Have you ever been reading a blog post or listening to a podcast and they invite you to come to their website and download a template or a freebie or a checklist that helps you take the training deeper and helps you actually implement what they are being talked about and helps you kind of retain the knowledge a little bit?

In the industry, we call that a content upgrade.

And to me, Amy Porterfield is the queen of content upgrades. She does these so well. They’re super in-depth and awesome – I download all of them every time her podcast offers one!

But if you’re just a team of one or two, it can be really hard and really overwhelming to create one for every single one of your blog posts and live up to Amy’s standards.

So, I wanted to share with you a little “hack” you can use for your content upgrades, that creates a lot less effort for you, and two, and also lets you test to see if content upgrades even work or resonate for your audience and your content.

Start Simplifying By Choosing Your Content Themes

My first tip for hacking content upgrades is that you need to break down your content into three to five core buckets or themes that you’re going to talk about on your blog or on your podcast, or whichever medium you choose.

A few weeks ago, I shared my content planning strategy for 2018, and this was one thing I talked about there, too, is that you need to have these themes, these kind of recurring topics that you’re going to cover on your blog.

For example, if you’re a health coach, you might have movement and food and maybe mindset, and those are kind of your buckets. If you’re a life coach, maybe you talk about self-care, relationships, time and boundaries. Those might be your three topics. Find the core pieces that you come back to again and again, because those are going to be really important in order for you to hack your content upgrades.

Create 3-5 Core Content Upgrades To Match Your Themes

Once you have your buckets or your themes, now you just need to create one content upgrade for each of those themes. Super easy, right? You might three, you might have four, you might have five, but you don’t need to create 52. You just need to come up with the three to five really key core opt-ins that you can offer.

Now why is this a simple and easy hack? If you are talking about related topics under these four buckets, any of these opt-ins will work.

For example, I was saying if you are a health coach, that one of your buckets could be movement. Maybe you have a movement core opt-in that is like the five movements you can do at home to keep yourself busy when you have a day job, or whatever the case might be. That’s a really long-worded title. But you get the point. That would go on any article that has movement relevance. Any time you’re mentioning the importance of movement, any time you’re mentioning the topic of the blog post falls under that theme, that’s when you would use that opt-in.

In another example, let’s say you are a graphic designer and one of your themes is colors or color schemes or how to come up with your color palette. You could have a how to choose your perfect color palette core opt-in that works with anything. Even if you’re talking about the five colors that are hot this spring, the core upgrade of here’s your five colors or how to determine your colors would work. Even if you were talking about three mistakes people make with their colors, the core opt-in of how to find your own color scheme works.

Because you have these themes, you can easily create these three to five core content upgrades that would work for any post, as long as they fell under those same themes or buckets.

Test Before You Invest

Now that you have your themes and your core content upgrades, you can put them into place throughout your blog.

I would recommend trying these core ones for anywhere from one to three months to judge their performance. Before you decide you want to go all in and create 52 brand new from scratch opt-ins, you need to see if they are even working for you.

So try it for a month with these core groups of content upgrades or try it for a couple of months and see, are people actually opting in? Is this is helping me grow my list? Are people opening it once they opt in? Is it even helping to boost traffic or getting it shared on social media?

See if these are even working for you before you decide if you want to invest.

Because they don’t work for every audience, and they certainly don’t work for every type of person, and you may not even enjoy creating it before, right? So you certainly don’t want to commit. But this is a really smart, easy way for you to kind of dip your toe into content upgrades right now and see if there’s a way to make them work for you and your business in a really smart way.

And like I said, content upgrades are a really great way to train your list to click and look for resources from you and help build that know, like, and trust factor. I hope this content was helpful for you and that you will try to hack your own content upgrades in the next couple of weeks, and if that is something you would like to do, I did create a brand new opt-in just for this video for you.

You can download it below, and it will tell you my content upgrade checklist. This is all the things I make sure that my content upgrade includes, how I format it, how I connect it to MailChimp, how you can connect it to any of your service providers, and make sure that it gets downloaded.

Your Turn

If you have any questions about content upgrades or how you can kind of hack this strategy or what your buckets would be, leave them in the comments below and I will be sure to get back to you. Until next week, I’ll be back with another Stress-Free Launch tip. Hope you have a great one.