6 Crucial Things To Boost Your Content

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It’s been a while since the introduction of content marketing and its potential to grow your business really took off. However, not everyone understands its power and the influence it gives brands.

The benefits that can be reaped from content marketing don’t stop there.

It’s amazing how much we underestimate information and how we don’t stop to think what makes a piece interesting and what doesn’t. Everyone produces content but not each piece gets the traction we are all looking for. Why is that?

Below are the 6 things that differentiate sub-standard content and engagingly high quality content:

Defining Your Audience

Have you ever heard the saying, “you can’t please everyone”? Well, it’s in a way similar to content. You don’t just produce content and hope for everyone to relate to it. Your audience needs to be specific and in fact, the more general you get, the less effective your content marketing campaign will be. So don’t worry about getting EVERYONE interested in what you have to say. Targeting your audience can help shape and structure your content.

Remember, content marketing is all about your audience.

Tips:

  • Align your audience with your goals for the content you are planning on producing.
  • Research your target niche and see what gets them ticking.
  • Don’t be afraid to be a contrarian.
  • Take advantage of human psychological responses such as ego or gullibility
  • Research who or what influences them

Define your goals

There are so many types of content mediums out there and each one could be used a different way. Your goals could refer to things such as increasing traffic, increasing links, attracting more social mentions, increase engagement, and the list goes on. Make sure to properly identify what the piece you are building will be used for and what you are aiming to achieve with it.

As mentioned earlier, make sure you align your goals with your audience. It could be that you are after links and social mentions, if that’s the case, create something controversial. If you plan to spark conversation and discussion, create something that opposes a majority of your targeted audience’s beliefs. Be creative in how you choose your audience and align your goals.

Tips:

  • Be specific and write down what exactly you want to achieve.
  • When planning, start from the end (your goal) and work your way back to the beginning title. This will give you a good idea on how to deliver your message.

Brainstorm Ideas, angles and pitches

Bouncing ideas off someone else in the industry is a great way to beef up the concept you had in mind. You can ask simple questions that will help you improve and add better value to the content that you are trying to create.

Tips:

  • If possible, talk to someone who is an authority in the niche you are targeting
  • Ask them what they think would latch them on to this piece if they were to receive it
  • Ask them for suggestions and ideas to come up with more compelling content
  • Ask for additional resources that they might have (i.e. Reference blogs, data and statistics, etc)

A title that begs to click it

Your title is the first thing people see and serves as your call to action for users to move forward. Choose really dynamic words that resonate with your audience. Adding words like ‘fantastic’, ‘amazing’, ‘killer’ and so on, to make it more exciting and interesting.

What seems more interesting?

  • 6 Tips for Creating Good Content
  • 6 Crucial Things To Boost Your Content and Hit Marketing Goals

I thought so.

Tips:

  • Use dynamic words like mentioned above
  • Make it simple and direct
  • Set expectations for readers when they click through
  • Use a sense of urgency and value to pressure / tempt users into clicking through

Information structure

As mentioned earlier, the attention span of web surfers have decreased so much, to the point that we have to strategize in order to capture the reader’s interest. With that being said, be extra careful how your content is displayed and structured. Provide breaks and whitespace to not drown your users in a sea of letters.

Tips:

  • Add images and Pull quotes if applicable
  • Create a guide first before writing
  • Create lists, bullets, numbers as people tend to like easy to digest information
  • Make important sections / categories of your content prominent by using H tags for categories. A lot of times, people skim through your content and these would help them catch the attention and potentially get them back into the article.

Give it a little push

After the article is complete, give it a push by sending it out to a few influencers in your niche. I always say, great content sells itself. Once a great piece reaches the right hands, there would be no reason for people NOT to share it.

Those are the 6 foundations of creating amazing content. It isn’t just coming up with a title and content, but more of planning it out from the beginning all the way up to pushing it out to key influencers and outreach. You WILL fail on some but once you get the hang of it and know how to “tickle” your audience, it will get better.

Have anything to add? Feel free to comment down below.

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