Why your content has to be great

The quality of your content predetermines the very success of your blog. If your content is awful, all the promotion and link building tactics won't work. As well as the other way around - if your content is top-notch, you'll have to work a lot less promoting it. The word of mouth will do the job for you. Great content promotes itself. While awful content is awfully hard to promote.

I do recommend you to be active everywhere, where your target audience is hanging out, and promote your content whenever you get a chance. However, it is much easier to get traction at these communities, when your content is objectively awesome.

So instead of spending your time looking for "secret" marketing tactic that will help you to hijack these communities, you should instead put all this time into making your content as awesome as possible! Because this is the single best way to conquer any audience and turn them into your fans.

Your goal is to make your content so awesome, that anyone reading it would want to share it with someone else.

• Leo Widrich, the co-founder of Buffer, once said: When writing a post, I get into a mindset to answer just this 1 question with a Yes: "Would anyone email this article to a friend?". Way too often bloggers think that their content flops because they don't promote it enough, while in reality their content flops because it's awful.
• In the words of Ryan Holiday: "Promotion is not how things are made great—only how they're heard about. So before you start promoting your new piece of content, please make sure that it deserves to be promoted in the first place."

How to create content that people will care to read and share with others

Ingredients that will make your content great:

• Quality

  • Learn to write well. Writing is a skill that almost anyone can learn and master.

  • Improve how content 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:

    • quality images
    • short paragraphs
    • subheadings
    • quotes
    • lists
    • 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.

  • 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.

    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.

    "Titles are often written as a vague pre-thought, but in fact, it's the most important creative decision you'll make." – Andrew Chen, from Uber

• 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.

  How to create unique content? 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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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

• Authority: as 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.

  But what if you're not? 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: If you're not the best person to talk about a certain subject, find that best person and interview them. 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 Ahrefs blog, where they tried to answer a question "how to become a marketing manager". They could easily crank up an article on that topic in a few hours and call it a day. But instead, they 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, they featured all 10 of them early in our article, so that to show their readers that there are quite a few very smart people behind what they're about to read.

How to create unique content that will stand out

If you will write about things that cannot be found elsewhere, your blog is almost guaranteed to be a success. But where do you find these unique things to blog about? I really like what Rohin Dhar, the CEO and Founder of Priceonomics said in his Content Marketing Handbook: Authentic information that your company has access to is the currency of truly valuable content marketing.

You can craft unique content from:

• The data that your company produces
• Insights you have because of your industry experience
• Stories of the people you have access to

What if you're a newbie blogger and you don't have these kinds of luxuries? Well, actually you do! Anyone can collect some unique data about their industry. Anyone can come up with unique insights related to their industry. Anyone can connect with industry experts and get a bit of help from them.

The vast majority of people are too lazy to do these kinds of things. But that is actually a good thing! The more steps you take towards making your content awesome and unique, the less competition you're going to encounter.