SEO, Affiliate Marketing & Quality > Quantity
If you haven't seen it yet, my webinar tools roundup review is here and you can click here to check out the silo page I created for it, SEO Sprint style.
I've started a quality > quantity experiment both here and over at Thrive Themes, results of which you'll start seeing soon. However, shipping rapidly and producing loads of content in order to build your skills are still very important concepts. I will be reporting more on how I balance the two in the future. In the meantime, here's some of my content that goes into this already:
Question
Thinking about quality content: what's the greatest value I could provide you? What's the highest quality thing I could produce for you?
And thinking about your own business: what's the highest quality thing you could create for your audience?
Let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment!
Shane, thanks for the update. For me the most valuable would be for you to explain behind the scenes about how you come up with the ideas on your projects. Do you survey your audience, mull it over with your team? Then case studies of your development of the projects from concept to launch. These provide a template or a checklist if you will on how to go about the process
Thank you, John!
An important part of generating ideas is interaction with our audience. Most ideas arise from comments, Q&A sessions during webinars, support requests and so on. And then we do discuss things in the team as well. There’s more to the process to unpack for sure, but that interaction with the audience is the bedrock.
Watching your video series is interesting, inspiring, and informative. It is as if one can see the wheels turning on your thought process and then how you transform your ideas into action. What is the best way to launch a course or introduce a product? How can I get back to using SEO to the fullest extent and weave what I can learn into my business?
Hmmm. Webinars seem like a possible best solution for a product launch. Okay. What is the best webinar software? Why not investigate to find the answer and document the efforts as a case study on my need to know the best way to launch a course?
Oh, and while I’m at it, why not figure out something that perplexes me. That is to determine as best I can whether high-quality content is better than high volume, lower value content? (Can’t wait to get those results.)
A high-value way you can help me is to demo a marketing model that incorporates all or most of the tools Thrive Themes provides its users. How can I get more use and better results by better utilizing the tools at my disposal? Please keep up the terrific work you are doing. It is as helpful as it is impressive, which is a lot.
Indeed, a lot of what I do here is my own process, laid bare. :)
I love your suggestion of something about how to use all Thrive Themes tools in combination with each other. That’s a really cool idea and something I’ll add to my list right away.
The most valuables out of:
– Active Growth: the focus on shipping to the customer – to know all that is possible to be done without being “ready”.
– Thrive Themes: a complete set of skills on marketing, business and website systems to make a solid move forward shipping.
I’m really grateful with these skills and mindset, so I would add one more asset from life experience that combines with these valuable assets: when I see a drawback that I can’t implement with Thrive, I thank you. I know that I can work around or ignore it, so I can ship and move forward.
___
For the SEO and Affiliate strategies, a nice combo would a local SEO strategy. It gives possibilities to improve quality and quantity, but it would be better if you can add a scope with SEO and PPC integrated strategies.
There are a lot of intersections of skills that would be really helpful for a lot of solopreneurs.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts, Daniel!
And really important:
Missing the Podcast and Hanne insights!
Hey Shane, Thanks for the update.
Maybe it is not just a matter of quality over quantity, but also sheer exhaustion of the audience.
I noticed that when I switched from weekly to monthly posts/mailings, my open rates shot up significantly.
In German we have this saying “Willste gelten, mach dich selten”! This certainly worked for my mailing list.
How can you provide value?
For Thrive my biggest wish is to have membership/payment plan functionality in Thrive Apprentice.
For Active Growth – I really miss those more philosophical/mindset related podcasts.
A course on list building and conversion would be nice. We did some of that in course craft, but I’d like to drill much deeper down on that.
Take care, Ann.
Thank you, Ann!
Indeed, one of the downsides of posting often could be burning out people’s limited attention.
Thanks for your suggestions!
Nice one Shane.
I have a very young website by the way, so am simply just building things bottom up.
If there is one highest quality thing I will like to create, this will be relevant content that help them to achieve their own aims for their business.
Learning about my audience pain point is one huge research/challenge and being able to attract the audience to my contents when researched out is also another challenge.
Any advice for me in this regard.
M.A
Thanks for your comment, Michael! Indeed it’s tricky in the beginning, because you have to find who your audience is, while trying to serve them best.
If my memory is correct, I think you had promised have about 2 years back to get a complete rebuild of thrive architect…. But now you seem to have taken a different direction from building tools to training.
I would love to see the above long awaited update, and a white label licence to your TT tools.
We’re still working on the new Theme Builder product. It has taken a lot longer than expected and we basically started from scratch several times because we weren’t happy with the product. We set an ambitious goal and we want to deliver something worthwhile, which is taking its time.
I was relieved to get this update. I, and I am sure many others were getting worried about you dropping of the radar. Not sure I understand what you mean by quality over quantity. Active Growth and Thrive Themes content is invariably high quality. Along with the never ending delay to the Thrive Theme Builder and this much reduced frequency of information, I am sure we were all getting very concerned that there may be some underlying problems. Glad to hear it is just one of you experiments.
Thank you for your comment, Edward.
Theme Builder has indeed been difficult and is still ongoing. Several times, it seemed like we were very close to the finish line, only for some new issues to appear. The project has not been free of problems, either. We’ll all be relieved when we can finally ship this product.
Hi Shane,
Thanks for good thoughts that fit well with both my convictions and my preferences for how to work. Quality over quantity. Yes, I’m just the type to get trapped in the perfectionist trap and never get it shipped, but I think I have that side fairly well in check. I’m focussing on getting the pieces that make the engine start, not polishing the bonnet. Being a sailing fanatic who dislikes cars, I should have made a sailboat allegory, but whatever. :-)
What is the greatest value you could provide me?
Since I’m in an early stage of building both my site and my products, but have a decent grip on what they should both be like, I feel my weakest link is building an interested audience group. The SEO course is spot on, I have several channels where I have a bit of reach and I also seek knowledge elsewhere, but I still think there are several weak sides to my awareness on the “getting an audience” issue. I think your inquisitive mind connected with by your experience could fill in many of my presumed knowledge gaps.
Thank you for your input, Stein.
As perfectionists, we have to be extra careful with a quality > quantity approach, because we’re really good at telling ourselves the quality isn’t high enough yet… forever. Overcoming this and developing an ability to ship is the top priority for perfectionists, IMO.
Talking about quality vs quantity, I notice marketers that skilled in social media (or affiliates) tends to have quantity, whereby speed of implementation is crucial for them. Those that focus on quality tends to have a much loyal followers, but the results can be slower.
I hope to learn more from you on deciding niche ideas. I think I am OK with IT infra and local seo. But these markets are already very crowded. How to stand out as niche sites?
Interesting observation! Social media is definitely a faster paced environment, yeah.
Regarding how to stand out: I think that’s a question every business has to find an answer to. Certainly some markets are more crowded than others, but it’s in the nature of a market to be crowded. If an opportunity opens up somewhere, the next thing that happens is a bunch of people rushing in. :)
You are the best part of Thrive, Shane. I’ve only been with you a few weeks. And you are the heartbeat, the vision, the everything from which all which Thrive is, and offers, flows. You are a visionary.
You teach brilliantly. Step by step. So novices like me can grasp what is going on, and work with the almost limitless creative tools we have. You give creators, the tools to create with.
And creating, leading, having the vision, and inspiring all of us to greater everything, is what I love most about you.
From my limited experience in all of this, I say continue to make Thrive the most kick ass, most creative, most productive, most efficient and effective tools for the world in which we operate.
If that means we hear from you less often, and Thrive continues to evolve and grow and be the very best, that’s a very worthwhile tradeoff.
Whatever you do best, do that. That holds true for all of us. Whatever calls you most intensely, follow that, and do that.
You’re a world-changer, Shane. You’ve changed mine. Keep changing the world.
Thank you for your kind words, Mike.
I have been working on designing my life and the work at Thrive Themes in such a way that I spend as much time as possible doing what I’m best at. That has been a surprisingly difficult and interesting journey in itself. But I think this is a worthwhile goal for anyone entrepreneurial. It’s not just about creating a job for ourselves, but about building a business in which we (and hopefully everyone we work with) can do our best, most of the time.
Hi, Shane. As always, you see to be a mind-reader, probably because you’ve been doing this for a while and you ask for feedback, get it, then act on it.
The thing I’ve been waiting for with the greatest anticipation is the Thrive Theme Builder that was mentioned several months ago as being in development. I hate the fact that a WordPress Theme has very limited access to modifying any out-of-the-box WP Theme to customize it as my own. The only way I’ve been able to go around that limitation is to create a blank page, then piece-meal together sections and elements by saving as them as a template within Thrive Architect.
Otherwise, I find huge value in 99% of the content, training, and tutorials you publish, both to the public and TT affiliates.
Thank you for the value you add to all of us who are fans!!
Thank you for your comment!
I’ve also been eagerly awaiting the Theme Builder. What a project this has been! I’ll be relieved when we can finally publish it.
Quantity over quality:
I think which approach you take depends on the stage of your skill or business.
For example, I am still learning to make better videos. So for me creating more videos is more helpful now to strengthen my muscles, then I can move to create better videos like yours.
Another example is writing, I have been trying to provide quality writings for my articles, but I think I am missing some things when it comes to writing, Like headlines and story-like articles. So, I may run a 30-day challenge in 2020 where I write 500 words every day to sterenthen my muscles in writing.
So, basically it depends on your business and skills.
Hope I made my point clear :)
I think you absolutely nailed it. This is how I think of it as well. Quantity is for building skill, quality is for reaping the rewards of that skill.
Check out “750 words” it helps you write every day and analyses your writing!
Hi Shane,
The most valuable thing for me….by far….would be a NEW TEMPLATE (or set of templates) for THRIVE APPRENTICE. I want to turn my 1-on-1 coaching into an online course. I believe lots of other members here wanna build their own online courses as well.
For me, the problem with the current Thrive Apprentice template is that it does not give me any flexibility, like for example location of the navigation, or nice separate section for downloading resources, pdf etc.
I also don’t like the huge image placeholder on top of the page.
From the positives on Thrive Apprentice: I think you already have the structure of building lessons, modules nailed down, so maybe it’s not much work to take add one more TEMPLATE and take the plugin to another level?
I also wanna say that I’m Thrive member from the very beginning and I love what you do and the plugins are amazing…..I mean it.
However, as far as online course templates I find myself checking other solutions at the moment….and to be honest I much rather use Thrive Apprentice if there was even one good TEMPLATE alternative.
I’m currently inside another online course with the membership setup that I love. It’s clean, very intuitive and professional. So I know exactly what I want in Thrive Apprentice TEMPLATE.
As far as speed of implementation I will be happy to share details with you or other team members explaining what doesn’t work for me in the current Template and share what I would love to see in the NEW template.
(happy to do a call or I can just do a video screencast)
PS I’m also looking forward to seeing the results of your “quality over quantity experiment”….and thank for Webinar tools in-depth review…great staff :)
Thank you for your input!
With Thrive Apprentice, our aim so far has been simplicity over everything else. That’s why there isn’t much visual customization. We know that some users would appreciate more options there, of course. We are considering adding visual customization to it at some point. It’s really a matter of resources and time and there are other, more important projects that are definitely coming first.
I miss the “Shane Melaugh and Hanne Vervaeck show” (podcast). I always liked the interaction between you and Hanne.
Thanks, Peter! I’m glad to know you liked our podcast. And it was always fun to have these discussions with Hanne. But it was one of the things I just had to say “no” to, this year. I always have too many projects going on and have to clean house every once in a while.
Then maybe Hanne can continue the podcast with someone else
Yeah it was great. I’m hoping Shane changes his mind and brings it back.
@Shane,
“what’s the greatest value I could provide you? What’s the highest quality thing I could produce for you?”
For me it is about three things:
1) LIST BUILDING
2) LIST BUILDING
3) LIST BUILDING
It is the bottleneck since quite a long time for me. Of course many challenges are interrelated, but right now this would be the highest quality thing which you could produce for me.
And thanks for your really high high value content since years. I really really appreciate it!!
paxpa
Thank you for your comment! Noted. :)
Hi Shane,
I just cannot thank you enough for all your incredibly valuable, no-BS content and courses!
I guess a lot has already been said in the comments, so I cannot add too much to it. Everything you say really speaks to me, especially the quality over quantity approach.
Since I just started my business in summer, I still need to implement everything I’ve learned from you (SEO Sprint, Course Craft, Focus & Action, Thrive Themes). So, for now, regarding your question, you’ve already produced highest quality “things” that I still need to implement (video is my biggest challenge here and the most valuable thing I can produce for my audience).
What would be interesting, though, is your take on the future direction of online marketing. Will it still be email? Bots? What else? Anything we can prepare for right now already?
Best,
Melanie
Thank you very much, Melanie!
Regarding the future of online marketing: one thing to keep in mind is that the future for big business looks different than the future for small business. And mainstream reporting and projections are often exclusively concerned with big business. For example: are bots, AI and machine learning an important trend in online business? For big businesses with massive data sets and data analyst departments, yes. For small businesses, not so much. And across the board, bots and AI have been oversold massively. Right now a lot of “AI” is just human workers and a company behind it hoping to replace the human work with automation sometime soon. And chat bots (all the hype a few years ago) are still far from something anyone wants to interact with, given a choice.
That’s not to say that these trends won’t ever become relevant. It’s happening. But it’s happening on a different timeline than most people expect and it becomes relevant to small businesses last.
Email has been slowly losing reach since, basically, day 1. But there’s no real replacement for it on the horizon. And it’s still better than pretty much any other channel. There’s monopolization happening in every corner of the internet, which is bad for small businesses. And also bad for humanity as a whole, but that’s a different story. Hopefully, we’ll see some companies broken up or some regulation stopping or at least slowing down the advancement of the attention economy as it is today. But we can’t know for sure.
Here’s what I think is relevant for small businesses: the principle of 1,000 true fans is still as relevant as ever. The nature of how you reach those fans, how you communicate with them and what you sell them has changed and will continue changing, but those are minor details. What matters is building that base of people you can serve with great value and serving that value. I believe this will stay relevant for a long time to come.
True! Thank you so much!
First of all: Many thanks for the great content over the last years. I’ve definitely perceived it as a “quality” thing already. And I love your humble, down-to-earth way of presenting it.
I believe that the most valuable thing you could deliver to me is an action plan or “pyramid” of audience building. I struggle with having a clear road map that takes me from where I am now to where I want to be in five years from now.
I’m publishing a weekly podcast with in-depth 2000-3000 word blog posts and it resonates well with my audience. I’m also collecting leads for my email list and I’m going to build a course next year (based on the things you’ve taught in your course).
So overall, I feel that I’m “kind of on my path” but my audience is still tiny and every week I see new shiny objects popping up that might or might not help me grow the thing I’m building. I try to deliberately ignore as much as possible and just keep on doing my thing.
You’re one of the few voices in this sphere which I actually trust to provide me with a clear road map. So I’d highly appreciate that.
For Thrive Themes, I’d love to have an in-depth tutorial about the 80-20 of great web design. It’s nice to have your templates etc., but if I want to really re-build my website with the upcoming theme-builder, then I’ll be completely lost on that front. I would gladly pay for such a product, by the way.
Thanks again and best wishes from Berlin
Philip
Thank you for your input, Philip!
Audience building has been on my mind for a while. In my case, the main thing I did was build an initial audience via products and affiliate traffic. Once there’s that initial audience, it’s much easier to keep growing than it is to start from scratch. And in many ways, I’ve been coasting on the audience building front and just kind of let it grow organically, as we focus more on the product side.
But I’ve been thinking about what I can do in my businesses to grow that audience more deliberately and what the best ways are to grow an audience from scratch. It’s a really interesting topic, too. So, I’ll definitely have more to say on this soon. As mentioned in the video, SEO is definitely a part of that. SEO can be an incredible audience building engine. But that’s not to say it’s the only thing there is.
First a comment about ‘Comments’ : I know, Shane, that you always have a CTA on each posting where you ask for comments.
The last few postings on ActiveGrowth I’ve arrive at the bottom and failed to find the famous three dots which start vibrating as the comments load. (I’m accustomed to seeing them on Thrive postings.) I assumed something had gone wrong and the comments had got missed out somehow.
This time, I happened to glance above the video and there I saw what appears to be a second header with an entry ’36 COMMENTS’ – below the first header and difficult to read because the font is a pale gray colour. Sure enough, clicking on that produced the comments display.
Why a different construction in ActiveGrowth from Thrive Theme?
As for quantity v quality – I’m a beginner in many of these matters and I’ve vastly appreciated the quantity of existing material on Thrive which I’ve been able to browse at my own speed. But I agree with Ann that a slower delivery rate of new material is easier to consume at my stage of development.
Thanks for your comment! So, you didn’t see the comments until you clicked something? That sounds like it’s a bug…
Probably a bug — but I can’t reproduce it today on any browser even after killing all the cookies. So not to worry.
Thanks for your feedback on this. Might be a caching issue.
In terms of skill development, I think that teaching about video creation (how to market and teach with video) could be a great skill to have. So that one can feel confident at exposing his/her message and have more impact. Even maybe more fun. Even when I also like to be surprised with new strategy ideas, like course-craft was.
Thank you for your suggestion!
I’ve been thinking about doing some in-person workshops on this topic. I feel like I can definitely teach a thing or two about how to present on video. If my experiments in the coming months succeed and I manage to grow the YouTube channels and drive more traffic from them, I’ll also turn that into a course of some kind.
One challenge with video related stuff is that it’s so multi-faceted. There are so many aspects to working with video, it’s hard to know what to include in something like a course or workshop. Everywhere you turn, there’s an infinite rabbit hole to fall down. :D
Hi Shane. What a nice update, thank you! I think everything you have provided so far has been of very high quality. You are a good teacher, and I believe that my online course will be of high quality also, because of what I have learned in Coursecraft.
You asked what high-quality content we would like to see you create. Well, for my part, I would like to learn how to make a podcast, and who better to teach it than you? “Podcraft” next, perhaps?
And thinking about my business, I am hoping to create high-quality blog content and online courses, and I have a secret dream to venture into podcasts as a way of supporting the content of the blog and courses.
Thank you for your input, Jorunn!
I can definitely teach how to make a podcast, but not how to make it successful. I did some experiments with the ActiveGrowth podcast, to see if I could use a different approach and get better than average results. The answer was: no. :)
So, I don’t really feel qualified to teach podcasting. Pat Flynn has a lot of content on this topic and he’s been a lot more successful at the podcasting game than me.
I totally dig these subscriber’s oly content you’ve been giving us. They’re real, insightful as hell, thought-proviking, relatable and inspiring.
As for the TT blog, there’s a few posts I keep coming back to. One is the round up for home pages where you featured Marie Forle’s, Ramit Sethi, etc. Another one, which is more recent I think, is the one where you analyzed salespages for different price-points (there was B-school and a few others). I’ve found a lot of value on those posts. The tutorials where you show smart and cool things we can do with TA for instance are also very valuable for me, although I don’t consume those that much – they’re more like a “nice to know” thing.
I totally understand how complex it is finding balance between shipping and providing the highest value possible. It’s something I keep asking myself, kind of struggling between being consistent with my planning, doing what I feel is right at a given moment, and doing the best work possible.
But the good thing (I think is a good thing!) is I’ve come to a point where I just can’t produce a very bad or incomplete piece of content just for the sake of producing content. Whenever I’ve tried to something “quick and easy” I will always end up with something much bigger than what I had set at first. I guess I have raised my bar a lot, which in turn gives me some reassurance about my content being higher quality than most things out there.
Thank you, Mary! Great to see what your perspective on this is.
Would LOVE to learn from you on how to scale an online business that’s already at the 6 figure mark as a solo entrepreneur. I want to start hiring to free up my time to focus on higher value things but need some guidance on building a great team. Anything on that note would be so valuable to hear from you. Thanks for everything.
Thank you for the suggestion!
This could be interesting to work on. I wonder how generalizable my own experience in this area is.
Thank you for all these reviews and tip-top content!
Love the backdrop and lighting. I already smell a quality improvement in your video :) Love it!
Surely balance is the key. More is the enemy of good and perfectionism is the enemy of progress.
What I think you and Thrive team can offer the best value at is creating content and courses on Saas.
Not the pure software development and coding side of things, but rather entrepreneurship, productivity, developing a community of Thriving Entrepreneurs who add to the experience by creating themes, plugins, widgets, funnels that they can share with their clients and can better serve their niches in a more impactful way.
These are of high quality too, but I talking about specific niches, where you can’t cover it all, but a larger support community can.
This is what you already do, have experience and passion about and most importantly good at. This will indirectly help as a support community which will indirectly take off some of the load from you guys.
I’ve seen this model works wonders in InfusionSoft, ClickFunnels and many others who allow third-party partners to develop on the top of their code or basic offerings.
That’s the thought that keeps coming to my mind when I come across Thrive and Active Growth. It will even help both of the brands support each other and build even more silos. A rising tide lifts all boats!
Anyways, wishing you the best of luck and thanks again for all these great pieces of content.