The objective is to grow the ranking power, traffic draw, and lead generation ability of Sound’s website. We’ll do this by doing three things:

First, we align our strategy with yours. This means we take the time to understand your brand, your members, your values, and most importantly, your goals. This means our content is designed explicitly to achieve your specific marketing objectives, while maintaining your brand messaging.

Second, we research and create a series of articles designed to engage and educate readers, rank on search, and drive traffic to key landing pages. These articles not only establish and expand your brand authority, but they are designed to be dissected and reused across all channels.

Finally, we take this strategic content, and promote it out through your existing social channels. We can even develop new social channels that can impact traffic (aka pinterest). Finally we deploy a professional link-outreach campaign, to connect your new content with influencers in your space, as well as local community partners.

We have explained more about how we plan to achieve this below.

Please read through the information carefully and, if satisfied, you can contact JC to go over the formal service agreement.

When you are looking to hire someone like us, you aren’t really looking for a bunch of 2000 word blog articles to just exist on your website. You want growth. You want to onboard new members, have a strong presence in the community and see those numbers go up.

That’s where we come in. We know that creating quality, evergreen content is just the beginning and in order for that blog to be valuable to your brand there needs to be a reliable strategy to promote that content to the right people.

At IUC we developed a unique content amplification strategy that makes multi-channel marketing effective and seamless for your brand.

It operates in 5 phases:

1: Prevetting Content

2: Content Creation

3: Social Amplification

4: Link Outreach

5: Analysis & Change

No one wants to spend large sums of money and time on content that nobody reads. We don’t chase the next trendy content idea. Instead, we created a unique content vetting system. Our system looks for key questions your audience asks and then evaluates the volume, ranking challenge, and backlink opportunities.

This ensures that the content aligns with the needs of real people.

By the time we get to creation, our writers have stacks of research, reference points, keywords and summary scorecard which tells our team what aspects of the piece have the most opportunity to improve on current offerings and rank on the front page.

The Infinite Upcycle only works if it is built around great content. When we’ve figured out what content is worth creating, it’s time to create something twice as good as what’s out there. This is why all of our writing staff are US English speaking natives. Then we select for writers with at least 100 financial articles in their portfolio. This reduces mistakes and improves the clarity of the writing.

But it doesn’t stop there

Our in-house design team will work within your brand guidelines to develop a visual theme that will remain consistent across all of your content. These articles use premium images sources or your own images if that’s part of your brand theme.

Then, creatives are designed to be easily and quickly resized and distributed with custom copy across all your favorite social media networks in addition to your blog.

Just creating great content is not enough. You need to amplify it by creating related content that you can share across the web on different platforms and mediums. We do this by re-purposing images, subtopics, quotes, audios, and videos related to your main content and share them consistently across the breadth of your social media presence.

We employ this method because we have found consistent advantages to multi-channel promotion when it comes to generating traffic. Using our amplified content and blasting it – in a methodical way – to all the social media channels help you stay engaged with your audience and protects you in the event that one of the traffic channels stops working in the future.

Additionally, social amplification has the added benefit of making it easier to get your audience engaged with the content. Seeing an article promoted 30 or 40 different ways increases exposure and curiosity which increases clicks. It’s as simple as that.

Link building is the warehouse work of online marketing. It’s repetitive, boring, causes way too much carpal tunnel, but it’s a vital and necessary part of delivering on your marketing goals.

The onboarding process provides a list of people who are already linking to content like yours that we can reach out to. Unsurprisingly, it’s not all that hard to get people to link to exceptional content. In addition, all of the social media and related content we created in Phase 3, creates additional buzz that legitimizes the work and increases the odds of link building outreach success.

Link building is still a vital key to SEO. Every quality backlink helps your site rank in Google and drives interested and relevant visitors back to your content for free.

This phase of the Infinite Upcycle has a secondary benefit. Many of the people we reach out to are looking for new stories, ideas and people to share with their own audiences. They are frequently attracted to the type of community-centric initiatives embraced by credit unions.

As a result, our efforts often result in guest posting opportunities, news interviews, podcast invitations, and other opportunities that we professionally hand-off to you.

Track, track, and track again. The key to the success of the IUC is tracking each round to see what worked, what didn’t, and then make it better. We track each round to see which bits of content worked on which channel (social media, email outreach, etc.)

Once we find one that works, we double down on it!

This is where the Infinite becomes an Upcycle. By analyzing our results we have the opportunity to get better and better by exploiting channels that work well, and avoiding over investment in ideas, channels and techniques that don’t.

We also provide a full reporting system for you. We are committed to creating and maintaining reporting systems that help us stay transparent, accountable, and, most importantly, collaborative with you.

Step 1) Brand Onboarding (Day 1-10)

We send over a brand survey and ask your team for any brand guidelines, marketing personas, and any other brand or strategic marketing information you are willing to share. Afterwards we meet to discuss your brand and make sure we are on the right track.

Step 2) Technical Onboarding (Day 1-21)

Our technical team will be sending you a series of emails that help us set up, or integrate, our systems with yours. This is primarily centered around SEO, analytics, social media scheduling and website access.

Step 3) Content Plan Presentation (Day 30)

With the information we gained from Brand Onboarding and other strategic resources, we spent much of the first month researching viable article topics that can attract links, engage readers, and compete for serp rankings. We will present you these ideas, along with a series of brand visual templates for your approval.

Step 4) Cycle Production (Day 30-60)

Now that we’ve locked in your article selection, we begin with production in earnest. Since creative work inevitably requires revision to align with local audiences, we start our production phase by batch producing your first 90 days of content. We will be working around the clock for the next 30-45 days to develop an approved content buffer that ensures that quality content is never competing with a deadline.

Step 5) Cycle Publishing (4 weeks per month going forward)

At this stage we are into the publishing, distribution and link building work that drives results. We will set a regular time to meet with you and discuss results as they come in.

Step 6) Analysis

Publishing evergreen content is an authority building game. Not every article will be a viral hit, but producing well designed, researched and linked content will increase your ranking, traffic and lead generation. We will deliver quarterly reports on progress to show how your content is supporting your goals.

Step 7) Seamless Redeployment

Most of our clients choose to continue with us after their first year because the results are worth the cost. If this is you, then we will start researching new topics (that align with your new goals) early so that you never have a gap in publishing content. And as any marketer will tell you, publishing consistency is key activity in building brand authority.

Strategy

Our pricing is designed for ease of use. A simple monthly subscription to develop, publish and promote evergreen content. Our guarantee makes sure that if it doesn’t work then we will fix or re-write it free. Yes, really.

Our reason for this is two-fold:

1. We focus on Credit Unions. Exclusively. CU’s are our community of choice. We believe in the need, we believe in the method, and we believe that more people need banking that works for them. So we are willing to do whatever it takes to become the preferred partner for our chosen community, and we are very excited about helping you.

2. We grab the low hanging fruit available first. Articles that are easier to rank for drive traffic faster. This means goals are met sooner and ROIs and realised quickly as possible.

The Cost

Below you can find the monthly cost of our cycle services for a Mid Tier plan with 4 cycles per month. Per our previous discussion, I met with the writing and design teams to discuss how we could produce outstanding content with a smaller word count.

Our unanimous agreement was that YES we can achieve outstanding evergreen content with word counts as low as 1200 words per article (a mere 4 mins per read). And while the differences in cost would not be significant, we live for the chance to learn and grow and experiment.

So we have included a 10% discount for the first year of services to Sound CU, including onboarding.

Onboarding is paid upon signing of your service agreement and allows us to get straight analyzing your strategic goals and researching your content (in-line with aspects outlined in the Process and Timelines page).

Total Due at signing (after 10% discount): $3,600

Total due per month (after 10% discount): $5,669

Total annual savings: $7,960

If you would like to join us and become a client then we’d be delighted to have you.

Next steps:

1. Click the Get Started button at the bottom left corner to view your custom service agreement. Read the agreement, sign and pay for onboarding.

2. We’ll arrange the initial interview where we’ll gather all the details we need.

3. We’ll be in touch with your invoice details and will set up billing

We’re ready to go, are you…?