The Vacuum Formula

The ‘Vacuum’ Formula: How to guarantee at least 120 people read your first blog post

I’ll admit it, I talk to myself a lot. Not verbally but I have mental conversations all the time.
This is one that I had for years:
Optimistic Me: “Bryan, you should start a blog”
Pessimistic Me: “I know, but…”
Optimistic Me: “No ‘BUTS’ just do it”
Pessimistic Me: ”But what if no one reads it?” That conversation went on for 5 years before finally starting this site. If only…

If I would have started then, I’d be light years ahead of where I am now. Instead of 1,300 email subscribers it would have over 50,000. Instead of 10,000 monthly readers, it would have well over 100,000. Instead of… well you get the point.

After working with over 1,000 entrepreneurs since publishing ”The Bootstrapper’s Guide to Explainer VIdeo’s” I’ve found that I’m not alone. This is a question that tons of people struggle with.
“What if no one comes?”
“What if I put all of this time, effort and energy and no one reads my blog?”
Today I’m going to show you exactly how to guarantee 120 people read your first blog post.
It’s worked for me on multiple blogs, in 3 different industries and is grounded in a principle that goes back 100 years.

Here is the formula:

Short Version

People want to know more about what they are interested in. Find people that are interested in what you are talking about, and tell them about you. That is exactly what door-to-door salesman have done for 100 years.

Example: If you own a house, you probably have carpet. If you have carpet, you need to clean your carpet. Thus, for 100 years Kirby has been going door to door selling vacuums to people.

How do you do this for your blog?

How To

1..) Write your article. There are many ways to do this, I’m going to share what I have found to work across multiple industries and varying topics. Make your first article a ‘How-To” style article. Posts in 1500 word range work very well. Use screenshots and explain every detail of the process. Be as helpful and thorough as you possibly can.

Example: I am helping a client launch a web app for Crossfit gym owners. One of the major focal points is inbound marketing via a blog. My main tasks are to build out the blog, write content, grow traffic and ultimately get customers to the app.

Since our product is used by Crossfit gym owners the goal of our blog is to be THE online resource for Crossfit gym owners.

We’ve mapped out a content strategy that starts with a 7 post series of how to do internet marketing for Crossfit gyms

Specific. Targeted. How-to.

2..) Find Similar Articles

Now your article is written. Your work is just starting. It’s time to make sure people actually know about it. To do that, first find other articles that have been written about your topic. Next, write a list of 5 keywords and phrases that describe your post.

Example: This article you are reading is about growing your blog via ‘targeted outbound email marketing.’ Here are a few keywords I drummed up:

■ email marketing
■ inbound marketing
■ how to start a blog
■ how to get traffic to my blog
■ outbound marketing

Now head over to Buzzsumo.com to perform a search for the keywords you brainstormed. This will produce a list of the most popular and shared articles with those keywords.

3..) Make a list of people that shared it

Now you’ve written an article and have found similar articles written by other people. Next you need to let everyone that shared the other articles know about yours.

To do that we’ll use a two step process. Step 1: Make a list of everyone that shared this article on Twitter Buzzsumo makes this part easy. Just click on “View Shares” and export the list into a XLS

Step 2: Find the email address for each person

Finding someone’s email address usually isn’t too hard. Here are a few ways to do that:

i. Check their Twitter bio
ii. Use Rapportive and guess popular email syntax

4..) Tell them about your article

Now all that is left is to email each person on your list.
You can either outsource this or do it yourself.
If you chose to do this yourself it will take time. It’s tedious work, so suck it up and do it. Don’t try to automate it. If you do, your email account will either be banned or you will be blacklisted and your emails will be auto spam filtered. Neither of those are good.
Here is the template I use:

Hi [NAME],
My name is Bryan.

I follow you on Twitter and noticed that you [ACTION] one of my favorite articles [ARTICLETITLE.]
That is such a great post. And it’s a great blog.
I was hearing from my readers that they wanted something more in-depth about the topic so I went ahead and created this post: [URLOFDESTINATION]
If you have time I’d love for you to check it out.

Thanks!

Here are a few more tips:

Tip #1: Send every email individually. I have base template I use for each email, however each email is customized for that individual.
Tip #2: Track your emails. I use Bananatag.com to track each email I send. This allows you to determine your ROI at the end of each campaign.

Tip #3: Track your other data as well:

■ How many emails I sent
■ How many were opened
■ How many were sent
■ Inbound referral traffic (via Google Analytics)

A few things NOT to do:

• Do NOT CC or BCC your entire list
• Do NOT send everyone the exact same email
• Do NOT use Mailchimp or Aweber to send the emails

Results

I have used this formulas 12 times. You can usually expect 2-5% of the people you email to share your content. I have seen traffic surges of 200 – 1000 veiws from sending out 100 emails.

Your results will obviously depend on the quality of your emails, the relevancy of the people you are emailing and the quality of your content.

However, if you contact 200+ people who care about what you are writing about your traffic will increase and your first 120 visitors will be in the bag.

Here is a tweet I received from a recent ‘Vacuum’ formula campaign: