The formula for writing organic content that scales like paid ads
Plus the GPT prompt to help you do the same
Happy Friday 👋,
This is a paid edition. Want daily insights to sell *more* stuff? Click the little yellow button.
I studied organic content that pulls in 1M+ views to crack the formula for content that scales like paid ads—without spending a penny.
And then I reverse-engineered viral organic content and built a ChatGPT prompt to help you do the same. At the end of this newsletter, I’ll show you the exact headlines it wrote for me 🤯 .
Let’s go👇
So you have a product or service to sell and you want to create organic content to sell your thing but you’re not about to eat 10,000 calories on camera to get noticed. You’re sitting there thinking: “How do I get my thing out there?”
Good news, yesterday I stumbled across a genius marketing framework that you can steal (without the bloated gut).
Here’s the deal… don’t write organic content that shouts ‘buy my thing’ because let’s be honest, nobody cares. Instead, turn your R&D department into content (translation: do the market research and share it). It becomes this beautiful flywheel because you *actually* need to do market research to understand the market (good for you) but also you can share that information and it doubles up as the perfect marketing content.
Do research → share research → build brand — *chef’s kiss*
WTF do you mean?
So let’s make it real—you’ve got a notebook company. You make notebooks and sell them on the internet. Likely, you want to do some market research to see what other notebooks are on the market, to see how yours add up. Hey presto —organic content. Let’s say you want to figure out which ones work best with fountain pens —organic content. You think I’m kidding?
5 Notebooks Better Than Moleskine (Especially for Fountain Pens) — 410K views
World’s Best Notebook - Here's Why! - Traveler's Company Notebook — 488k views
A notebook to save you from infinite scrolling. — 3.9M views
What’s genius about this strategy is that you become an authority in the space by doing these reviews. People get to know you as the go-to person on notebooks [insert any other product] and at the same time, you *literally* do become an expert.
And it doesn’t stop there.
Founder-led marketing
So you’ve spent 6 months writing content or posting views about notebooks. Next, I would create a series on ‘the build’ (if you haven’t built the product yet). Document your visit to factories, your research process, and how you’re thinking about design, and involve your readers and viewers in the process. Offer a behind-the-scenes look.
And then we use a new department as fuel for the organic content —this time? Operations. So now you’ve started building the thing and getting orders, so now we shift into using that as a ‘behind-the-scenes’ content strategy:
I Tried Selling Digital Products for 90 Days — 1.1 M views
STUDIO VLOG #10 | PACKAGING ORDERS | Before, During, After Launching 800+ New XXL Scrunchies 🌈 - 1.1M views
STUDIO VLOG #017 // LAUNCH DAY - $260K IN 24 HOURS!!! - 712k views
And it actually never stops. This is a flywheel that has another flywheel—Everything you learn serves as marketing material. Once you’ve done your research, made the thing, and shown the operations, you can then reflect on what’s going well:
If I Started My Online Small Business in 2024, Here's What I'd Do | 5 things I wish I knew | E-commerce — 1.1M views
Organic content is a gold mine it doesn’t have to be complicated, you can use the things you are doing anyway (building your business) as the organic content for your business. Pretty neat.
Why it works…
Potential customers build trust with you — If you’re putting out content that genuinely helps people (some people want to know about the best notebooks in the world) then they’ll build a relationship with you because you gave them value.
People get to know you —Whilst you're building and learning, you create a relationship with these folks, they get to know who you are and what you’re about. Remember it’s a personality that sells stuff — people behind the brand.
People start to build an affinity with your story —Especially if you start with them from day 1. If there’s one thing people love it’s a story.
Giving value creates reciprocity — Give free value and you create reciprocity which means when it’s time to buy a thing, people are more likely to support you.
Validating the idea before you invest in it —It’ll save you a bunch of time. If you write a load of organic content about ‘the best fidget spinners’ and it flops, you know it’s probably best to find something else to sell. Think of organic content as your MVP.