The Magic Ratio of Selling and Content for Your Articles

 

What’s the ideal mix between selling in your content and giving value?

Unfortunately, there isn’t a fixed answer. However, there are some general guidelines you can follow.

It all depends on the audience you’re trying to appeal to.

Audience Type 1 – Doesn’t Know You or Has Low Trust

Think of including 90% content with only 10% selling.

Keep in mind, though, that the 10% needs very soft calls to action. 

They don’t know you. The last thing they want to hear is a hard sales pitch.

Audience Type 2 – A Little Familiarity

With these people, you can start to shift that distribution.

Maybe you could go with 70% useful content and 30% selling.

Or if you’re feeling super-confident, you could try going 50/50.

Audience Type 3 – A Lot of Familiarity/Trust

Lastly, the final audience type is very deep into the funnel. 

This is your golden ticket to go all pitch with little to no content.

There’s one exception to these guidelines though.

If you have a breakthrough platform or technology driven by something that’s very newsworthy, the rules change. 

You can lead with selling this news regardless of whether people know you or not. In fact, the news could be about your breakthrough technology. 

So in that case it’s ALL selling to people that don’t know you or trust you!