if you are a robot. This is a normal security feature from Google).
- Divide the allintitle number by the search volume. Remember, the search volume should be 250 searches per month or less.
- If the resulting calculation is 0.25 or less, you have found a KGR keyword.
Once You find a KGR keyword, you can create content around that topic. It will probably take you a while to find your first KGR keyword.
If it was easy, it wouldn’t be as profitable.
- Everlasting Gobstopper Content
On my website, I do my best to focus on evergreen content that will remain relevant for years.
I think that’s an excellent strategy.
However, I think there is a deeper level of evergreen content. In fact, I think this content is so much better than standard evergreen content that it deserves its own name. I haven’t heard anyone else talk about this specific type of content, although I’m not the first to mention or apply the general concept.
I call it Everlasting Gobstopper content. It’s evergreen content that is so valuable and relevant that people bookmark it to come back to review it time and time again.
I stole the term “Everlasting Gobstopper” from the magical candy in the 1971 movie, Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory (based on an even earlier book by Roald Dahl). In the movie, the Everlasting Gobstopper candy lasts forever.
One of my favourite compliments that I get on any of my content is when readers say that they bookmarked it. When that happens, I know that I’ve created something very valuable, at least to them.
I’m in a private Facebook group with 1.5k other men. The connecting factor of the group is a personal development book. Most of the men in the group have read the book multiple times, some of us 10 to 15 times, and even a few upwards of 20 to 30 times.
Why? Because the book is so insanely valuable to us. We learn something new every time we read it. We up our game and improve our lives.
That’s the kind of content I want to create for others.
How you can create Everlasting Gobstopper content:
- Start by creating evergreen content that will be relevant for years. Avoid fads or recent trends that might be temporary.
- Create the most helpful resource around that topic. That could be a comprehensive list of tools or techniques, a super detailed how-to tutorial, or an online tool that people come back to every week or month. (Example: I use Ahrefs.com and TitleCaseConverter.com every single day).
- If you notice that a lot of people bookmark the content or that you’re getting a lot of return traffic to the content, then you know that you’ve created Everlasting Gobstopper content.
Final Thoughts
If you’re wondering how I decide which content type to write, my strategy is pretty straightforward.
I start by looking for low-competition, high volume keywords. During my research, I typically find a few keywords that fall into the KGR ratio.
My goal is to always write Superman content that is also Everlasting Gobstopper content. That’s how I aim to dominate the search rankings in Google.
If I discover a series of tiny low-competition keywords around a single search topic, I collect them for a possible Army Ants article.
Every month, I check my Google analytics to see which articles perform the best (let’s be honest, I check my analytics every day, but rely on longer data for content purposes).
When I see content performing well, I try to reverse-engineer the reasons for its success. Then I write more articles around the same topic using low-competition keywords.
In a nutshell, that’s how I rank my articles on Google. That’s how you can, too.
This article by Christopher Kokoski first appeared in Medium.
