7 Ways to Nail the Skyscraper Technique | Ep. #92

Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors Neil Patel and Eric Siu.

Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm your host Eric Siu.

And I'm Neil Patel.

And today we're gonna talk about 7 ways to nail the skyscraper method. So I'm going to talk about the Skyscraper Method really quick. This is a term that was coined by our friend Brian Dean, also known as Backlinko. And the idea behind a skyscraper at a very high level is that, you know, you're looking to create content that is 10x better than, you know, the first result. So let's say for example, you are trying to talk about, well, search engine optimization, for example. And then you Google search engine optimization, you take a look at the first 3 results. You know, what really stands out about them? What can you do that's 10x better to make your version the canonical version? So that's basically what the Skyscraper Method is. Neil, I'll let you start it off with number 1.

The first one is, so with the Skyscraper Technique, most people just think that they can add more content, make it more thorough. That's not enough. The content that you place in there has to be better. And what I mean better, more advanced and more detailed, right? Not necessarily in pure length, but more advanced in which when people read it, they're just like, oh wow, I'm getting a ton of value. So an example of a Skyscraper Technique post could be 100 SEO Tools That You Have to Check Out, right? Or something like that. Assume, let's say someone wrote an article previously on 50 SEO Tools That You Have to Check Out, and the title sucks, but just assume it's a good title, and now you're adding 50 more ways. Well, just listing another 100 ways isn't enough. Theirs could just have been covering each tool, where you don't want to just cover each tool. You may want to include reviews on what most people think, right? You may also want to end up putting in there, hey, this tool works really good for ecommerce sites and it works really well for blogs, but it doesn't work well for lead generation sites. I'm just making up an example, but going that much more in-depth and that much more advanced, like you can even go into a tool and be like, here's the top 3 ways to use the tool and breaking down the specific actions you would take in the tool to start getting results from it. That's something that people would be like, oh wow, this post is way better than the original. It has way more value to offer.

And the second thing is, this is actually building on what Neil just said. Actually, Neil and I just had a conversation the other day about what, you know, how long-form content really, really stands out. And one thing is, you know, having unique data. So if you actually look for one of Backlinko's posts on how he analyzed 1 million search results, he has a lot of different images in there that shows different data points, right? And it's not easy to analyze a million search results, right? That's unique data, and, you know, he's sharing it with everyone. And when you do something like that, that tends to get a lot of links. So, you know, whether you have something unique, you know, you maybe you've done some type of report, something really in-depth, think about the things that you can share that are unique, that nobody else can just kind of pull out of thin air, and then you'll be ahead of the pack.

Another thing you want to do is make your content really skimmable. So when people do thorough pieces of content that are long, and have many different points in them, they don't make it where the content is skimmable. And an example of this is people just think putting headings in each section is good enough. But if you break down your content and you say, hey, what kind of business type are you? And are you a beginner? Are you an intermediate? Are you an advanced person? Whatever it may be, slice and dice it however you want. So then that way when people are reading your blog posts, they can be like, oh, I'm trying to grow my traffic. And of course, this mainly works for marketing-related articles, but you can do this for any industry. Let's say it's marketing. I can say, hey, I'm a newbie marketer and I have an ecommerce website, and then I'll break all the content down into what's relevant for you. Because if your Skyscraper Technique is about SEO tools, well, not every single SEO tool works for each and every single business type out there. Same thing if your article is about dog food and it's the most thorough dog food article out there. You can just ask people, my dog weighs on average, and it's this type of dog. And then you can end up showing the dog food that's best for that type of dog, right? Or let's say even if they say their dog is 12 years old versus a puppy, I'm assuming that there's probably dog food. I don't have an animal, but I'm assuming that there's probably dog food for older animals that wouldn't be relevant for a puppy, let's say. But by doing that, the article then becomes way more powerful due to the fact that A user is now able to adjust it so that the information is really tailored to them.

One of the key tenets of the Skyscraper Technique, and, you know, Brian Dean having a background in SEO, it's really about, you know, how do you get more traffic ultimately, and a big portion of that is organic traffic, right? So number 4 is really about promotion. How are you going to go about promoting the new masterpiece that you've produced? So the easy way, you know, we've talked about this tool a lot, is using a tool like BuzzSumo. And going out there looking for the top results and looking at, you know, the different types of pages that have linked to that, or different people that have linked to that specific result, right?

This is—

you can create an outreach list and you'll have an Excel sheet of, you know, people that have tweeted this, people that have also specific websites that have mentioned it as well. And you can use a tool like Email Hunter, that's emailhunter.co, and then, you know, find those people or those webmasters, whoever it is exactly that have shared that piece of content, and and then create an outreach type of campaign. And also, you know, don't forget about promoting to your email list, your social channels as well. And, you know, in some cases, if your piece is really that good, you can even take it to— believe it or not, you can go to Reddit. And then, you know, you obviously can't be too self-promotional, but I've seen pieces that have done really, really well on Reddit, you know, where people are actually just contributing to the conversation and it just kind of blows up from there. So food for thought there. You have to definitely Think about different ways you could go about promoting it. It's not just you create it and they're going to come. I remember Derek Halpern from the Growth Everywhere podcast. You know, he talks about 20% of the time in the beginning, you're going to be spending it on creation. The other 80% is going to be promotion.

When you're dealing with a blog post that's really in-depth, it doesn't matter how amazing of a post that you write. If your headline sucks, no one's going to read it. 8 out of 10 people will read a headline. Only 2 out of 10 people will read the rest of the post. That just shows that most blogs are losing people with their headline. So go out there, Google copy blogger headline formula, or go to Portent and look up their title generator, right? That's a tool. Type in keywords within your space and look to see what type of attractive title you can end up creating. You can also go to BuzzSumo.com, type in keywords, and you'll see which titles or headlines within your space have gotten the most social shares. Usually if a post got a ton of social shares, that means people love the content. The point I'm trying to make is focus on crafting a really amazing headline. And you can do this by just doing quick research. It doesn't take too long, maybe like 5, 10 minutes. And then once you have some headline ideas, it's not just about A/B testing them because you don't want to just come up with 10, 20 headlines and just A/B test them all. It's about testing the best ones. And a guy named John Morrow used to do this. He would go to like a bar in the place that he lived. And he would just throw around his headlines to people who were there drinking. And if you can get the attention of someone who's drunk or buzzed, the chances are you have something that's really intriguing.

Great. And number 6 is making use of content upgrades. And this is something that Backlinko talks about as well. I mean, if you're going to spend, you know, we're assuming a couple hundred or thousands of dollars on a piece of content, you're going to spend weeks, you know, creating this masterpiece. Well, the idea is if you have a content upgrade, this is also known as a lead magnet, people can opt into a resource that is very closely related to whatever you did. So for example, if you have a search engine optimization kind of skyscraper post, well then you might have something on, here's an SEO checklist, like a companion checklist to the post. And when you do something like that, you're able to drive your conversion rates as high as, in some cases I've seen, you know, some of our lead magnets or content upgrades convert at 15 to 20%. So that's something you want to think about because, you know, traffic's important, but, you know, collecting emails are likely important for your business as well.

I've also done a lot of analysis and testing on these long-form blog posts. And I use Crazy Egg, right, which is one of my software companies. And we're looking to see how much of the content do people actually read. We're dissecting the data from different traffic sources, time of day, regions, et cetera, right? We're slicing and dicing it from all different segments. And what we quickly learned was what really helped increase people reading content was a few things. One, the blog posts that wrote in a conversational tone, you and I, right, using those 2 words, helped cause more engagement. The ones who also ask questions throughout their content also got more engagement, like comments, people reading, people scrolling further down. And then the other thing that we saw was images helped a lot, but not images that just took up the whole screen where people had to keep scrolling, but small images that help bring across the main points and ideally custom-made images that were related to the article versus stock photography. We saw custom-made images helping quite a bit more. And last but not least, the paragraphs. So we found that paragraphs that were 3 to 6 lines, no more than that, tend to create more engagement where people would scroll and keep reading longer and stay on the, the time on site was way better than people who had paragraphs that were like 8 to 10 or 12 lines. 'Cause it was just too overwhelming for people.

Alright, that's it for this episode of Marketing School. As always, let us know what your feedback is, and if you have any other ideas, please email us or tweet at us. We're always looking for new ideas. See you tomorrow.

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