Presented live on Tuesday, Nov 26, 2019
In 3 years, 3 months, 3 weeks…
You may find yourself writing an article for a big-ass publication that, today, seems IMPOSSIBLY out of reach. Like The New York Times, who juuust said YES to an article from blogger Aaron Orendorff.
Only a few months ago, Aaron was terrified to pitch NYT.
Cold sweats.
Absolute certainty that he’d be discovered as a fraud.
Never-ending nausea at the idea of actually hitting “send” on the pitch email.
And now, with a nod from his new editor to guide him, he gets to put pen to paper and actually look forward to his name in lights at that particular dream publication.
Which brings us to YOU.
You may not want to write for The New York Times.
But chances are good that…
>> Guest blogging is on your radar for 2020, or
>> Content marketing on your site alone hasn’t been bringing you the traffic, leads or authority you need to really scale, or
>> You’ve realized you can’t build the business you want – and get the traction you want – without borrowing some authority from publications your target audience trusts, whether that’s NYT or ConversionXL…
In this live Tutorial, Aaron’s going to walk us through how he’s turned an outline into the article that is now on its way to his editor.
Check out the replay below and follow along with Aaron’s Almighty Template.
And… Content School is now open!
TRANSCRIPT
JJoanna Wiebe: Hello, sir?
Aaron: Yes.
Joanna Wiebe: What are you doing here?
Aaron: I know, fancy running into you. I haven’t seen you in forever.
Joanna Wiebe: I know. Right, like a day or something. Yeah. We have Aaron in today to lead us through the last Tutorial Tuesday of 2019, I’m just saying.
Aaron: No pressure.
Joanna Wiebe: Yeah, none at all. No, it’s going to be so dope. Before Aaron actually dives in, I am going to share my screen for a moment because SEMrush just put out this big report yesterday on the state of content marketing and given that we’re talking about content marketing today, I wanted to share some of these with you. There’s a whole bunch more to it. We chatted it out over in Word Workers, the Facebook group, which most people who attend Tutorial Tuesdays are also in Word Workers. So head on over there if you haven’t already, but it’ll tell you very interesting things, like a 64 page slide document where it says things like what the most popular search queries are when it comes to content marketing and other such things.
Interestingly, really long headlines of 14-plus words are according to SEMrush,
[inaudible 00:01:21]
a lot more effective in terms of driving traffic, shares and back links. So all those who are optimizing
[inaudible 00:00:01:26]
, don’t let anybody [inaudible 00:01:27] it. Work them out, lovers obviously. The average length of top-performing articles is between 25 and 5,600 words for different industries. So across the board that’s what’s up. Interesting stuff. Aaron, without further ado, you’re going to talk to us about not this side of things but actually writing stuff. So let me stop sharing and it’s all on you now.
How To Turn an Outline Into an Article with “The Almighty Outline Template” [01:52]
Aaron: All right. Fantastic. So right at the top, Carrie is going to drop for everyone a Google doc link that has copy at the end. What that should do is fire up a would you like to make a copy of The (Almighty) Outline Template, which is very intentionally named. What I’m going to do is ask you to click through that, make that copy so you can follow along as I go through the step-by-step process I use particularly when writing guest posts for niche or mainstream major publications. So I’m going to screen share exactly what you should be seeing on your end. This should be what eventually you end up with, The (Almighty) Outline Template. So there’s some wonderful housekeeping copywriting stuff here, all kinds of links to make sure you get connected to … This is parts of my first full on course revealing exactly how I used guest blogging, particularly in the first two to three to four years of my career to shortcut basically that growth trajectory from nothing to six figures to Editor-In-Chief at Shopify Plus to all kinds of impressive logos that I hadn’t mad envy about.
So get inside this document. What I’m going to do is break down, first of all, what the deal document itself contains, the outline piece-by-piece. We’ll roll through that and then I want to show you two working versions, two different states of what this will eventually look like so it’s uber practical.
Every Persuasive Document Has Three Things [03:30]
[Every piece of clear, powerful, persuasive human communication boils down to three limits: introduction, body, conclusion. I have been using this basic outline template for everything I write from email sequences, to emails themselves, to blog posts, to eBooks, to pillar pages, and on and on and on ever since I discovered it through the great blessing of eighth grade English. I’m not joking, this is by and large exactly how I start and it’s so part of my DNA now that I think in these structural terms. What I want to say is each element, introduction, body conclusion has one job to do and one means of accomplishing that job.
What is the Job of the Introduction Paragraph? [04:17]
So the introduction, the only job of the introduction is to get your reader, to get them, the people that are exposed to your content, into the body. I stole a lot of this inspiration from Joe Sugarman, epic, old school copywriter. I think he’s still alive, where he talks about the slippery slope of … Your whole goal in the first line of an advertisement of a headline is just to get someone to nod and slip effortlessly into the next line. That’s how I think about introductions. Get them into the body by telling them what you’re going to tell them. Okay, I’ll break down those parts in just a moment.
Once you hit the body, your job is to keep that effortlessness flowing. Get them from main point to main point and into the conclusion by telling them. So in the introduction, you tell them what you’re going to tell them. In the body, you tell them, and then right class, anybody can guess what the conclusion is.
Get them to take it action by telling them what you told them. I use these outlines primarily to save myself from the hell of the blank page. I’m a lazy, lazy writer. So I then break down each one of these constituent three parts into its own three parts. I think about this as the introduction is composed of a hook, the opening line, what grabs their attention, what pulls them in.
The Purpose of the Thesis [05:43]
The thesis, and when you hear the word thesis, I want you to think the one idea, emotion or action you’re trying to sell your reader on. Not the end of the line, bottom line, but what are you trying to get them to think, feel, or do? It’s got to be uber clear in your own mind. Then the overview, which is basically a, here’s what we’re going, this is the roadmap.
How to Write the Body of a Persuasive Document [06:08]
Now inside the actual outline, there’s a lot of different options and you can kind of see, I love the rule of three. Problem, agitation, solution a lot of you are probably very familiar with. This is state the problem in a single sentence, maybe two sentences, get them to nod and then agitation, bring that problem to terrifying reality. Add data on top of it. Paint a picture in real human terms and then what I do is I gray out you’ll notice one element in each one of these. So I know that the hook is all about either one, problem, agitation or two. I really like thinking about it in terms of hell, what’s the hell I’m saving my audience from, or if it’s sort of like a journalistic piece, true human story, cliffhanger resolution. There’s some plug and play options I like to use as well if I’m feeling particularly lazy, and then the thesis of the piece is really grayed out agitation and problem.
What’s the solution? Grayed out hell. What’s the heaven? True human story. What’s the resolution? And then on into the body.
Focusing on the Core Negative Emotion to Pull Your Audience In [07:15]
So let me show you exactly how I do that with something like an introduction. I use a very in depth process when I’m thinking through content. My preferred method is this hell unto heaven. So inside the actual full course there’s 20-some questions on all these different hells to pull out from your audience and get you thinking about what’s wrong, what’s the core negative emotion, what’s the surface emotion, and then what’s the heaven that’s associated with that. In this instance, I’m writing a piece about professional writing at work. So I’ve answered question seven. What do they complain about to their friends, family and colleagues? How do these complaints differ in context? So I want to write in the first person. I have job critical information or requests that have to be responded to, but nobody seems to read anything I write at work.
I put a ton of effort into getting that info out and I try different methods, memos, email and Slack. Still I can’t get results. Now this goes on to then unpack the I feel small, ignored, disrespected. I end up acting all aggressive at the last minute. So all of these problems that are associated with writing at work, and there’s a bunch of different ways to get into this. I really like number seven here.
So when I start moving from The (Almighty) Outline Template into, this is VI, I start dropping in elements like problem, agitation, solution or something like a true human story cliffhanger. I want to create for myself a couple of options, plug and play type of deals. So for this one, because the publication that I’m targeting is more than mainstream journalistic type pub that I know really likes first person narratives, that’s what I did here is my second option is recounting the story of back when I was a college instructor, teaching students to write for professional settings.
Each class began with a single disheartening thesis. Nobody will ever want to read anything you write at work, period. Not emails, not Slack, not memos, nothing. So I’m grounding this in reality, right? There’s a place, there’s a person, there are supporting characters. This doesn’t feel like once upon a time, but it’s very much this is a storied way into this issue. So as I’m going through these elements, what I like to do is if I know I’m not going to use a particular piece, I just X them out. So I would do the same thing here, cross all that out. Then I get into the thesis and essentially this is actually the heaven unto hell. I’ll place that there and then the heaven is answered here.
Thesis: Resolving the Core Negative Emotion for Your Audience [10:13]
I write it out in exact first person terms. I want to put myself in my reader’s shoes of what they can get. What would be the heaven if they were delivered from that hell that I’m identifying? So these are reflections of one another and then the same thing goes for the resolution. Beneath that brutally honest reality, how do you get busy coworkers and bosses to pay attention and take action? The other way I like to get really clear about my thesis, because this is going to be the governing centerpiece of the entire article, of everything I write is to answer these questions one at a time and then decide on which one fits best.
The one thing I want my readers to think idea, feel emotion, do action.
In this case I’m keeping it very simple. In order to get what you write at work read and responded to follow three steps, write less often, use fewer words and make communication about the recipient, not yourself.
Tips for Targeting a Specific Publisher [11:02]
You can already see inside something like that. If I keep it, I’m actually doing double duty so I’ve spelled it out here for myself so I know what my three points are in the overview, which is going to be a direct reflection of the main points in the body. One, write less often. Two, use fewer words. Three, make it about them, not you. Or you may be asking yourself, how did I decide on that first person narrative? The why three points, and that’s because I am targeting The New York Times and whenever I target a publication I go through a very detailed process of trying to find either popular articles or articles that overlap with the kind of content I want to create from that publisher.
Then, this is inside the post that just went live a few days ago on Copy Hackers, I’ve got a very detailed process that I give you a bird’s eye overview of of reverse engineering, yes. All right, so for instance like the headline pattern, the character length, the word count, all of these things, even something like seven subheadings, I’ll go through the posts that match my topic or that are most popular and find out how many do they normally have. It turns out rule of three is true for The New York times Smarter Living section, which is why I have three steps inside that piece.
Techniques to Make Writing The Body of Your Paper Easier [12:28]
Given that I know I need to have three subheadings based on the publication that I’m targeting, identify those three main points and then I started breaking it down and I just drop in one, write less often. This is a subheading main point, number one. I then follow a very … I love this process, define, illustrate, apply. This simplifies everything from trying to tackle this beast of a blank page. Even if you know what you want to communicate when you hit the body of an article, the substance, define it. What does it mean? All right? In this case, absence makes the heart grow fonder. That’s the old cliche, but is that principle true when you put fingers to keyboard at work? Explain the principle of scarcity. Provide a very brief summary of the academic research. Why? Because I learned from the research process that The New York Times Smarter Living section loves academic research, so I’m going to define what it means to write less often.
I’m then going to illustrate, and in this case, because I’m targeting The New York Times, I’m going to try gun ads, and I already actually did, interviewing Robert Cialdini and either Liz Wiseman who wrote Multipliers or Carolyn O’Hare who used to write for Harvard Business Review and is now the Editor-In-Chief of Pocket. So I sent out emails to all those people to interview them. And I also know I need to present one real study on scarcity. That’s illustrate. Bring it to life. Get other people’s insight. What do they say about it and then present one real study on scarcity.
Apply: What Can You Do About It? [14:01]
Apply then is all right, now that I’ve told you what it means to write less often, I’ve illustrated these principles in action, what can you actually do about it? This was my first attempt at it and you’ll see in just a second, I thought it was pretty crappy so I got rid of that, but I really liked this.Limit how often you write. Delay what you send.
I’m going to flesh that out. Second point, use fewer words, right? Same exact pattern. Define, open with a Shakespeare quote, “Brevity is the soul of wit.” Then Mr. Mark Twain, right? Is there a better quote about writing too much and too long? Unpack that, simplification without distortion. I’m just plugging these in each and every time. Illustrate, I’m going after Harvard Business Review. Illustrate, these are the data points that I need to use to substantiate the piece. I jump then into a journal article because that’s what The Times really likes. Then apply. This time I decided to go after Ann Handley, Val Geisler and Liz Wiseman again for uber practical takeaways, how to apply less is more. You can see same pattern here with three. Don’t make it about you. Then we’re on into the conclusion.
How to Write a Conclusion [15:26]
So the conclusion is just a reverse engineering of the introduction. All of this is built because I’m lazy and I like to write in systems and this makes it so much … So this essentially is, I got a little note to return to opening lines and reword. I copy and paste it. That’s all I’m going to do is write it so it’s not line for line. Thesis then, those three steps taken in quick succession. I’m going to put that into one sentence.
Then the CTA, I give myself a few options that I think might work in VI, first iteration of the article. In VII, that’s where I start doing even more strike-throughs. So I decide, okay, I don’t want to use any of this. I want to use this as my introduction. I ended up interviewing Ann Handley, so I think this is a great quote to use at the beginning.
I’m going to substantiate that with this. I get rid of these. I don’t want any of this so I delete it. I don’t want this, I don’t want this. I’m going to do this. I don’t need these two, and then you can see what I start doing is basically unpacking it in even more detail inside the outline.
The major benefits of doing this not aren’t just only when I’m overlapping it with a publisher that I’ve done all that research on and I know exactly how many points, what sort of research that they like, the data points that they like to substantiate it with. It’s also what I end up with is a very clear picture of a balanced article, piece-by-piece. So I want to make sure that all of these, all of these parts basically fill the same amount of area.
Last Step: Changing the Formatting [17:05]
Then what I’ll do, and I’ll show you this is the last thing, once I’ve done all of it, I copy it, I jump over to a fresh doc. I paste it in. I select all the texts and I just turn it into normal. That gets rid of all the formatting that’s come before as well as all of the slashes. The reason I do that is because it’s harder on me to then make sense of it, but it forces me to read it with fresh eyes all the way through. I often find things that I crossed out earlier in the process that I really wanted to cover now.
Joanna Wiebe: That’s awesome. I was, as you were going through it, I was like, “You know, you could do a tutorial on just this section by section, just that part or just that part. But we just got a really badass overview here, so awesome. That was amazing. This is scratching the surface of what Aaron’s going to share or does share in Master of Guest Blogging, the first course.
Aaron: And I talk a lot slower in it too.
Joanna Wiebe: You do.
Aaron: I swear.
Joanna Wiebe: And it’s really, yeah, over the shoulder tutorials galore. This is the kind of stuff that has got him published everywhere you want to be published. So check that out on Friday and we’ll hopefully see you in it. Other than that, see you in our next Tutorial Tuesday. Bye you all.
Speaker 3: It’s the ’90s.
