What Is Minimum Viable Content

Firstly - if you’re a solopreneur, you may or may not care about content. But if you care about building a funnel that leads people to eventually try out your product or if you care about growing your company outside of doing sales-led growth or want to start having inbound leads, this article is for you.

I first heard of “Minimum Viable Content” (MVC) when going through Pat Walls’ content course. For those who don’t know - Pat grew Starter Story to top of the SEO game and beat out a number of popular websites in his articles with a super small team. And despite the rise of ChatGPT and other “answer engines”, SEO still remains the number one most important

Alright, so what’s MVC?

MVC is the idea that you “test” a piece of content and see if there’s any traction before you scale it. It’s a lot similar to product testing but with content that matters for you.

Step 1 - Content Idea Generation

We’ll go through 2 ways to quickly generate content ideas. Both are free and allows you to get 100s of ideas for you to test.

• Typing incomplete search phrases into Google. It’ll show you the top searches and you can just type “a” up to “z” and see what the top terms are.

• AhRefs Keyword Planner - this gives you more ways to choose what you want to write about along with “keyword difficulty” and “volume”. How do you use this? Beats me. But here’s how Danny Postma uses it to generate content (tweet here) and product. Find keywords that:

  • Have KD < 20 (requires less than 10 backlinks to rank on 1st page of Google)

  • Volume > 500 (This is for 1 country. Roughly tripled for worldwide search. Estimation: 500 × 3 = 1500. At 2% conversion if they all go to your website is 30 sales pm).

  • Many child keywords

    • Ranking for the main keywords means ranking for all long-tail keywords too.

  • Spend months on this keyword generating content and product.

  • Optimize for keyword by mentioning it inside domain, title and alt text but avoid “overstuffing it” (I don’t have a rough metric but I would suggest using common sense here)

  • To rank on all long-tail keywords, create loads of pages focusing on those specific keywords. Linking the most important ones to the home page and all the others on a category page to help Google index them.

Step 2 - Create the MVC

The goal here is to create and publish content in 2 hours. Publishing 3 different types of minimum viable content.

Minimum viable content has:

• Grammar mistakes

• Punctuation issues

• Spelling mistakes

Don’t over-do it. This content will most likely fail anyways!

Step 3 - Review and Pivot/Scale

Now - how do you review the success of your content. Each content should lead to a subscription/user. You can track these using PostHog or Google Analytics. We like using PostHog because you can also survey users if required and add more functionality to your website.

This is a super important step. Without tracking the subscriber counts, it is likely certain content pieces may lead to more traffic but not necessarily more users. This has often been the case when sharing articles on Reddit can lead to high traffic but very few people are willing to become paid users.

Don’t confuse the two.

Step 4 - Pivot/Scale

When considering whether to pivot/scale, it’s fairly straightforward. Consider the following:

• Pivot if your content has 0 audience impressions.

• Scale if your content has garnered eyeballs (e.g. when you have >5 long session durations of 3 minutes). And you can scale in a number of ways - by targetting the child keywords, expanding on your list or creating slightly different variations of your list targetted at different crowds.