7-step framework: Turn 1 content idea into 250+ LinkedIn posts and never run out of ideas.
Hey - it’s Alex!
Welcome to Startup Business Tips, a bi-weekly newsletter, where I share with you 3 actionable growth tactics that will help you quickly grow your SaaS business from €0 to €1 million ARR 🚀.
Today we cover:
1️⃣ 7-step framework: How to turn 1 content idea into 250+ content pieces
2️⃣ How to increase your ARPA by decreasing value metric thresholds in your pricing plans
3️⃣ The 4 ways to ‘steal’ your competitors’ followers on Linkedin
👉 Bonus tip by Jonathan Reimer (CEO & Co-Founder of crowd.dev)
👉 Bonus material (software, content, news) - this time 75% off Black Friday special for 90+ growth tactics (with discount code ‘BLACKFRIDAYSAAS’)
A quick word from our sponsor: dofollow.com
📢 Turn Your B2B SaaS Website Into a Lead Generation Machine.
Imagine if your website could attract more potential customers effortlessly. That's exactly what dofollow.com does for your business. Get in front of more customers by having the world’s most powerful high-quality backlinks to your business each month from sites like HubSpot, BigCommerce, Business Insider, Canva, Cloudways & 100s more. Only Pay-for-Performance. No hidden fees.
Want to reach 2100+ early-stage SaaS founders/leaders? Sponsor the next email.
1. How to turn 1 content idea into 250+ content pieces
You want to create content for LinkedIn, but after a few posts, you are running out of ideas?
This is how most founders I’ve worked with felt.
The good thing: There is a solution. You need to follow a clear framework, a process. So you will never run out of content ideas.
Here is the framework I follow to turn 1 content idea into 50+👇
Step 1: Define 3-4 content pillar topics
Those are the main topics you want to talk about. Topics your ideal customers care about.
If you are early-stage, select topics that are rather BOFU (bottom of the funnel) topics.
Step 2: Write a long-form blog post/article for each topic
Now this is the step where you need to spend the most time. The goal is to create high-quality long-form articles for the relevant topics. This could be a ‘How to’ article or ‘Ultimate guides for X’ type of content.
Examples:
The Ultimate Guide to reduce SaaS churn rate
How to reduce your sales cycle with mutual action plans
Step 3: Break down the long-form blog/article into X new articles
Once you have all the relevant content on a specific topic in your long-form article, you can break it down into new, more specific, and shorter versions.
You take a piece of the long form and sharpen the content from a different perspective.
Here are 8 examples of titles:
Best tips on TOPIC (e.g. Best tips to reduce sales cycles with mutual action plans)
Do's and Don'ts of TOPIC
Top 10 tips on TOPIC (e.g. Top 10 tips to reduce your SaaS churn rate)
X steps framework/guide to TOPIC
X reasons why TOPIC is important/hard
Biggest mistakes about TOPIC
Best tools for TOPIC
Best books/events/influencers/reports for TOPIC
Now based on the 1 long form title, you already have 8 new articles. So in total have now 9 articles.
Step 4: Turn these blog posts/ articles into X multiple LinkedIn posts
Now you can turn any of the blog posts/articles into multiple LinkedIn posts.
Let’s take again the example of the ‘Top 10 tips to reduce your SaaS churn rate’.
You can easily create the following 6 LinkedIn posts:
text-only post
carousel
listicle
1-page cheatsheet
(selfie-style) video (e.g. a 5-minute highlight video of the new blog post)
screen recording video (Loom video)
you can be very creative here and maybe find your own formats
Make sure that you always link to the long-form blog post on your video (but not in the post, better as a comment on your post).
So let’s quickly do the math: 9 articles x 6 LinkedIn post formats = 54 LinkedIn posts.
Step 5: Create 3-5 variations for each of the LinkedIn posts
A hack big creators like Justin Welsh leverage perfectly.
You create slightly different versions of each post - e.g. changing the hook (first 3 lines of your post), while keeping the rest almost identical. Or you rephrase it a bit, but keep the message the same.
Quick math: 54 posts x 5 versions = 250+ posts
Step 6: Schedule the posts via Taplio/Publer with monthly rhythm
Now you have 250+ posts ready to use.
I would recommend using a tool like Taplio or Publer and schedule your posts.
Every 2-4 weeks, you can post about the ‘same’ topic again.
Step 7: Review posts and use them again or repurpose
Don’t forget to analyze your posts. identify the posts that worked very well and find patterns.
Reuse them again and schedule a new post.
Maybe you also want to slightly adapt the post (based on the learnings you made so far).
But if you choose topics that are highly relevant to your ideal customers, those are not getting ‘old’ - you can repurpose them over and over again.
With only 1 content topic you can end up with 250+ posts. Now with this framework, you will never run out of ideas 🙂
2. How to increase your ARPA by decreasing your value metric thresholds in your pricing plans
Okay, this sounds complicated. But promise, it’s not.
Do you want to increase your prices? Normally everyone immediately thinks of increasing the € number. So instead of 100€, selling it for 200€.
But then founders are worried about what customers would say.
There is also another way you can increase the average revenue per account - without really increasing the price.
Instead of increasing the €, you decrease the value metric for your tiers.
Example: You are a newsletter software and you charge based on subscribers.
Let’s say you offer 3 plans:
Lite: 9€ for up to 1000 subs
Standard: 19€ for up to 10000 subs
Premium: 49€ for 10000+
So now instead of increasing your prices, you change the thresholds for the value metric.
Example:
Lite: 9€ for up to 500 subs
Standard: 19€ for up to 5000 subs
Premium: 49€ for 5000+
The result: You will see more clients in your Standard and Premium plans and ultimately increase your ARPA.
P.S. The Ultimate SaaS Pricing Guide for early-stage SaaS startups covers pricing in more detail.
👉 Before you read on:
✅ Create your own powerful SaaS Growth Strategy with my FREE Workbook (helped 2700+ SaaS professionals) and GTM-strategy 1-pager Notion template (helped 1000+ SaaS professionals)
✅ Unlock your growth potential with 90+ actionable SaaS growth tactics (helped 150+ SaaS professionals)
✅ GTM advisory (for early-stage SaaS founders on their way to hitting the first €1 million ARR) - Work with me 1-on-1 in weekly or bi-weekly deep-dive working sessions to build and execute your powerful GTM strategy.
❤️ Get exclusive benefits for sharing my newsletter with your SaaS network.
3. The 4 ways to ‘steal’ your competitors’ followers on Linkedin
Followers of your competitors are a great source of potential customers, especially if you know what customers like and dislike about them (check review sites like Capterra, OMR, etc. for insights, or obviously from your conversations with customers).
On LinkedIn, you can follow 4 different approaches.
1. ‘Steal’ people who follow your competitors’ LinkedIn page
This is a bit sneaky, but it works. Create a fake LinkedIn profile, add yourself as an employee of your competitors’ company, and then filter for people, that follow ‘my company’.
JB Jezequel, the founder of Evaboot created an awesome video about it.
2. ‘Steal’ people who follow a specific creator
Very similar approach to the first one, but here you don’t need to create a fake account.
Instead of searching for company page followers, you go for creator followers. This can be for instance the founder of your competitors.
3. ‘Steal’ people who engaged with your competitors’ posts
In this approach, instead of going for specific followers, you try to reach out to people who engage with (your competitors’) posts.
So all you need to do is:
Find a relevant post on Linkedin
Go to Taplio and add the URL of the post
or alternatively, use Phantombuster to export all post commenters
P.S. Of course this tactic is also possible not only for your competitors’ posts. If you find posts that fit perfectly the topic of your ideal customer profile, this can be an awesome trigger for your outreach (—> see TAPSA framework).
4. ‘Steal’ people who joined your competitors’ LinkedIn events
This strategy is very similar to the one before. Here you need to use the “LinkedIn Event Guests Export” phantom from Phantombuster.
P.S. Of course this tactic is also possible not only for your direct competitors. Event participants (of a relevant topic your product covers) can be a good trigger (intent data) in general.
P.P.S. Tools like builtwith also allow you to identify companies using specific software (your competitor or also tools you integrate with or are qualification criteria for you).
💡Best tip, failure, and learning by Jonathan Reimer (CEO & Co-Founder of crowd.dev)
Learning: Selling to developers is different
The Developer-led Growth Flywheel
What is developer-led growth?
Developer-led growth is a Go-To-Market approach that shares similarities with product-led growth (PLG) but has distinct differences in sales motion and strategy. PLG focuses on user acquisition, activation, and retention driven primarily by the product itself. Developer-led growth instead revolves around empowering developers and leveraging their advocacy to drive growth.
Step 1: Understand the developer buying journey
In the world of Business-To-Developers (B2D), developers have countless internal and external touchpoints with your brand and product along the buying journey. To get started with Developer-led Growth, you first need to understand where developers come from, which questions they have, and what’s driving them to use your product. (Shameless plug: This is something crowd.dev can help you with.)
Step 2: Create educational content
In the next step, you take the learnings and insights from Step 1 and turn them into ideas for content. More than for any other persona, educational content is king for developers. High-quality technical documentation, blog posts, video tutorials, live streams, and podcasts are great ways to communicate your message and let developers learn about your expertise and product. You should always keep in mind that it is about education, not promotion. Developers will notice marketing from far away.
Step 3: Share your content where developers hang out
For distributing content, you should focus on platforms where developers hang out (even in their free time), namely, GitHub, Twitter, Reddit, Stack Overflow, HackerNews, or DEV. But also smaller platforms in your niche, industry newsletters, or guest blog posts can be a great way to reach developers with your content. As with almost everything, this should be a trial-and-error process.
Step 4: Build a community to turn developers into your advocates
For developer-led growth, it's key to turn developers into advocates. Developers trust their peers more than anything else, so your primary goal should be to have users who go above and beyond for your product. The most proven way to do this is to build a community around your product and allow developers to feel like they are part of something bigger. We published a whole guide on “How to build a developer community”.
🧠 Do you want to be next and share your best tip with 2100+ SaaS professionals? Reach out to me via Linkedin.
💪 Bonus material (software, content, news) - this time 90+ B2B SaaS growth tactics (75% off - Black Friday offer)
Get access to over 90 proven and actionable SaaS growth tactics with detailed explanations and additional resources - specifically for early-stage B2B SaaS startups from 0€ to 3€ million ARR.
With the discount code ‘BLACKFRIDAYSAAS’ - 75% off.
Growth tactics include lead generation, pricing, sales demos & discovery, content marketing, email & multichannel outbound sales, product onboarding, referral programs, website and landing page structure, and much more.
No need to reinvent the wheel.
Happy growth 🚀.
🚀 3 ways I can help you grow your SaaS to €1 million ARR:
GTM advisory (for early-stage SaaS founders on their way to hitting the first €1 million ARR) - Work with me 1-on-1 in weekly or bi-weekly deep-dive working sessions to build and execute your powerful GTM strategy.
List of 90+ actionable SaaS Growth Tactics and Free SaaS Growth Strategy Worksheet.
Sponsor this newsletter - Reach 2100+ early-stage SaaS founders/leaders.
For daily actionable tips to grow your B2B SaaS business, follow me on Linkedin.