In a way, if you join the Digital Marketing Empire, you will be working on your own business. But, at the same time, you will work closely and together with other team members, most importantly your mentor at first, and later, maybe even other team members.
To work efficiently as a team and achieve a productive workflow, we will rely on several online services and tools. This guide covers all of them, explains exactly how you will use them, which also explains how the typical workflow for creating and publishing content will look like.
- Blogging (WordPress)
- Topic and Keyword Lists (Google Sheets)
- Data (Google Sheets)
- Videos (Youtube)
- Link Building (HARO, Quora, Reddit, Forums, Skyscraper, AHrefs)
- Social Media (Blog2Social, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, others)
- Email Marketing
- Display Ads (Ezoic)
- Affiliate Links (Affiliate Partners, Thirsty Affiliates)
- Payments (Payoneer)
- Analytics and Insights (Google Analytics, Youtube Analytics)
- Team Communication (Slack, Zoom, Skype)
- Education and Resources
Blogging (WordPress)
When you join the Digital Marketing Empire and after you choose your main topic, you will be assigned an account in the WordPress blog for your topic.
You will be assigned a Contributor role. In WordPress, this means that you will be able to edit the posts that are assigned to you.
You will receive an email in your inbox, and you should change your password right after creating your account.
Remember, you will not have to start the blog posts from scratch – a lot of the infrastructure will be ready for you, and you will only have to fill in the blanks, so to speak. So, once you choose the keyword you will write about, you will be given access to the already started post for that keyword, and you can start writing.
Once you are done with your writing and editing, you will let your mentor know. You will schedule a time when to go over the editing and fixing process, and after that is done, the mentor will publish your article.
As you progress in your Digital Marketing Empire levels, you will be given more responsibilities and autonomy, and that might involve upgrading your WordPress role to Author at some point, and maybe even Editor for those of you that continue to work closely with us.
Topic and Keyword Lists (Google Sheets)
The lists of topics will be just short lists of all the topics we’re covering on all of our active blogs and channels, along with some additional information about their expected profitability, projected interest and growth, and some other information. You and all of the other team members are encouraged to have one topic you will be an expert in, and several other ones where you will still be able to produce great content.
The lists of keywords will be long lists with many keywords, and they will include information like the monthly search volume for that keyword, possibly the level of competition you can expect, and, most importantly, the team member to which the keyword is assigned.
For your first blog posts, you will pick a batch of 10 keywords. Those will be assigned to you, and you will be the only person that can work on those keywords in the entire Digital Marketing Empire team. If you fail to produce a content piece about a keyword for a certain time, that keyword will be assigned to someone else.
You will have read-only access to both the topic and the keyword lists.
See the guide on how to pick the best topics and keywords in the Digital Marketing Empire for more.
Data (Google Sheets)
Depending on the topic, we will have detailed spreadsheets with data about the products and services we are writing about. We will do this so that we all follow a unified source of truth and don’t provide conflicting information in cases where two or more team members write about the same topic.
Videos (Youtube)
At this point, the Digital Marketing Empire will be focused on blogging first, but Youtube videos will be added to the process as soon as possible.
When the processes for Youtube publishing are prepared, this section will be updated with the details.
Link Building (HARO, Quora, Reddit, Forums, Skyscraper, AHrefs)
Link building will be an important part of our strategy. We will still focus primarily on content, but we will have a short, effective link building process in place that brings very solid results with a minimal time commitment.
We will use HARO for link building, but new and inexperienced bloggers will not be involved in that process, at least not in the beginning.
It is strongly recommended for you to have accounts on Quora, Reddit, and as many relevant forums on the topic as possible. You will manage these accounts entirely by yourself.
As soon as your content piece is published, you will follow the promotion guidelines and try to either create a post with a link back to your content piece, or respond to someone else’s post or question with a comment containing the link to your content piece. Our aim will never be to spam or to force our content in these networks, merely to provide pointers to helpful resources when we can.
Finally, we will also use the Skyscraper technique for link building as well. As soon as your content piece is published, you will follow the promotion guidelines for this technique as well, and you will use AHrefs and try to identify other blogs that might want to link back to your newly published content piece. You will not need an AHrefs account for this, you will only have to send an email from your email account, or fill out a contact form.
Social media will not be a crucial part of the Digital Marketing Empire efforts, but we will still post frequently on various networks to maximize the exposure of our brands, gain some quick links, and see if we can foster some communities.
Our social media strategy will consist of low-effort content, which will usually be posting links from the content we publish on the same day we publish it, along with some brief text description, often an excerpt from the blog post itself.
Once your content piece is published, your mentor will share it on all of the social media channels associated with the blog you’re working on.
Keep in mind that while you will be the author of your posts, the author specified on the blog posts themselves may sometimes be a different person. Usually, the author will be the main topic expert, which may not be you at times. Still, when it comes to collecting the profits generated by your content pieces, you will be the author, and you will get the profits you are entitled to.
You are encouraged to share your published content piece on your personal social media accounts as well, or, at least share the social media post from the accounts associated with the blog. Preferably, do both, as that’s an easy way to promote your content quickly.
We will use a WordPress plugin called Blog2Social to share the content easily. If you share the content on your own social media accounts as well, you will have the option to use Blog2Social and share the content quickly and easily.
Email Marketing
Our blogs and channels will have mechanisms for collecting the email addresses of our audience to further increase our traffic and revenue.
You will have the option to send email campaigns to the email list for the blog you work on. In the beginning, you will simply reach out to me or your mentor with the prepared contents of the email you wish to send, and we will check the email and send it for you. Later, this process might evolve and you may get an account with the email service we will be using so that you can send your own email campaigns.
Display Ads (Ezoic)
All of the blogs in the Digital Marketing Empire will display advertising. That will be one of our primary sources of income.
We will work with Ezoic primarily, and possibly other networks later.
Ezoic has a feature where it allows blog posts to be assigned an author, and that’s exactly how we will work. You will be assigned as the author for your blog posts in Ezoic, and you will have an easy and consolidated view of your performance.
Keep in mind that Ezoic makes the payments for one month at the end of the next month. So, the profits that your content generates for the month of October, for example, will be paid out at the end of November.
Each week, we will have a video call, where I will share my screen with you and show you the performance of your blog posts and how much revenue they’ve generated with Ezoic.
Affiliate Links (Affiliate Partners, Thirsty Affiliates)
Besides displaying ads, our blogs and channels will earn money through affiliate marketing as well.
For simpler management, we will use a single account for every affiliate partner we work with. To track your performance, you will have your own unique ID assigned within the accounts of all of the affiliate partners. You will be entitled to your share of the profits for every commission that has been generated by your links.
Further, we will also use a WordPress plugin called Thirsty Affiliates, which makes the management of affiliate links easier. You may have your own unique ID assigned within the Thirsty Affiliates framework as well, which will be used to further track the clicks that your links generate (although this will likely not be the case at the beginning, and we will use the revenue percentages from the display ads networks to calculate the profits).
Affiliate partners and merchants have different payout schedules and routines. A lot of them make the payments for one month at the end of the next month, like for example the profits for October are paid out at the end of November. There are some exceptions here, most notably Amazon, which take even longer to complete the payments, and in the case of Amazon, the profits generated from commissions for October will be paid out at the end of December.
Same as with the display ads, each week we will have a brief video call, where I will share my screen with you and show you the performance of your links, both in the portals of the affiliate partners, and the Thirsty Affiliates dashboard, and we will calculate your share of the profits.
Payments (Payoneer)
Payments will be made through Payoneer, and possibly through PayPal in some cases.
If you don’t have a Payoneer account, you should try to create one (signing up to Payoneer with this link will earn us both $25 when you earn your first $1000, so make sure to use it).
We will try our best to add additional payment methods later.
Analytics and Insights (Google Analytics, Youtube Analytics)
We will track the performance of our blogs using Google Analytics, and the performance of our channels using Youtube Analytics.
Each week, we will have a video meeting where I will share my screen with you and show you how your content performs and how much traffic it generates. We may also go through some additional research and try and identify ways you might improve some skills so that you improve your most important metrics.
Team Communication (Slack, Zoom, Skype)
We will use Slack for quick team communication and chatting. You will be invited there once you join.
For the training and mentoring process, as well as the weekly insights and reports, and any other communication that requires a call or a video meeting, we will use either Zoom or Skype.
Education and Resources
All of the training materials will be available at all times to you, both in text form on the blog here, and in video form on Youtube. Go over them often in the beginning, but also keep an eye on them at all times for updates.
Guidelines and Processes
Besides the learning materials, you will also have access to the guidelines and processes for content creation and promotion.
You will likely find these extremely useful, as they will be very condensed, very practical, very actionable lists of steps that will almost guide you through the content creation and promotion processes effortlessly. As long as you learn the material and put in some effort in practicing it, the guidelines should be of tremendous value to you, as they will practically do the work for you, in a way.
After some time simply following the guidelines, you will find that creating high-quality content becomes almost effortless, and you will perform it at a high level with minimal use of your mental resources.