How to get best results from Penfriend

Hi Penfriends,

I want you to maximise your article credits by showing you how Tim thinks about content strategy.

I’m kind of learning about content strategy at the same time as some of you, and I’m putting my new knowledge under the most extreme of tests.

I’m using Penfriend to write a blog about investing in gold. Gold keywords are highly contested but I’m me, and an impossible task is too tempting.

Content strategy: blog structure

The first thing Tim’s teaching me is about blog structure. Understanding what makes a good structure is helping me work out which articles I’m going to ask Penfriend to generate first.

You see, it would be easy to see a blog as a list of articles but they’re much more interconnected.

Topics

Think about your blog as a hierarchy of topics from general to specific.

For Penfriend’s blog Tim's identified 3 general topics:

1. Content strategy

2. Content creation

3. Content research

For my gold blog, I’ve identified my first general topic:

1. How to buy gold

General topics should be high level, below which sit sub-topics, and sub-sub-topics, and sub-sub-sub topics, all of which cross reference each other.

Figuring out your general topics will probably be quite easy. You’ll only have a few.

But how do you know which sub-topics to make..?

Figuring out your sub-topics

Penfriend kinda does it for you!

Your sub-topics are the H2s and H3s of your general topic.

For example, in my how to buy gold article, the H2s and H3s of the outline gave me sub-topics like:

1. Gold investment strategies

2. Physical gold vs gold securities

3. Gold ETFs vs Gold mining stocks

4. How to store gold

5. How to insure gold

6. The gold market

7. Gold bars vs gold coins

…and several more.

My how to buy gold article introduced these topics, but only at a general, high level. Each one can become its own article, going into much more depth.

You can see how each one of these sub-topics has its own sub-topics.

Let’s take gold bars for example.

1. Why invest in gold bars

2. How to invest in gold bars

3. Assessing gold bar quality

4. Assessing gold bar pricing

5. How to buy: step by step

6. How to store gold bars

7. How to sell: step by step

…and several more.

Then finally, let’s go one level deeper.

Let’s take how to store gold bars as an example:

1. How to store gold at home

2. Home storage vs professional storage

3. Safes for home storage

4. Safes vs storage boxes

5. Security best practices

6. How to choose a gold storage professional

7. Costs of professional storage

…and several more.

You can see, from the general overview of how to buy gold you can follow a thread all the way to safes vs storage boxes.

Let the H2s and H3s of one article guide the creation of your next 10.

Then, when you have an army of articles, it’s time to send them to battle.

The content war

Articles are like soldiers in a battalion.

They aren’t like snipers.

They do best when they’re sent into the war for attention as a group, supporting each other. They don’t do well alone.

Tim says:

And so, I’m going to make 30 to 50 articles around the general topic of how to buy gold using the simple strategy I’ve spoken about so far, and publish them as a battalion.

Google will see my focused, connected, collection of quality articles and consider me a topical authority. That’s the plan!

Topical authority is part of how Google decides which articles to rank highest.

The Penfriend advantage

Penfriend finally solves the quality/quantity dilemma.

Until Penfriend you had to choose:

1. Lots of bad blogs

2. Very few good blogs

Neither of these sad options will achieve topical authority.

With Penfriend you can.

And so now is the time to gather your army of articles, before your competitors discover Penfriend! 😱

Best wishes,

John, Tim, and Inge

p.s. We’re taking a week off over the holidays so I’ll next chat to you in 2024. Have a restful, joyful holiday. You deserve it. Cheers! 🥂

p.p.s. The colour coordination of cream and grey here is epic 😌