The Topic Wheel

If you’re a growth hacker or small business entrepreneur, the name of the game is to make yourself look bigger than you actually are. It’s smooth sailing on top with lots of paddling underneath.

Even if you haven’t racked up a lot of successes yet, you want to project the image that you have deals in the pipeline and that it’s all on its way. It’s having a champagne taste on a beer budget.

What I’ve found is that Facebook is the ideal place for you to build this personal brand for yourself and your business. On Facebook you’re able to get the reach and be seen by anyone you want for a dollar a day.

My company has spent over a billion dollars on Facebook ads and we learned that even if you don’t have a massive brand or lots of credibility, people will respond to you if your content is compelling to them.

What we’ve pioneered is a concept we call the “Topic Wheel.”

It’s tied to your public figure personal page as well as your company brand page, your website, your email, LinkedIn, and even your chatbot account.

If you can tie all these assets together in the right way it gives off the appearance that you really have your bases covered.

This triggers a flux of inbound marketing. The best measure of how your growth hacking strategies are doing is by asking yourself “are people coming to you to get involved with your business?”

One of the things we do is highlight my relationship with one of my favorite clients, the world champion Golden State Warriors. We have them on our website, giving video testimonials in our ads, and blog articles about them on key marketing websites.

We do this in part because it’s authoritative, and our industry agrees.

If you want to get your brand out to high authority places you need to earn the trust of high authority people.
This needs to be done in a way that communicates the value you’re providing to them.

If you can make them look good to their peers, then you’re going to be their new best friends and secret weapon.
As you refine your unique value proposition to the market you can then systematize your process and sell your step-by-step guide to how you do it along with case studies of the work you’ve done.

You’d think this is giving away the recipe to your special sauce, but it actually has the opposite effect. Often times it’s further validation to your clients, competitors, and overall industry that you’re an in-demand specialist that they need to work with.

The Structure of the Topic Wheel

What I’m selling: On the inside of the wheel is your core content, the work that’s about you and only you.

My expertise: The next layer outside of that it’s the content you’ve created with other people.

Tangential audiences: From there you want to figure out how to position your content in a way that will influence the people tangential to your target audience.

This is how your authority positioning is transferred to your customers. I call it my inception model. If you can tie all these assets together in the right way it gives off the appearance that you really have your bases covered.

Action Steps

1. Get all your online and social media assets in alignment around the same message.

2. Create content about what you’re selling, and your core business.

3. Collaborate on content that conveys your expertise and partners with other authority figures in your industry.

4. Position your content to become influential with the communities that your core audience respects the most.

Result You Will Achieve

Content, collaboration, and leveraging authorities to trigger inbound marketing gains.

 

The Topic Wheel

 

With any piece of content, you need to have a Content Library organized around your Topic Wheel.

Most people create blogs or produce other content randomly with no connection to other messages. But if you want to be a true marketer, if you want to grow sales, everything that you do needs to tie into a concept which then ties into your overall framework.

If you take all your content, organize it by topic and connect those topics to the appropriate people of authority, now you have the ultimate targeting engine.

Within the structure of the Topic Wheel, you’re assembling authority. The Topic Wheel anchors the content pillar of authority.

A Topic Wheel has three concentric rings: a center (WHAT), a middle layer (HOW), and an outer layer (WHY).

 

 

The Topic Wheel goes from the outside (WHY) to the middle (HOW) to the center (WHAT). The WHAT is the product/service that is the focal point of the Topic Wheel.

WHY

The outer layer is the WHY, which consists of a series of “WHY” stories. It is helping people understand who you are. Not selling, not trying to teach, but telling one-minute stories about what you stand for. This helps people understand who you are and why you do what you do.

You also interview other people about their stories. Within the outer layer, you have a variety of stories that are from you and stories from other people. Then you cluster them into different topics.

You’re using the Topic Wheel to leverage the power of other people’s network. Because of the reciprocating relationship you have built with them, these people are glad to be a part of this.

HOW

The middle layer is your HOW, which is your topics that encompass the different “WHY” stories.
Topics are things related to the product but are not talking directly about the product. Topics are on the inside and the stories from others on the outside. 

You’re trying to systematically and intentionally put these pieces into a structure where the topics group any content that you have.

Then from the topics, you bring them into the product or service, the thing that you are selling.

Completing your Topic Wheel

Section 1: Set up your plumbing

Before you start the process of personal branding, you need to define what industry you want your brand to represent.

If you’re passionate about music, you might want to become the best Facebook marketer in the music industry. Or maybe you’re passionate about sports, and want to establish yourself as the top social analytics expert in the sports industry.

Once you figure out what you stand for, everything else can start to fall into place.

It’s the through line that drives the content you produce. This is critical to inbounding the clients you want to work with, because people hire people.

While it’s important to look good on paper, what’s even more important to potential clients and employers is whether or not they’ll like working with you.

People spend the majority of their days at work, so of course they want to hire someone personable whose goals, values, and personality aligns with theirs. The same goes for public figures.

If you’re a speaker that wants to talk at SportsGeek, you better demonstrate an interest in the automotive industry, right?

To sell more, or to achieve the goals you’ve selected, you must map your goals back to topics and your topics back to people who are authoritative in these topics. People connect with your “WHY” (outside ring), then want to understand HOW (middle ring), and only then care about the WHAT (the product/service you sell).

Our personal brands allow us to show this through the content that we create, which of course always ties back to our “WHY.” At Content Factory, our “WHY” is to educate and create jobs for students, which carries through in all that we do .

Once you’ve determined your WHY, create a one-minute video about it.