MODULE 1 LESSON 4 – TRANSCRIPTION - Find a Proven Topic

 

Hey guys, Brian Dean here. And welcome to lesson 4 of Module 1. In the last lesson you learned – as crazy as it might sound at first – that creating content exclusively for your target audience is a huge mistake. Instead, I showed you why your content needs to appeal to the Linkreators in your industry, who actually have the power to share and link to your content. Obviously, it’s best if your content appeals to Linkreators and potential customers. 

But if that’s not possible, you need to put the Linkreators first. Otherwise you won’t have anything on your site that appeals to people that actually have the power to link to you. But when you create content for your Linkreators, getting links, shares, and traffic is relatively easy. That’s because your Linkreators will WANT to share and link to your content. And in the last lesson I showed you a simple process that you can use to find your Linkreators. So now that you have a list of Linkreators, what’s next? 

Well it’s time for the next crucial step to generating first page Google rankings: Finding a topic that your Linkreators will link to. This will be the topic of your first Power Page. Now I’ve mentioned the term “Power Page” a few times in this course. What does this mean exactly? Let’s break it down. You see, most people create content around random topics that they THINK will do well. And even if they get lucky and get the topic right, they don’t know how to turn that topic into content specifically engineered for first page Google rankings. 

And sure, for some people this can work OK. But you’re an SEO That Works student and you can do better. In plain English, a Power Page is a piece of content engineered to quickly rank on Google’s first page (and stay there). A Power Page has three essential features. These 3 features help your content stand out, generate backlinks – and most importantly – quickly get to the top of Google. The 3 features that make up a Power Page are: Linkreator-Focused Based on a Proven Topic Built with a Content Framework I’ll explain. 

You already found your Linkreators in the last lesson. And they’re going to be the target audience for your Power Page. But to create something that truly appeals to your Linkreators, you need to know what topics they already link to and share. And in this lesson I’m going to show you 4 strategies that you can use to easily find topics that your linkreators love. But before we dive into the specific tactics, there’s one thing to keep in mind about topic research. 

Your Power Page topic doesn’t have to be directly about what you sell. For example, Backlinko is a B2B online education company. You don’t see me publishing content, like “How to choose the best SEO course” or “Why you should invest in a B2B training program”. 

Instead, I mostly publish content that appeals to my Linkreators, like ultimate guides and industry studies. And the links that I get to those pages boost up the rankings for all of my other more commercial pages, like this one. With that out of the way, it’s time to talk a little bit about content frameworks. Content Frameworks are the third feature that makes a Power Page unique. 

This is important. Finding a Linkreator-friendly topic is key. But unless your content is packaged in a way that’s built to maximize shares and links, it’s not gonna perform nearly as well. That’s why Module 2 is all about teaching you my 7 battle-tested Content Frameworks. Each of these frameworks are specifically engineered to get backlinks. But that can wait until Module 2. To recap, a Power Page’s 3 features are: Linkreator-focused Based on a proven topic Built with a Content Framework And to be clear: these 3 features make Power Pages MUCH more effective than a traditional blog post or article. 

In fact, I stopped publishing normal blog posts and articles at Backlinko years ago. Today, I ONLY publish Power Pages. And it’s one of the reasons that my site gets so much traffic. For example, here’s one of the most popular pieces of content that I’ve published on the blogNeedless to say, the main reason that this content did so well is that it has all 3 elements of a Power Page. First, it was created to appeal to my Linkreators (marketing bloggers). 

Second, it’s based on a Linkreator-focused topic (SEO case studies). And finally, it’s built using a Content Framework, in this case, The Trademark Technique. And because my Power Page checks off all 3 boxes, it’s been linked to from thousands of different websites, including Hubspot and  Entrepreneur.com Now that you understand exactly what a Power Page is, it’s time for me to show you how to find your first Power Page topic, step-by-step. 

There are 3 methods that I use to find topics for my Power Pages. So let’s dive right in with Method #1: Linkreator Topic Research. Now that you have your list of Linkreators, it’s time to see which topics they already cover. Here are the steps: First, grab the Linkreator list you created in the last lesson. Next, visit the website of the first Linkreator on your list. And check out their last 3-5 blog posts or articles. Specifically, check out the topics of those 3-5 posts. Do they have any common themes? Or anything that ties them together? 

For example, let’s say that you’re in the health and fitness space. So you go to the homepage of a popular blog in your space. And you quickly notice that a lot of the posts are either about batch cooking. Or mention batch cooking. If health and fitness bloggers were my Linkreators, I’d add the topic “batch cooking” to this lesson’s worksheet. 

Another example: A while back I published a Power Page about voice search. So why did I choose to cover this topic? It’s simple: voice search was a topic that more and more of my Linkreators were writing about. In fact, there was a huge boom in interest in voice search around this time. My Linkreators were talking about how voice search was going to be the “next big thing” in SEO. 

So I decided to create my Power Page around that Linkreator-focused topic. And because that topic appealed to my Linkreators, my Power Page quickly picked up hundreds of backlinks. Alright let’s move onto Method #2: Resource Pages. Resource pages are one of the best places to find Linkreator-friendly topic ideas. What are resource pages? Resource pages are pages that curate the best content on a given topic from around the web. 

And because the people that run these resource pages LINK to the content they include, you can easily see which topics your Linkreators link to all in one place. For example, here’s a resource page about the Paleo Diet. As you can see, this is a Linkreator topic gold mine. You literally get a list of topics that the Linkreators link to...all in one place. With that, here are the steps. 

First, use one of the search strings from this lesson’s worksheet that are specifically designed to bring up resource pages. Then, go to one of the resource pages that show up in Google. Finally, scan the resource page. Keep an eye out for topics that the resource page tends to link again and again. Add those topics to your list.

Our next method for finding Power Page topics is to look at your Linkreator’s “Top Pages”. Like step #3 from the last lesson, this is an optional step. But if you already have access to a premium SEO tool, it’s worth doing. Otherwise, methods 1 and 2 are usually more than enough to show you which topics your Linkreators already link to. 

Anyway, the goal of this approach is to reveal the most heavily linked-to pages on a website. In other words, this strategy shows you the exact topics that your Linkreator’s Linkreators link to! Here are the steps: First, pop a site from your Linkreator list into a link analysis tool like Ahrefs, SEMRush, Moz Pro or whatever tool you want to use. Then, take a look at their “top pages”. 

But every tool has something where they show you the most linked-to pages on a given site. With that, let me show you a real life example of me executing this step a while back. First, I grabbed Moz.com from my list of Linkreators. 

Then, I popped the site’s homepage into Ahrefs and looked at the pages that people linked to the most. And I saw that one of their most popular pieces of content was about keyword research. I also noticed that other Linkreators had content on the same topic. 

So I decided to create a Power Page about Keyword Research. And because my Power Page was about a topic that appealed to Linkreators, when I emailed them to let them know about my content, they happily linked to it. Simple. Now before we tackle the worksheet, here again are the 3 methods for finding topics that your Linkreators link to and share. 

And now it’s time to take action. In the worksheet below this video, I’ll show you the entire step-by-step process in detail. So make sure to download the worksheet before watching the next video. Then, in the next lesson, you’ll learn how to do keyword research the right way. Specifically, you’ll learn how to find a medium tail keyword that you can optimize your Power Page around. See you then.