How To Craft Content Outlines

How To Pick Content Headlines

- Open up your Foundational Copy Document and Scroll To the Problem Areas
- Pick one of the most urgent problems.
- Craft a “how to {solve the problem} without {undesirable things}” headline - don’t reinvent
the wheel.
- Examples
- How to turn an 18 year old student into a closer capable of closing complex deals
to sophisticated buyers
- How to go from $0-$5M in 18 months, profitably, with a commission only sales
team without raising money.
- For B2B SaaS Founders: How to pack your calendar using outbound
prospecting and LinkedIn
- For B2B SaaS Founders: How to close $20k + deals in under 2 weeks
- How To Get Product Market Fit and Pocket Your First Few Million
- How To Find And Attract Top Sales People Without Paying Out The Nose For A
Recruiter
- How to make your SaaS business profitable in 3 months or less.
- Do some research by typing in the headline into Google and see what types of content
are resonating. Is there any sort of utility content specific to your niche? If so, can you go
deeper? Can you make a piece challenging it? Can you provide even more value or spin
up another angle?
- The best headlines come from speaking to your customers and understanding their pain
points.

Presenting Evidence That Your Claim In Your Headline Is True

- 1st hand data or your own customer examples
- 3rd party data or citing research
- Open up with a third piece of evidence.
- Just reference the quote or the pictures
- Examples
- Case Studies
- Charts
- Money Shot
- Press Release
- Quote in Article
Identifying Who This Is For And Building Rapport
- Be as specific as possible
- Your content will be hyper-effective if it is hyper-specific to one person. Be as
specific as possible. For example, if there are already content pieces on “how to
build a b2b saas sales team”, you can write something on “how to build a b2b
saas sales team for financial services saas”

- Encourage Dreams and Desires

- Call out the direction your prospect is going.
- This causes massive amount of rapport
- This information was collected in the foundational copywriting section earlier

- Identify Problems and Emotions

- Prospect will resonate with the problem being stated. These problems were
identified earlier in the Foundational Document using your interview questions.
- Ask “how does the prospect feel about this problem?”
- What are they frustrated with?
- What are they angry with?

- Justify Failures
- Removing the responsibility from the prospect is a powerful way to cause rapport.
People make mistakes, but they don’t need to be ridiculed. They make mistakes
often because they just don’t have the right information.
- If you tried to do {insert}, but it didn’t work, it’s not your fault it’s because {insert
reason}
- If you tried {insert}, but {insert what happened}, it’s not your fault it could be
because {insert reason}.

- Template you can use:

- “You are a {niche} who wants to {desire},but you are struggling with {problem}
and you are feeling {emotion}

- Allay Fears
- Allaying fears will cause a deep sense of rapport. It’s almost like a parental
comfort.
- If you are worried about {insert}, don’t be.
- If you are thinking {insert}, don’t worry.

- Confirm Suspicions
- If you can confirm a suspicion, you will cause a deep sense of rapport.
- If you suspected that {insert suspicion}, you were right.
 - Throw Rocks At Enemies
- If you have a common enemy with the prospect, then you will cause fall into
immediate rapport.
- If you hate {VC}, us too.
- If you are tired of all the {insert}, us too.
- If you are fed up with {insert}, same here.

Structure Your Core Concept

- The core concept is the one thing that your audience must believe to be true in order to
be influenced to take action. This can be thought of like the thesis.
- It can be the one thing that is blocking them. The missing link. The silver bullet. This is
the core point in the thesis.
- They must also believe that the best or only way of getting this silver bullet is with you.
- Template: You can {achieve result in headline}, if you {do activity}. The problem is that
this {activity} is {problem/poorly understood}. We are dedicated to helping {niche} solve
this problem. The following points will show you how.

Introduce Credibility
- Without credibility, the audience will not believe what you are saying.
- You can “borrow credibility” by referencing credible sources.
- You can establish your own credibility by citing your own achievements and track record.
- You can establish credibility by referencing social proof.

Structure Your Points, Evidence, Interpretation and Q and A In

Outline
It’s at this point when we dive deep into the content and the points you are making. This is the
meat of the content piece and this is where it can get long.

Map Out Your Content Points

The quality of the points are extremely important. We want to provide true insights to the
audience. These insights must provide utility.
- Map out the 3-6 points they must understand in order to be influenced by your product.
These can be thought of as your thesis steps.
- How to come up with your content points or thesis steps
- Look at your product features and ask yourself, why does that feature even exist?
What job was it trying to do? The answer to this question will uncover the thesis
step.
- Frame the thesis step in actionable form:
 - Step 1:
- Step 2:
- These points will often change as you are writing your outline. You will shape
them to fit your argument.

Explain the Point With Examples and Evidence

- Every time you make a point, you need to accompany it with evidence. Just like with any
argumentative essay.
- Types of Evidence:
- Your own research and findings
- Other people’s research and findings

- Try to be as data driven as possible. If you are citing something, make sure it is cited
properly. If you are referencing your own research, make sure the data is available to the
audience.
- Spend time doing research and coming up with your evidence. This can take you a few
hours to a few days. If you are conducting your own study, it could take you a few
months to gather the data. Hopefully you already have the data somewhere.
- You can add multiple instances of evidence to cement your point.

Explain Conclusions and Interpretations

- Draw your conclusions and get buy in for your point.
- Connect the dots for the audience.

Q and A and Action Items

- Now that the point is made, the prospect is wondering what to do about it and how it
could apply to them. It’s at this point when you can answer specific questions and offer
helpful advice or resources.
- There might be a few loose ends that you will need to tie up to get further buy in on your
point. Ask yourself, why would the prospect not believe me? What does the prospect
need to further understand in order for them to get help?
- If you are going to mention your product, you can do it subtly and respectfully. Offer
alternatives without your product.
- Examples: How can you do this now? You could use ___, you could hire ___, you can
use our tool, etc..

Repeating The Steps For Each Point

- Repeat this process for each point.
- You can have 2-10 points.
 - Don’t worry about the length - only mind the quality. If it needs to be long to effectively
communicate your point, then sure.
- As you are writing, you will likely find that you need to restructure things, move things
around, remove points, add points. Things get much more clear as you write things down
in your outline.

Summary
The summary is used to sum up the points and pull everything together for the audience.
It’s at this point that the audience thinks to themselves, “Hey, this was actually really useful.
Thanks!”

Remind the audience of the point of this information - to help them get to the goal.

Transition
- You just delivered a ton of value to the audience and it is not that you have the trust. A
real sales letter will direct the audience to a specific action. This is known as the “selling”
portion of the piece of content.
- If you do not have a product or case studies at this point, you can simply just direct the
audience to book a call with you or to open your next email.
- Some content piece will not have the “selling portion” on the backend. The “selling can
be done on a sales page or something similar, however, we recommend getting versed
in this because at least a few pieces of content will have this attached.

Option 1 and Option 2

- It’s at this point where the customer is enlightened on a subject and buys into your thesis
and points and is open to direction.
- The “option 1” “option 2” steps give them direction.
- In “Option 1” step, you will introduce alternative ways to get to the desired state and
point out the challenges or problems with them. Think about all the ways why option one
is not the best path for them. What are the implications? Short term and long term? What
could they run into?
- In “option 2” you will introduce “your path” or “your product” as a path to help them get to
the desired state.
- This is not a fancy sales trick or anything similar. It’s simply trying to effectively help the
customer.
Case Studies
- You just introduced your solution and the prospect is wondering if it is legitimate.
- You want to introduce the case studies and proof that your solution works.
- Your case studies should have been collected in section 1 in the Foundational
Document. You should already have your interviews and your content mapped out. In
this step, just reference them. In the sales letter and video sales letter, we will produce
them.

Benefits
- Now that you have introduced the proof that your solution works, we need to introduce
the benefits - reasons why they should buy.
- What are the reasons why they should by? What will happen? What are the outcomes?
What can they avoid?
- Map out the benefits in the outline. These should have been collected in the
Foundational Doc.

Features
- The prospect is sold on the benefits and wants to know exactly how you deliver the
transformation.
- The feature section will introduce each part of the offer that is relevant to solve this
problem addressed in the article.
- You can use the feature copy template:
- You can use “Feature” to get {result}. Instead of the {doing it the old way or a bad
way}, you can now {do it the easy way}. Do you see how {easy/simple, better,
cheaper} it is?
- Repeat this for each feature
- Don’t go too long. Only speak to the features that are relevant to the prospect.

Offer
- The offer can be a book a demo CTA or a product or free trial.
- Just explain exactly what is included and what to expect. This is called the “Stack”. You
want to stack all features as much as you can.
- If you are making a sale, then give the price at this point.
Call to Action
- Give the call to action. It can be a quiz or a trial or a book a call or a purchase to an
order form.

Bonus
- Include a bonus to drive urgency. This can be an extra support, extra templates, extra
storage. Something a little extra.
- Types Of Bonuses:
- Extra Features
- Extra Support
- Extra Product

Warning
- The warning is used to inject scarcity. The scarcity and urgency together will help move
the decision-making/buying along.
- Examples of warnings:
- Limited time
- Limited spots
- Limited quantity
- Limited bonuses

Q and A
- This is where most of the selling is done.
- It’s important that you work through this Q and A section and be as exhaustive as
possible. The buyers will appreciate it.
- These q and a questions would have been collected in the Foundational Doc. Simply spit
them out here.