Epic Content Isn’t A Talent, It’s A Checklist: The Five Rules Behind Every Post That Actually Converts

You know the blog posts that stop your scroll. You also know the sinking feeling of staring at your own blank editor, sure you’re supposed to produce something like that, with no idea where to start. Michelle Schaefer, who has personally driven half a million page views to her own blog, and Rob, Empower Network’s director of marketing, took the stage together to name exactly what separates content that gets shared from content nobody remembers, and then to explain why you might not have to write it yourself at all.

What actually makes a blog post epic instead of forgettable?

Michelle borrows a line from a 1964 Supreme Court case about obscenity, where a justice admitted he couldn’t define the thing in question but knew it when he saw it. Epic content works the same way. It’s genuinely hard to pin down in a single sentence, but once you’ve seen a handful of examples, the pattern becomes obvious. She lays out five specific markers.

• It’s unique and unmistakably human, not generic advice anyone could have written.
• It’s visually interesting, using images, graphs, or infographics instead of a wall of plain text.
• It delivers valuable information the reader can actually act on.
• It’s built around the reader’s actual needs, not the writer’s need to publish something.
• It makes the reader say wow, not just nod along politely.

She points to Neil Patel’s blog as the clearest working example. His posts don’t just tell you what to do. They tell you why, they tell you how, and they show you real people doing it, often running four, five, six thousand words long. Readers can tell within a paragraph that someone spent twenty hours building that post, and that investment is exactly what makes it worth sharing. Michelle has written posts at that same length herself, and she’s specific about the payoff: months and even years later, those same posts are still pulling in traffic, comments, and shares, long after a quick daily post would have been forgotten.

Why does every blog post need an intention before you write a single word?

This is where Rob shifts the conversation from craft to psychology. His starting premise is blunt: every single person visiting your blog is making a decision every second they’re on the page, and if they read your content and don’t buy, that’s not a neutral outcome. It’s a decision they made not to buy.

If they go to your blog, and they read your content, and they don’t buy, that’s a decision. They made a decision not to buy.

Rob’s fix for that isn’t a harder sales pitch. It’s asking a question before you ever open the editor: what is the actual goal of this specific piece. More comments. More leads. More sales. More engagement before a call. Most bloggers, Michelle confirms from working with thousands of them directly, never ask that question at all. They write, publish, and hope, with no bridge planned between the post and an actual next step for the reader. Content built with a clear intention behind it does the opposite. It knows exactly where it’s trying to take the person reading it, and it builds the path there on purpose.

What if the content that converts didn’t have to come from you at all?

Here’s the challenge underneath everything Michelle just described: most people starting out aren’t going to sit down and produce a well-researched, six-thousand-word post in their first month, and pretending otherwise just adds one more source of overwhelm to a business that already has plenty. Chris Rushlow, who helped originate this initiative alongside several of the company’s top leaders, describes coming to that same conclusion after realizing only a small fraction of any team is ever going to be capable of writing that kind of content consistently.

The solution the team built instead is a shared blog stocked with content from established leaders, including John Oaks, Paul Hutchings, Tracy Walker, Lawrence Tam, and David Wood, each post already built to the five-rule standard Michelle laid out, and each one shareable with your own affiliate link attached. You don’t need to be a writer to benefit from writing that good. You need to drive traffic to it. The internal team frames this as removing a failure point that was never really about effort. It was about a skill most affiliates were never going to build fast enough to keep pace with everything else the business asks of them.

That’s the real shift worth sitting with. The mechanism that turns a stranger into a lead was never locked behind your own writing ability. It was locked behind having access to content built by people who already know how to make a reader say wow, and having a simple way to put your name on the door.

The full session shows the specific process behind creating this shared content library and how the affiliate-coded sharing actually works. Watch it in full, free, when you Create your free account.

The full session transcript follows below.

Transcript

How'd that go? Yeah, thanks. We got to have fun around here. All right, so, epic content.

Everyone's going, what are you talking about? Now we're going to bring up a couple more of our internal team, which have a pedigree in the industry and are marketers themselves, and they help us develop and build and design this stuff, and this cool new initiative that we've reached across the lines and have started to mastermind with a lot of the leaders you've seen here on stage to create something that is going to be the coolest addition to your business, especially if you're a blogger. Sound cool? Yeah.

So, what I'm going to do is bring them on out, and we're going to talk about this, and I just get the feeling your mind is going to be absolutely blown. So, please give it up for Michelle Schaefer and our director of marketing, Rob Ramone. Do you see this standing ovation? You guys really are appreciated.

You guys work so hard. I mean, guys, I work with these guys day and night, and they're always working, so give it up. So, I would go into all of their backstories and tell you how awesome they are, like how Michelle Schaefer did half a million page views on her blog as a blogger herself, or how Rob has made his first million dollars before he was 18 years old as a marketer, but I really got to get into the content here. So, what I'm going to do here is turn it over first to Michelle.

We have a presentation for you, and we're going to show you guys specifically the evolution of blogging and what has happened in the last few years as to how you can effectively utilize your blogs and how we're going to help you and help you leverage this yourself as well from what we're doing with you working with the leaders. So, on that note, Michelle, go ahead and take it away. All right. There we go.

All right. So, if you were in the Kalachi Premium, if you were in the workshop the other day, you heard me mention that we would talk about the evolution of blogging and what has changed and why blogging daily may not be the best approach for you. If you weren't at the workshop, you need to be at the next one. I'll have to think about forgiving you.

So, let's start with what is epic content. You heard Mr. Ashlow mention epic content. There's five rules to creating content that is epic.

It's unique and human. It's visually interesting. And I'll give you examples of this in a minute. It delivers valuable info.

It's focused on readers' needs and it makes your readers say, wow. That's really easy, right? You get now exactly how to write epic content? No?

You may be familiar with this phrase. And I won't mention what court case this was, but in 1964, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said about something that, while he couldn't define it, he knew it when he saw it. They know what it was about.

Any comments? No? All right. Epic content is much like that.

It's hard to define, but you know when you see it. So, whoops. Let's get to some examples. Everybody here knows who Neil Patel is, right?

Great. Watch his blog and you will know when you see it that that's epic content. So, the types of content he shares answer your questions fully. You're not left wondering anything.

You know exactly what to do after you read a post on his blog. They're detailed. He doesn't just tell you what you should do. He tells you why you should do it.

He tells you how you should do it. He gives you examples of other people in action, right? There are these 4, 5, 6,000 word blog posts. Copy bloggers, same thing.

You go to their site, you see that kind of content. That's thousands and thousands of words. And you know somebody put 20 hours into writing the content. You'll be like, wow.

What's that? That's epic. It's great. I'm so excited.

I've been reading that. I love that. You know, hours into this blog post, right? Here's some other examples so that you can get an idea of visuals.

That's one thing that makes content epic is, you know, we all learn in different ways. We digest information differently, but visuals help us understand it. So when you've got a blog post like this, it's the ultimate list of blog post ideas. They turned it into an infographic.

It's things like that that make content really stand out. You can see another example here from HubSpot. How many of you are familiar with HubSpot? Okay.

HubSpot is a marketing blog, or this particular section of it is about sales and marketing. And you can see from this post, they analyzed a thousand salespeople's personalities and broke it down with graphs and percentages. Now, that's a cool blog post if you're looking for that kind of information. These types of posts get you more traffic, more comments, more leads, and more sales.

I know that because I've written them. I've written 5,000 word blog posts. When I hit publish, I get a lot of traffic, a lot of sales, a lot of leads. Months later, years later, in some cases, these posts are still bringing steady traffic to my site.

I'm still getting comments. I'm still getting shares. They work amazingly well. However, there is one huge challenge with creating this kind of content yourself.

Most people wonder, how do I create it? Have you ever wondered that? You see those blog posts on other people's blogs, but you wonder how to create them yourself. Does it ever feel overwhelming?

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

I don't know. I don't know. Time-consuming? Yeah.

Even if you know how to do it, it's time-consuming. And confusing. Does it ever feel confusing? Back to the definition of what is epic content.

I don't know how to write it if I can't define it. It can be very confusing. We had a conversation a few weeks ago, and the focus of it was blogging has evolved. It's changed from what it was in the beginning, where you could put out a post every day, get a lot of traffic to it, and it's evolved into, to content needing to be unique, needing to really stand out.

Because there are a lot of blogs, there's a lot of noise out there. If you want people to notice yours, you want people to notice you, it's got to be unique. And the other five things that I listed at the beginning. And those things are challenging.

Especially if you don't consider yourself a writer, it can be very challenging to create that kind of content. So we had a conversation about how we could help you succeed with this, how we could make it easier. And somebody had a great idea, and this was inspired by other conversations that we had. And I think it's a great idea.

And I think it's a great idea that we've had with a lot of leaders and a lot of people in this room. Some of them have been after us for quite a while to create something like this. Silvio's laughing because I'm looking at him. So Mr.

Rushlow was in charge of this conversation, and he had this crazy genius idea. What if we could get blog posts from people like Mr. John Oaks, Mr. Paul Hutchins, which I hope somebody talks to you about this project, because I've just roped you into it, if not.

Miss Tracy Walker, Mr. Lawrence Tam. Yes, these are from today. Speed of implementation, I'm learning that.

And Mr. David Wood. What if we could get a blog filled with content from these leaders who know how to create epic content, and you could share it affiliate-coded to you? Does that sound good?

So you get all the benefits of epic content without having to write it yourself. Ah, my turn. Okay. Great.

As you can see, we're great planners, right? And I actually have no scripted content. I'm just going to speak to you from the heart, okay? Because part of creating epic content is creating content that sells.

Raise your hand if you agree, right? You want people to read your blog, and you want people to take action. You want people to buy what you're selling. Raise your hand if you agree.

That is what these epic blog posts are created to do. See, what I'm going to do here is I'm going to open your mind up, and I'm going to help you make some mindset shifts. Because I was having a conversation with a group of people, and they were like, Rob, I'm just not good at selling. I'm not good at getting people to make decisions.

How can I get better at getting people to make decisions? The first step to getting better at getting people to make decisions is to understand that every second of every day, people are making decisions. If they go to your blog, and they read your content, and they don't buy, that's a decision. They made a decision not to buy.

If that makes sense, these epic blog posts are created from some of our six and seven-figure earners who understand how to get people to buy. These epic blog posts are designed to turn your visitors into actual paying customers. And one of the ways you do that is you do it through intention-based marketing. When you're blogging, when you're writing content, when you're writing emails, when you're talking to people, what is the intention behind the comments that you're putting out.

Those are the things that help you transition to face-to-face. Read em yo genders. Start reading your behind the conversation, behind the blog post, behind the video, behind the email that you're writing? Is it to get more comments?

Is it to get more leads? Is it to get more sales? Is it to create engagement, right? When you have an intention and when you speak with intention and act with intention, your results are going to increase.

I mean, Michelle's worked with over 10,000 bloggers, right? And what would you say some of the common challenges are that people face when they write blog posts? Exactly what you're talking about. They don't know how to write a blog post that has a goal.

Most of them don't know what the goal is for any particular blog post. Have you ever felt like that? You're writing a blog post, but you're not sure exactly what the goal is? Yeah.

And they don't know how to bridge from a blog post into something that gets a lead and gets a sale. Right, right. So what we decided to do is we decided to remove that confusion and overwhelm for you, and we're creating a done-for-you solution. We're creating a blog that you can use, that you can take, and all you have to do is drive traffic and just add your affiliate ID.

Yeah! And the reason why we're doing that, and it's not even us, it's the leaders, the leaders that are here, six- and seven-figure earners who are here, they're already doing it. They're walking the walk. They're talking the talk.

They're doing this for you. Why? Because we want to see you succeed. We want to remove all of the failure points that can stop you from succeeding so you can reach success in the fastest time possible.

It's time to cheer! One more time? Yes! I love it.

So that's what we're here to help you do, and here's the crazy genius. Give it up for Chris Ruschel, guys. Chris, we had some of the brainstorming conversations, and we were talking about the blog posts, and give the audience kind of, you know, an understanding behind why you came up with this idea and how it can really help them. Yeah, absolutely.

Okay, you guys got me. Okay, so this is where it originated from. I was reaching out with Tam and John Oaks and a lot of the other leaders, and I was like, well, how do we get blogging to evolve with what we've been doing? And at first, my thought was, well, as you saw with all of this epic content, I was like, well, let's just teach them to do that.

Well, that's a great idea. Now, how many of you, starting out as a blogger, would have been able to do something like that? No, no. And so they were like, we have probably, you know, 1% of people in our team that are capable of creating that type of content, because you need and very well researched, and you can't do that every day, you know?

So you got to do a lot of research. So what we looked at was, I was like, okay, well, how about we go back to the basics here? First off, as we build teams, as team builders, we know that we have to make sure that we give you a clear, specific set of guidelines to follow that are understandable, and you can implement them right away without knowing everything, right? And that's how you make money, right?

So we said, well, we can already, we've already seen some of the leaders do this with their team sites, where they have blog posts that they allow their members to promote with their user IDs, just like they do their capture pages. And so that has worked for them, because it codes to the Empower Network funnels. So I said, so how about we make VIP Day awesome, where we show you all to take all of this content that we are going to have from goodwill, donated, and optimized by the leaders and the team, and we're going to do that.

And so that's what we did. And so I said, well, we can't do it without the team here, so that you all can promote that on social media and generate leads from it. How do you like that? And so that's essentially the initiative.

And I had to step backstage for a second, so take it away. We've got a couple more slides. Oh, well, there we go. When will this be ready?

Two weeks or less. Ah! Yes, Mr. Jones, we meet two weeks from today.

Oh, oh my God, don't get me started. So I want you guys to understand something here. So I come into the internal team and mind you, I'm an entrepreneur. I don't really have corporate experience.

And so I haven't worked with internal teams on how operations work. Well, I got a very quick crash course where all of a sudden I felt this whip just crack me in the back of the neck and I turn around and it's Mars with his beard and he actually like, and I was then from that point indoctrinated into what, how the operations go. And one of those things is I'm like, why does this gotta be done by this time? I guess done when I want to, I do, I'm creative and I'm an entrepreneur.

I can do all these things. I know you, you gotta take time to let it flow. No, that's not how that works. I had not been used to that.

So it's kind of like football that every like, I know it's a tough, that was like, yeah, I used to ask Irene, I'm walking out there like, what the frick did I just get into? Oh my God. So it's like hell week sometimes like in, in football, like your first week of football trials in high school where you got like those two and three day practices and you're wanting to quit every single day. For those of you who don't know, you just, you want to quit every single day and you got like your friends that are like there and they're like punching the gut.

Like if you quit, I swear to God tomorrow you're not even going to be here, you know, so you're all keeping each other going. And so there's moments where I was like, there is so much happening here. Oh my God. Like.

I'm overwhelmed. And so I'll reach out to one of them and they'll like remind me why they do this. And all of a sudden there's these moments and more and more moments to show up where I realize why we're doing this and it's all worth it because I look out here and I see all of you and they used to do the same. They see all of you and it's worth it.

So that's why these guys work day and night to do this stuff and get this pulled off of you. Give them a round of applause. They deserve it. Let's go.

That's it. Look for more in two weeks. Michelle Shafer, Rob Romani. Thank you guys.

Take care.