10 Ways to create 10x Better Content than Anyone Else
Virtually everyone who is anyone in the digital marketing space has finally boarded the content marketing bandwagon. We know now that creating good content for a brand is the best way to get a good ranking in Google search results. So just writing ‘Good and Unique Content’ should do the trick right? Maybe not.
Content marketing has risen by leaps and bounds in the last five to six years. The rules have changed and writing ‘Good and Unique Content’ is just not enough – as Rand Fishkin of Moz rightly pointed out. Writing content that covers only the basic of any topic is very easy. A user may probably visit your blog and feel that they now know something about this topic and choose not spend more than a few minutes on it. Chances of such blogs, making into the top ten positions of the Google search results are very slim. The modern SEO’s demand are much higher and you need to have the best content in your category to make it into the top results organically. Take your regular content, make it 10X bigger and better, and only then can you hope to try and rank for those keywords. But what has brought upon this change?
The content marketing field today is far more crowded than it used to be and there is simply a large amount of content available for most topics. One needs to put only the best blog to grab a user’s attention today. Add to this the fact that user expectation today is very high. They expect the pages to load quickly and look great. Blogs need to be filled with interesting elements like pictures, videos and infographics. In fact, user experience also plays a big role in the ranking algorithm making it even more important for the need to move from ‘Good And Unique Content’ to a ‘10X Content’.
So now comes the next question, how do you achieve this? How do you make sure that your content is 10 times better than any other material out there for that topic?
Here are 10 ways to ensure that your content is 10X times better than anyone else.
1.Research Your Topic
The basic idea of writing a 10X content is to have the best written material under the topic of your choice. So start your work by researching on the content which is already out there. What is missing in those blogs? What new aspect can you showcase through your material? And most importantly, has someone already written a 10X blog on that topic? Google is certainly one of the best tools to use to conduct these searches. You can also explore BuzzSumo.com, a very useful platform that helps you find the most shared content for a certain topic under all social platforms. Run a quick search and if you find that there is tremendous potential for a 10X content under your topic of choice, get ready to type it out!
2.Design Your Blog Well :
While creating a blog, you need to keep two things in mind – 1. The content should be 10X in nature and 2. It should look visually appealing. A blog with good content and average design might not work as well as you would like it to. Studies have shown that 60% of people are visual learners! In conclusion if your blog looks visually alluring, chances are that 60% of your visitors will stick around to explore your blog! An aesthetic design is an absolutely essential part of ensuring a great user experience which directly impacts your blog’s ranking. Avoid a cluttered template and keep things clean and simple.
There are several content management systems (CMS) that can help you create a visually appealing blog. While we recommend WordPress as one of the best CMS platforms to use, here’s a list of top 5 content management systems you can explore! You can easily buy a stunning blog wordpress theme from Themeforest that gives plenty of space for images and have clean fonts. A curvy or complicated font is very hard to read and can cause discomfort to readers. Ensure that your blog is linked to other relevant content you have already written about. It is easier to divert a visitor from one blog to another than putting in fresh effort to lure the readers in for every blog. Here’s an example of one such well-designed jewelry blog.
3.Add Compelling Pictures And Videos :
There are certain factors that make your blog likeable, readable and shareable like – high frequency of images/visuals/infographics, usage of layman’s terms, good videos to go along with the content etc. Backlinko’s study on 1 million Google searches also revealed that content with at least one image significantly outperformed content without any images. The thought is to make your blog interesting and extremely user-friendly. When you use more visuals, users stay for a longer time only because images or videos can convey the same content in a better and interesting way. Only relying on text-heavy blogs are passé! What works best are- listicles, image-centric blogs & embedding videos in your blog. The trend today is to also translate the content into an infographic which is self-explanatory and does the job. For example, the blog of a survey tool GetInsights has a lot of infographics & visuals included in them which make the overall content very compelling. Even we create a lot of infographics for our product, Influencer.in – which we have showcased below. These pictures and videos in turn are easier to share on social media and are an essential part of ‘earning links’ as opposed to ‘link building’ .
4.Aim For Long Form Content :
Long form content pieces with around 1600-2000 words are really beneficial as the reach is much higher as compared to any usual content piece which has 400-500 words. It gets you what you want – more online visibility in the form of search ranking, social links and shares, building your social reputation in terms of making you an industry expert and also more substance for community building and engagement. Long form content also helps you land on SERP #1 in the long run. This is possible when someone searches for a product or specific information for a problem in your area of expertise and your long form content appears on their results as a solution to their problem. The latest study by Backlinko concludes that the average Google first page result contains 1,890 words so if you are serious about ranking your content on Google then aim for articles with 2000+ words. Long form content is good for social too. There is a correlation between the social media success and length of an article strongly suggesting that long form works better than a usual ~600 worded article.
5.Push For Relevant Content :
Relevance of the content is an important criterion for you to establish metrics for tracking the success of your blog. Creating your 10X content around a current hot topic revolving around an event, trend or holiday can help it climb the ranking. If you are a pop-culture fanatic and are up-to-date with everything that’s happening around you, you possess the innate power to leverage it and form your blogs around it or use it for creating good references and link it to your content. Here’s the perfect example of one such blog piece by PlanetSuperHeroes.com released during the Christmas sale. It was an article where the secret Christmas wishes of superheroes were listed to form an interesting and funny blog post. So keep an eye out and ride along a trend wave! Twitter, Feedly, Google News & Buzzsumo are good ways to track trending topics to ride the wave on.
Courtesy – PlanetSuperHeroes.com
6.Check Blog Speed & Mobile Optimization :
Google has several parameters based on which it pushes good and unique content to SERP #1, two of them being the speed of the blog and mobile optimization. According to an article by YourStory.com, by the end of October 2015, the mobile internet user base in India has increased by 65% over the last year. If your blog is not mobile friendly, you are bound to lose the interest of a large number of readers. In addition, the blog’s loading speed is a vital part of ensuring high blog traffic. It has been observed that blogs that take less time to display all the elements quickly and load fast enough have higher readership and search engine traffic. There is no point in having a fabulous blog design and content if it doesn’t load quickly. Ensure that your site speed is optimized and that your content is mobile optimized to get higher search rankings on Google. Google has its PageSpeed Insights tool that can help make your blog become more mobile friendly and also gives tips on improving the website speed. Pingdom also has an excellent tool to test website speed.
7.Create Content That Is Valuable To Your Reader:
“Make your content valuable” is the most heard advice when it comes to content and search marketing. But how do you really create content that is valuable to your customer? Content might be king, but conversation is queen! The idea is to build content that speaks to your readers and connect with them instantly. The best way to do that is to try and converse with the readers about the things they want to know. For example, if a real estate brand wants to connect to its potential customers and readers, it needs to roll out detailed content around topics that would interest the potential customers of the business and not topics around the brand itself. Focus on what they really want to know about and leverage that to create good and unique content. Much like this brand – The Flying Elephant Corp. Their latest real estate project, Falling Waters, is located on the popular Old Mahabalipuram Road. A series of informative blogs about basic facilities like schools, restaurants located on this road was aimed at providing useful content to the existing and potential residents of the apartment community.
8.Avoid Exclusive Self Promotional Content:
As mentioned above, bombarding your readers and potential customers with self-promotional content is unlikely to be shared by the readers. There are several cons to writing a self-promotional content. You will not be able to establish any kind of connect with your readers and might end up losing instead of gaining more readers. However, promotional content that is intertwined with useful/generic content is a smarter approach to take. Content which talks about what your readers want and addresses the common problems and offers solutions, is bound to work better for you! One must aim to become the one and only source for all the information relevant to the industry for your readers because that is the only way your content can gain monopoly of organic search results under that topic.
9.Keep Updating Your Content:
Stale content can be one of your worst enemies! Ensure that your content is updated and reflects any new trends and changes that have occurred since the time it was originally published. Google rankings are also affected if your content is created once and left unmonitored. In fact, not many people know that Google measures all of your content for freshness and then scores each page according to the type of search query which makes it even more crucial for you to constantly keep your content updated. One such example is the blog listing out the top 29 digital marketing course available in India. Originally published with only 10 courses way back in 2013, this widely popular blog was constantly updated to include newer courses and continues to be relevant and shared due to its fresh material. So Keep It Fresh, Keep It Growing!
10.Ask Yourself – Is It Now The Best Content?
Once you are done creating the blog content, sit back, read once, twice maybe thrice and ask yourself this – Is it the best? The ideal way to go about it would be to put yourself in your reader’s shoes and then think and scrutinize. Self-criticism is always good since it pushes you to get better every time with every step. As a reader, if you would like what you read, then you are good to go! Do try and keep researching on newer blogs that crop up in your content space and analyze if your blog is still the best in its domain.
The creation of 10X content is not easy and often brands may look at it and think, well, this is just too much of an effort to create and market content on this scale. Well, it just means that you have a perfect opportunity to gain an edge over your competition! Push yourself to create high quality 10X content and spend your efforts to amplify it. Here’s a quick guide to help you with Content Amplification once you have created your 10X content.
Share your thoughts on how you go about creating 10X Content!
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