Content Marketing: Behind the Scenes

I think I found a way to turn the Ghostwriter Dad rolling portfolio into something far more interesting for the both of us.

Each project linked to in the rolling portfolio is designed in some way to eventually make us money. The purpose of linking each week is because the SEO on this site is strong and because it provides potential clients with an accurate view of we do for ourselves each week, leaving them with a fair indication of what they can expect us to do for them.

But you’re reading this site, too. That means you’re probably interested in making money online, probably as a writer or content creator. You wanna leave having learned something, right?

So, rather than tossing off a few paragraphs just for links, I’ll share what we did as a company each week and why did it.

Win, win.

By telling you, I’ll understand it better myself. You get to see the events unfold just a beat behind.

Let’s Get Started

Last week I started out Writer Dad with a promo for the Creative Copy Challenge. The reasons for this are obvious: simple cross-promotion. I wanted to send as many Writer Dad readers over to the Challenge as I could. At some point, Dave will put a button in the sidebar as well.

The key is relevancy. Your promos must be interesting to the audience and only as long as necessary.

It worked. Challenge #7 was our highest commented yet. Challenge #8 cooled off just a tad, but is still going.

On Tuesday, I launched the Children Write the Future feature. This is a core belief of mine, and I’ve been considering bringing my daughter from Children Write the Future to my home site for a while. She’s worked hard and earned it. So I wanted to give her a wider audience. It will help her writing, and I think it helps to underline one of the core themes of the Writer Dad site and brand.

The following day, she wrote an introductory post for the site, then fielded comments when she got home from school.

My purpose was to bond my business with my family and my family with my business. Comments, email and at home response, all reflected an excellent decision. : )

On Friday, I wondered if careers were slowly dying. This was a short thought and written to initiate conversation. My day, however, was an avalanche of oopses as the sky threw buckets of water against my window for six hours straight. The comments went unanswered all day. Great way to kill a conversation dead.

The Big Redesign

The big news in blog monetization this week came with our complete overhaul of the Potty Training Power site. Along with the visual overhaul we redeveloped the product and set a new sales system in place. Take a look. Dave did an outstanding job. He gave his usual awesome facelift to the site. It looks like a million downloads.

This is 3.0 for PTP. We scrubbed down each piece of the product, and Dave’s new art is off the hook. We beefed it up with three new components, including a 7 Day Preparation Guide. We also added phone support. I already felt strongly about it, but now I’ve no doubt we have the best potty training product on the market, no doubt in my mind.

Dave ended his week at Blogger Dad with a wonderfully personal post about his twinges of jealousy from “Mr. Dave” at his son, E’s preschool. The rest of the week he spent teasing the arrival of our brand new site, ThingsMyChildSays. Dave’s work is stunning. A truly beautiful site design.

The premise behind the site is simple. Each day there is a quote from a reader’s child, along with their name, age or picture if the parent would like to include one.

The site is a terrific means to gather mom and dad bloggers together; a nice thread in a syndicate which includes two parent friendly blogs, a children’s writing site and a potty training site, in addition to projects still in the planning stages.

Simple to run, super friendly and with a potentially wide reach to a relevant audience.

This directly ties into one of the most important projects we have on our plate. Children Write the Future has been on auto pilot for most of its life. This is simply because we have been afflicted with the common disease that sinks into the skin of many entrepreneurs during their first year online: too many projects.

We’ve known its deficits for a while and have been building a lot of content behind the scenes. The new site will be unveiled March 15, and it will be wonderful, but it will be running on baseline autopilot until then. The content’s good, of course. But it’s nothing compared to what we have coming up.

This week’s, “This is Why Your Child Doesn’t Like to Write” was terrific and tied in nicely to Cindy’s, “Got Language?”

At the Inkwell, we started out the week with The 7 Sins of Writing. Judging by emails, comments and retweets, the post was a total failure. Sad really, it’s clever and has a good message. But the best way to learn by rhyme is through repetition, and repetition is best in a single verse. Therefore, this post doesn’t carry enough value for the audience. Lesson learned. :)

We followed on Wednesday with another promotion for the Creative Copy Challenge. This one makes even more sense than the ones at Writer Dad and Blogger Dad since writers are the Inkwell’s target market.

We closed out the week with what will be our last episode of Available Darkness at the Inkwell. This week we’ll be announcing the book’s own domain (even though you’ve already seen it here) and moving the serialization there. We feel that it will have a better chance to thrive on its own. Plus, we would like to start using that third spot to further benefit our Inkwell readers who are most interested in our author and writer related content.

We have a lot of surprises coming up and this is a fantastic way to share the information. I’m curious to know what you think.

Is this too much information? Do you feel as though you could learn this way, with information just a beat behind our actions?

Let me know down in the comments!

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