Part #2. How to create content that people will care to read and share with others
Most resources that I've examined while preparing for this very course will advice you to "create great
content,"and call it a day.
I mean, what does it mean "to create great content?"
Ain't the content you create great already?
And how do you know if it's not?
Well, I don't consider myself to be a content marketing superstar, but in the last few years
I managed to make Ahrefs Blog one of the best ones in the SEO space.
And I think, along the way, I figured a few ingredients that will make your content great:
Here they are:
Quality, Uniqueness, and Authority.
Let me expand on each of them one by one.
Quality.
In all honesty, there's no shortage of advice on how to improve the quality of your content.
So I'll just do a brief recap of the things that I'm sure you're already well familiar with.
Here they are:
#1. Learn to write well.
Writing is a skill that almost anyone can learn and master.
Think of playing a guitar.
When you first try it, you surely can produce some sounds, but it can hardly be called music.
But then you learn some chords, how to pick strings and so on.
And after some time your friends are asking you to take the guitar and play them something.
Same with writing, at first it will be very clumsy and tough to read, but after some learning
and practice people will start enjoying your articles.
Luckily, there's no shortage of advice on the topic of "how to improve your writing."
Just start learning and practicing as soon as possible.
Now, the next thing you do to ramp up the quality of your content is...
Improve how it looks.
It is a well studied fact that most people will skim through the article before reading it,
which will help them to evaluate if it is worth reading at all.
And if your article doesn't look good, people are unlikely to risk their time reading it.
Here are the things that make your content visually appealing.
The design of your blog;
Quality images, short paragraphs, subheadings, quotes, lists, and all sorts of formatting tricks.
All these things make your article pleasing to a human eye and transmit a message to your
blog visitors that the author of the article invested quite some time to ensure pleasant
reading experience.
But let's move on.
The last, but not the least.
You need to craft an eye-catchy headline.
Headline is the only bit of your entire article
that people will see on Twitter, Facebook, Google and on the homepage of your blog.
Which means you only have about a dozen words to persuade people that your article is worth
their attention.
Writing headlines that lure people into your article is both art and science.
There are many ready-made headline templates that you can try using, as well as many
psychological tricks that will educate you to create your own attention-grabbing headlines.
I won't teach you any of that, because I'm not a professional copywriter.
But there's one piece of advice that I can give you.
Make sure to brainstorm at least five different headlines for every article you write.
If you won't invest the time and effort into coming up with just five headline variations
to choose from, your entire article is almost guaranteed to flop, no matter how good it is.
In the words of Andrew Chen, from Uber
"Titles are often written as a vague pre-thought, but in fact, it's the most important creative
decision you'll make."
And this wraps up my brief recap of ramping up the quality of your content.
But in all honesty, all these things are just a proxy to the actual idea behind your article.
Which brings us to the second ingredient of great content: Uniqueness.
I see a rather upsetting trend in the blogging and content marketing space.
When they go after some keyword, many people research everything that has already
been published on that topic and then try to squeeze it all into a single article of theirs.
But this way you're only creating a clone of existing content and not adding any extra value.
And if it's a clone, it doesn't deserve more attention than the original.
So with this approach you're immediately putting yourself one step behind your competition.
If you want to stand out with your content - it has to be unique.
So how to create unique content?
Well, you still have to research everything that has already been published on the topic.
But then you don't create a clone.
You create something that would be different from what's already there.
Ideally you want to say something that hasn't been said before.
Which is rather hard to do, as it requires you to be at the very forefront of your industry.
These people are called thought leaders.
And most likely you're not one of them just yet.
So another option is to find a new angle, which would be somewhat different from the
conventional opinion on that topic.
Ideally you'd want to turn 180 degrees and challenge the status quo - this often generates
a lot of buzz.
But only if you have good arguments to make your point.
And finally, if the above is not an option, you might simply try to explain that topic better.
You might not be the thought leader of your industry, but you might be a great writer,
teacher, and storyteller.
If you invest enough time into finding better arguments, better proof and better examples,
you do have a chance to outperform the original piece on that subject.
And now, here goes the last ingredient of great content: Authority.
Like I just mentioned, in order to say something entirely new and unique,
you have to be at the very forefront of your industry.
You have to be an authority in your niche.
Let's say I do a few weeks of research and write a cool article on the topic of colonization of Mars.
Would you read my article on that topic?
Or would you prefer to learn about the colonization of Mars from someone with more authority
in that subject?
Like Elon Musk, for example.
If you go to YouTube and search for his talks on that subject you'll see that they get
millions of views.
That's because Elon Musk is probably the most qualified person in the world to talk about
the colonization of Mars.
So you know he can teach you a lot of things that you won't be able to find elsewhere.
Hence the crazy amount of views.
And that is a nice illustration of the impact that authority and credibility have on
the content that you create.
But what if you're not the Elon Musk of your industry?
Does that mean you're doomed to oblivion?
Not at all!
There's a simple trick to "hacking" authority that writers have been using for ages.
Take a look at this article at Wait But Why, that explains the colonization of Mars start to finish.
It is super long, so you'll need a rather compelling reason to spend your time on it, right?
Well, how about that: this article was co-written by Elon Musk.
I bet now you're thinking that every paragraph of this post is totally worth your time, right?
That's how you "hack" authority.
If you're not the best person to talk about a certain subject, find that best person
and interview them.
Obviously, it is almost impossible to get a hold of a person like Elon Musk and interview
them for your article.
But I'm sure that whatever industry you're in, there are many high-profile people who
are easily accessible.
Think about journalists.
This is one of the core duties of their profession - to find credible sources and use them in their writing.
If you want to create great content, you need to be a journalist.
Here's an example of our own article at Ahrefs blog, where we tried to answer a question
"how to become a marketing manager".
We could easily crank up an article on that topic in a few hours and call it a day.
But instead, we took time to reach out to 10 high-profile marketers and used their advice
to create a great resource on that topic.
As you can see, we featured all 10 of them early in our article, so that to show our
readers that there are quite a few very smart people behind what they're about to read.