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What do you think of the content that your competitors publish?
My guess? It’s not great.
It’s easy to judge others but tough to evaluate ourselves.
I guarantee that all your competitors think the same thing—that most content in your niche is junk.
And yet…they believe that theirs is the exception.
No doubt you think your content is pretty good too. Otherwise, why would you publish it?
I’m not saying you’re wrong; I’m just pointing out that we all have biases. Of course we’re going to think our own content is good.
The ideal solution would be to hire a professional marketer or editor to evaluate your content and compare it with that of competitors.
However, that’s rarely possible.
The next best solution is to have a checklist of all the essentials of good content.
While you can make your own, I thought I’d start you off.
I’m going to tell you 6 questions that you should ask yourself before publishing any piece of content.
This is a list of essentials, so feel free to add to it.
You can write in two ways.
You can write for yourself, creating something that you think is superb.
Or you can write for your readers, creating something that is specifically crafted to help them.
Can you guess which one I prefer? It’s option number 2. Always write for your readers.
One mistake that many content creators make, especially newer ones, is writing something that they think is good.
They’ll write a rant, or some other post, just to make themselves sound smart. But this doesn’t accomplish anything other than making them feel smart.
Here’s an example of such a post on Medium:
As you can see, the author wrote a public post that was essentially a rant directed towards her CEO.
You can read it if you want, but essentially it’s a whole lot of complaining. All about “me, me, me.”
As an interesting note, an edit on the post explains that she was let go shortly after publishing the post (not necessarily related).
The point is that even if this content gets read by a lot of people, it’s not going to impact their lives.
From a content marketing perspective, all good content needs to leave a favorable impression of your brand in the minds of readers.
It should do one of the following:
Go back to the question, and answer it now.
Is your content written for your audience, and does it provide value to them?
If the topic is good but you were more focused on writing what you think should be in a good article, go through it and edit it. Constantly ask yourself, “how can I make this clearer for my reader?”
You should be able to articulate the exact value that your content provides to your readers. If you can’t, it probably doesn’t have any (or much).
The days are over when you could write whatever you wanted and be believed.
Many readers these days are skeptical. After reading so many lies and hearing false promises, they need to be convinced to take you at your word and take action.
And if you can’t get them to take action, you’ll never claim that place in their email boxes or memory.
This is why I recommend backing up all your claims with data when possible.
What’s more convincing? Saying:
They both sound possible, but they also both sound like they could be speculations. The difference is that the second one links to a study in a respected journal.
As a reader, I am convinced by the second one; the first one leaves me with questions.
What’s a credible source? A key word in the question here is “credible.” If a reader clicks through to your source and doesn’t trust it, you’re back where you started.
Here’s what I would say a good rule of thumb for credible sources is:
I’m a big fan of visual content, which you know if you read my stuff regularly.
One benefit of including a lot of pictures is that they break up text, making it easier to read.
But if that’s the only thing the images in your content do, that’s a problem.
Images give you a unique opportunity to:
…all in a way that most readers enjoy.
But too many bloggers, even good ones, squander this opportunity on a regular basis.
Here’s an example from a very popular blog that shall remain nameless:
I really don’t know what a molten chess piece has to do with becoming a brand publisher.
This factor isn’t the end of the world, but using the right pictures can take your post from mediocre to good or from good to great.
Take this post on the Ahrefs blog as an example. After going over a concept that is tough to explain, they presented a tiny infographic to illustrate it:
Even without reading the article, I bet you already have a good idea of the point it’s making.
That’s an image that adds value to the surrounding text.
Just as every sentence should add something to the content, so should every image.
Think of your content as a product (even if it’s a free one).
Just about every product has competition. Go to a grocery store, and you’ll find ketchup made by five different companies.
Look up a guide to SEO, and you’ll find not just five, but thousands, of competing pieces of content.
Before you publish, and even before you write, you need to know what you’re up against.
Usually, this means going to Google and putting in a few keyword phrases that describe your content.
For example, I would search for “is your content good enough” or “how to judge content quality” for this article that you’re reading.
Next, go through at least the first page of results. More is always better.
Look through them, and analyze their strengths and weaknesses. Then, compare those strengths to your own.
If your content is worse in some areas, it needs to be improved before you publish it. No one switches to the new product if it’s worse than the old one.
There is one exception: There is no competition in a monopoly. A monopoly exists when a company can create a product that no one else can, either because of legal reasons or the inability to create it.
It’s great to own a monopoly in real life if you ever get the chance from a business perspective.
If possible, you should try to create a content monopoly on the topic you’re writing about.
If you can approach a topic from an angle that no one else can replicate, you’re guaranteed to stand out.
For example, a few years ago, I spent $252,000 on conversion rate optimization and published a post about it:
Anyone can write a post along the lines of “x lessons of conversion rate optimization.”
Very few can say they spent a few hundred thousand hiring the best in the industry and then share what they learned.
Your title can affect your conversion rate by 40%, and it plays a huge role in overall traffic.
It’s the part most people read before deciding whether they are interested in reading the actual article.
You should write down at least 20 different possible titles for each piece of content you create.
I know it’s a pain and takes a lot of time for just 10-15 words, but it is by far the most important part of your content.
Recognizing a great title takes practice, but essentially what you want to do is put yourself in your readers’ shoes and ask yourself:
Do I really need to read this right now?
It’s important to nudge people to read your article right now because most people who say they’ll read it later will not.
And if you can’t honestly answer that question with a “yes,” you need a better title. Do not rush this—it’s crucial.
Once you have the title down, move on to your opening: your first 100-200 words. This is the second most important part of your content.
Past the title, many will read the opening and then decide if they want to read the rest of the content.
Again, ask yourself the same question. To compel them to read on, you need to address a question they would want to get an answer to or a story they would want to know the end of.
This is hard.
If you’d like to see some examples, check out some posts on Smart Blogger. Their editor makes sure that every post has a strong opening.
Content marketers are not average readers. What we think is good isn’t usually good for the average content reader.
Research shows the readers read only an average of 20-28% of a post.
Most readers are skimmers.
They skim the content, looking for anything that stands out. It’s important that you include elements that do stand out and invite readers to pay closer attention.
There are a few main aspects to consider.
Aspect #1 – Subheadlines matter more than you think: Open a new blog post, and skim it quickly. What stands out the most?
Usually, it will be the subheadlines since they are larger and usually darker than the rest of the text.
Readers judge your entire post by its title and each section by its subheadline.
Notice that I rarely use boring subheadlines in my posts. I always try to make some sort of interesting point that makes a skimmer curious. For example:
You don’t need to spend quite as much time on these as on the post’s title, but don’t just put the first subheadline that comes to mind either.
Aspect #2 – Readability: It’s important that you keep the basics of readability in mind. No one is going to read a post if it’s all one giant block of text.
Instead, keep the following in mind:
Aspect #3 – Images: Images do break up text as we mentioned earlier, which makes content easier to read.
More importantly, they attract attention.
Imagine you were skimming a post and saw that custom iceberg graphic from earlier. Wouldn’t you want to read that section to learn more about it? Many readers will.
Images will always grab attention, and if they are interesting (i.e., not a basic stock photo), they can suck in a skimmer.
Being your own toughest critic will help you create great content that will win over your readers.
But it’s hard to criticize yourself sometimes, and it’s easy to give yourself the benefit of the doubt.
I recommend going through this list of questions for all the content you’re about to publish. It ensures that you don’t skip over a glaring weakness that needs to be improved.
Keep in mind that this is a list of the essentials. You may have other things you want to ask yourself before you publish something in order to ensure a high standard of content.
may Google puke with FCS networker
The term “content marketing” is a wide umbrella.
It encompasses a plethora of different strategies and techniques.
But at the end of the day, one of your primary goals is to create content that ranks as highly as possible on search engine results pages (SERPs).
This is important because organic traffic is the number one means of generating traffic for many companies.
A study from The Bright Edge even “found that organic search drives 51 percent of all visitors to B2B and B2C websites trumping all other non-organic channels.”
This means one thing.
You need to figure out the relationship between content marketing strategies and keyword rankings.
This is instrumental in fine-tuning your content marketing campaign and finding the right areas to focus on.
In this post, I analyze data from multiple studies and draw on my own knowledge and experience to give you a clear idea of the content strategies demanding the most attention.
So, let’s see which strategies have the biggest impact on keyword rankings.
I won’t waste your time telling you about the importance of creating quality content.
You already know that.
But I’d like to share with you this statistic from an infographic on Quick Sprout:
That’s a lot of links!
And I’m sure you know the integral role links play in SEO.
This graph from Moz illustrates the importance of links and their influence on Google’s algorithm:
Let’s put this information together.
When you create rich content, it gets you more links.
These links improve your overall SEO, which improves your rankings.
So, being diligent about achieving and maintaining rigorous quality standards should be of the utmost concern.
Here’s the deal with long-form content.
It’s hot right now. Scorching hot.
I remember a few years ago when your average blog post was only somewhere around 500 words.
But if you look at the vast majority of content that ranks on page one of Google SERPs today, it’s rare that you’ll find anything under 1,000 words.
To prove just how important long-form has become, I would like to show you a couple of graphs.
The first is from a fairly old (September 2012) article I wrote on Quick Sprout.
I got the data from research performed by SerpIQ:
As you can see, every single piece of content that ranked on the first page had at least 2,000 words.
More specifically,
The first result typically has 2,416 words and the 10th result has 2,032 words.
Newer research (September 2016) from Brian Dean of Backlinko shows a similar pattern:
According to his research,
The average word count of a Google first page result is 1,890.
That’s over 500 words fewer than the original research from SerpIQ indicated back in 2012…526 to be exact.
But it still shows us long-form content is a key element in achieving solid rankings.
Why is this so?
The way I look at it, there are two main reasons for this phenomenon.
First, people have a tendency to scan through content these days.
Few actually sit down and read a 2,000-word piece word for word in its entirety.
Instead, they scan through and look at the sub-headers that grab their attention and may read little snippets of text from there.
Long-form content facilitates this new method of reading.
Second, a longer word count tends to translate into more links.
And this makes sense.
The more content you provide, the more opportunities for it to be linked to.
Put all this together, and you can see that long-form content means higher rankings.
Who knows, the whole “long-form content bubble” may pop in a few years.
But it’s stronger than ever at the moment.
However, it appears that the ideal word count has been reduced considerably, and you should aim for just south of 2,000 words.
How do you create 2,000-word content?
You should never stuff your articles with words just for the sake of hitting a word count.
But you should strive for detail, depth, clarity, and mastery of a subject matter.
Here’s what I’ve discovered about long-form content. When you truly make an effort to provide value in your content, it expands in length.
That’s not to say that you can’t provide value with a 400-word article.
But the level of value created in a 2,000-word article is usually much greater.
But the plot thickens.
The same Backlinko article also points out that
content rated as “topically relevant” significantly outperformed content that didn’t cover a topic in-depth. Therefore, publishing focused content that covers a single topic may help with rankings.
Topical relevance basically combines my first two points of creating rich content and long-form content.
It simply means that Google values content that’s comprehensive and that thoroughly covers a topic.
This means it’s best to focus on a single topic for each piece of content you create.
Rather than bouncing around from subject to subject, you’re better off going all in on a single topic and leaving no stone unturned.
Does this mean you can’t discuss other topics?
No. In fact, you should touch on as many relevant topics as possible! But your focus should be on a single topic.
If you feel you need to cover a topic you weren’t able to get around to in the post, create a separate piece of content and cover it in-depth as well.
This strategy has been in existence seemingly since the dawn of SEO—back when SEO was in its primordial soup stage.
One of the main ways small-scale marketers have been competing with the big dogs is by using long-tail keywords.
And why wouldn’t they? It freaking works.
In fact, I’ve been using this strategy for years.
I even used it to grow my search traffic by 51% in just three months!
And guess what? It still works brilliantly.
An infographic from Adept states that “pages optimized for long-tail keywords move up 11 positions on average, compared to just 5 positions for head keywords.”
It’s really not rocket science.
Using long-tail keywords means less competition, which means a greater likelihood of achieving a favorable ranking.
The awesome thing is that long-tail searches account for roughly 70 percent of searches:
This means there’s plenty of opportunity out there.
Of course, you won’t get the same volume of traffic that you would for a head keyword or broad keyword, but you can still generate some sizable traffic if you do your keyword research and choose a phrase that receives a reasonable number of searches.
Check out this post from NeilPatel.com for a step-by-step walkthrough of integrating long-tail keywords into your blog posts.
The process is fairly straightforward:
If you haven’t heard, people respond positively to images.
It’s true.
And although I think the whole visual-centric discussion has been done to death, I would like to reference one more point from the Backlinko article I mentioned earlier.
According to Brian Dean,
Industry studies have found that image-rich pages tend to generate more total views and social shares.
But here’s the interesting thing.
Using at least one image is much better than not using any images at all.
However, they couldn’t find a correlation between the total number of images and rankings.
That means there’s no proof that using a lot of images will improve your rankings any further.
In other words, using just one image would in theory have the same effect as using 10 or more images.
The key takeaway is this:
Using a single image is clearly better than zero images. Including lots of images doesn’t seem to have an impact on search engine rankings.
When it comes to my posts, this information isn’t going to stop me from sprinkling plenty of images throughout my content.
In fact, you probably know that many of my posts are jam-packed with images.
I think my audience enjoys the “eye candy,” and graphs in particular are excellent for explaining fairly complex concepts.
But keep this in mind when creating your next piece of content: going nuts with images probably isn’t necessary.
If you’re not sure what I mean by “direct answers,” it’s simple.
Google is now starting to show direct answers when you use a “how to,” “what is,” “who is,” etc. type of search.
Here’s an example:
The first thing that pops up at the top of the page is a clip from the top ranking site.
It’s a way to streamline the process and offer searchers direct information without them having to actually click on the link.
Of course, oftentimes they’ll still click on the link to find more in-depth information.
I know I often do.
So, here’s the deal.
Providing a direct answer can be beneficial and a viable strategy for killing it on SERPs.
If you can provide a quick, logical, and direct answer, especially for a long-tail keyword phrase, there’s a good chance you can get your content featured at the top.
Just be sure your direct answer transitions smoothly into the rest of your content.
Here’s how I typically use this strategy:
When I follow this three-step process, the articles I write on those topics usually rank on page one for the associated keyword within five days or less.
This is the primary technique I’m currently using on NeilPatel.com, and it’s earned me over 800,000 unique monthly visitors.
I value objectivity when determining the approach of my content marketing strategy.
I find that examining the cold hard facts clears most biases and preconceived notions I might have.
This is important because this gives me the clearest path to achieving my goals.
While there are countless factors that contribute to keyword rankings, the ones I listed here appear to have the biggest impact pound-for-pound.
Putting your attention on these key areas should ensure that your content marketing is heading in the right direction while giving you the best chance of climbing in the SERPs.
Content marketing can be a soul-crushing endeavor.
It’s like this. You spend several hours or maybe even days meticulously putting together what seems like a brilliant blog post, slideshow, infographic, etc.
But even with all your hard work and dedication, your content falls on deaf ears.
You post it on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and any other network you can think of, but there’s no reaction.
Maybe you get a handful of shares, but your content never gains any momentum.
Are you alone?
Nope.
Here’s the deal.
There’s a lot of content that gets published every day. I mean a lot!
Just take a look at the skyrocketing number of blog posts published on WordPress between 2006 and 2016:
And according to BuzzSumo, “The number of pages Google has indexed over 7 years from 2008 to 2014 has increased from 1 trillion to 30 trillion.
This means one thing: more competition.
As more and more content gets created, it results in more “noise,” which inevitably makes it harder to bring attention to your content.
Here’s the most disturbing stat of all from the American Marketing Association:
“Marketers are blogging 800 percent more but getting nearly 100 percent fewer shares.”
Here’s what that looks like:
This isn’t exactly encouraging if content marketing is one of your primary means of advertising.
So, how can you get your content in front of your audience?
More importantly, can you amplify its reach without digging into your budget?
It all starts with an effective content amplification strategy.
You need to implement tactics that ensure your content attracts two key things: shares and links.
These are the foundation of content amplification.
I would now like to discuss five techniques I have personally had success with, which—if done correctly—can work for you too.
Let’s start from the top.
I’ll begin by going over a couple forms of content I’ve found to receive an insane number of shares and links.
After all, the first step to amplifying your reach is to create content people are genuinely interested in.
This is a natural catalyst for shares and links.
One type of content in particular that kills it is content that includes original research.
By this I mean statistics, graphs, charts, and other forms of data that provide readers with in-depth insight on a topic.
One particular piece of content I really love and have linked to on several occasions is this one from OkDork: Why Content Goes Viral: What Analyzing 100 Million Articles Taught Us
Noah Kagan (the creator of OkDork) partnered with BuzzSumo to analyze 100 million articles to determine things like:
Here are a couple of graphs to illustrate the point:
It’s incredibly thorough and well-written and has received a lot of attention as a result.
I’ve also noticed that sites such as The Content Marketing Institute and ConversionXL that provide users with consistent original research perform very well.
I’ve been doing this myself, mining data that has never been collected before and turning it into actionable marketing tactics.
Some of it is super technical data.
But it always has value. And that’s the whole goal!
I realize that performing your own research can be time-consuming and expensive, but it can really pay dividends in the long run.
I suggest incorporating this into your content strategy.
Readers will inevitably have questions.
The resource that answers those questions most effectively is usually the one that gets their attention, which is often followed by shares and links.
You can amplify your reach by being the one who creates the best, most thorough, and most exhaustive guide.
Typically, this will come in one of two formats: “what is” or “how to” guide.
Your goal is to use your knowledge and expertise to walk readers through a step-by-step process, answering any questions they may have along the way.
Here’s an example.
I wrote a long-form article on neilpatel.com called SEO Made Simple: A Step-By-Step Guide.
It covers most aspects of SEO and walks readers through them in a way that’s easy to follow.
I was sure to provide lots of examples, data, screenshots, etc. to provide them with the most comprehensive explanation I could.
The end result was that it received a boatload of shares and links.
Here are the numbers for shares on different platfroms as of February 2017:
I’m not showing you these numbers to brag. I want to highlight the impact creating this type of content can have.
Whatever your niche may be, you can usually amplify your reach by creating be-all and end-all guides like this.
Another strategy I’ve been using for a while involves choosing the topics for my articles based on what’s trending at the moment in my industry.
Although this may not have the longevity of evergreen content and get you shares for years to come, it is a viable strategy for quickly amplifying your immediate reach.
Here’s the logic behind this technique:
But how do you know what’s hot at the moment?
Well, there are several ways to tell:
It’s quite easy. Just enter a topic in the search box. I’ll use “SEO marketing” as an example.
Here’s what pops up:
Just like that, I can see what the most popular content is based on metrics such as social shares and engagements.
I then use that information to base my next piece of content on.
The likelihood of that content “sticking” and reaching my audience increases considerably as opposed to the content I might come up with off the top of my head.
To learn more about how to use BuzzSumo to generate content ideas, I suggest reading this post from Moz.
I feel like many content marketers think it’s a good idea to post every single piece of content they create on every platform they can get their hands on.
And I get it.
You’ve worked hard and are trying to get as many eyeballs on your content as possible.
But here’s the cold truth. The bulk of content of most brands isn’t overly impressive.
Usually only a fraction is super-interesting.
In other words, not every piece of content is a unicorn. The majority are donkeys.
But you want to post “unicorn content.”
Now, I’m not saying you should share only one blog post out of 20.
But you should maintain rigorous quality standards when choosing what to post on social media.
If someone does click on an article that’s clearly sub-par and reeks of mediocrity, two things are going to happen:
By being selective and sharing only the best of the best on social media, you can uphold your quality standards, which should amplify your reach.
Only share content worthy of unicorn status, and you should be good to go.
All right, you’re probably getting sick of hearing about “the power of influencer marketing” and all that jazz.
I feel like it’s a topic that’s been done to death at this point.
But the fact is that getting your content featured by a key influencer or even having them give you a subtle nod can amplify your reach dramatically.
Here’s a quick example.
I like Tim Ferriss’ website The Four Hour Workweek.
I like to read his blog, listen to his podcast, and get his take on things. He’s an all around interesting guy, and I think his content is jam-packed with value.
He recently featured a guy who goes by the name “Mr. Money Mustache.”
Long story short, this guy has a blog about how he and his family live a comfortable lifestyle with annual expenses of no more than $27,000.
He tackles topics such as frugal living, efficiency, achieving happiness, and so on.
His content interested me, so I checked out quite a bit of his site.
I had never heard of “Mr. Money Mustache” up until that point, but being featured on Tim Ferriss’ site gave him instant credibility in my eyes, and I was interested in what he had to say.
I mean if Tim gave him his seal of approval, he must be legit. Right?
But if I simply came across his site on my own, I doubt I would give it the time of day.
The point I’m trying to make here is that having your content featured by influencers can take you from zero to hero insanely quickly.
I won’t give you a step-by-step guide to influencer marketing right here. But I will point out a few helpful resources on this topic:
6 Ways to Get Influencers to Link to You
The Ultimate Guide to Writing Epic Content That Will Go Viral
Getting someone influential in your industry to share your content is your ace in the hole.
Content amplification is a way to increase the reach of your content, delivering it to more of your audience.
With such an ungodly mass of content already out there and piles of it being produced every day, content amplification has never been more important than today.
Using the strategies I discussed above should help you amplify your reach without having to dig deep into your pockets.
This should also minimize the numbing sense of disillusionment that so many content marketers feel these days when their content falls flat.
Your content will go further, and your brand equity will continue to grow at the same time.
how I went to number one on Google for a competitive term by just getting people to click my page
may Google puke with FCS networker
I’m not going to lecture you.
You already know that content marketing can be a very successful form of marketing.
You also know that producing great content takes a lot of time or money, sometimes both.
But there’s something that you might not know, at least not for sure.
Just because a piece of content gets thousands of views or hundreds of social shares doesn’t mean that it produced a positive return on investment (ROI).
You could spend $100,000 on the most spectacular piece of content on how to pet a cat. It’s very unlikely that it would ever make you anywhere close to that amount back.
Content marketing is only effective if it’s profitable.
From what I see and hear, only a small fraction of marketers actually achieve a significantly positive ROI with their content.
That’s a HUGE problem.
While there’s a lot of factors that contribute to your ROI, I’m going to assume you have the basics of content marketing down.
That allows me to show you 7 different ways to maximize your content’s ROI.
If you apply even a few of these tactics, you can take your content from a break-even or slightly negative ROI to a healthy, positive ROI.
Achieving this will allow you to ramp up your content production in a sustainable way.
A common mistake I see is people creating a piece of content and then trying to promote it everywhere.
I’m talking Facebook, Twitter, forums, Reddit, and any number of other marketing channels.
The reason why this is a mistake is that audiences on different channels and platforms within those channels typically behave very differently from each other.
Content that may be very popular on one channel isn’t necessarily going to do well on another channel.
That makes a shotgun approach for promotion a waste of your time, and it’s going to kill your ROI.
The solution? Get specific: You need to find 1-3 channels where your content does best.
For Quick Sprout, I use mainly Facebook and Twitter, along with my email list.
Ideally, you want to identify these channels before you even create your content. Then, you can tailor everything, including the topic, angle, and title just for those specific audiences.
Here’s your practical takeaway: Stop promoting your content on every place you can think of—you’re wasting your time. Focus on the sites that send you the most visitors for your time, effort, and money.
How do you pick a channel to focus on? Analyze your past content, and determine the number of visitors or subscribers you got from each channel. Create a simple table, like this one, for each piece of content to measure your results:
Then, divide the sales (or subscribers, or metric of your choice) by the time it cost you to get a return per hour metric.
You will see that certain channels vastly outperform others.
As you may know, there are 2 types of content…
Evergreen content, which stays relevant for years (possibly for the foreseeable future) and non-evergreen content, which will go out of date in the near future.
You’ll probably end up creating both types of content.
The main downside of non-evergreen content is that once you get the initial value out of it, it fades into irrelevance and won’t help your business much.
However, you can essentially erase this negative effect by continuously updating your content.
It’s something that Brian Dean does very well; you should follow his example.
For example, he created an incredibly thorough guide to SEO tools:
He updates this guide on a regular basis.
Why is updating so important? Updates are all about the reader. They make the content much more valuable.
SEO tools come and go all the time.
If you look at other lists of SEO tools that are a few years old, you’ll see that most of the tools listed there are either ineffective these days or no longer available. Plus, they are missing some great tools that were recently released.
While Brian isn’t ranking #1 for “SEO tools” in Google, he ranks very highly, and I expect his rankings will continue to rise (it’s a tough keyword):
Google is going to see that users find his guide the most useful, and it will be promoted.
Updating has a few other side benefits.
First, it allows you to keep promoting your content. Usually, you publish something and then you go all out on promoting it for a week or two.
After that, you probably have a bit of anxiety doing more promotion because you feel like your content already isn’t that “fresh.”
If you update your content, it allows you to send a quick Tweet or email to people who have enjoyed it before, letting them know you’ve added a few cool tidbits (like new tools for Brian). That’ll get you extra shares and links.
Finally, a lot of things influence what your readers will share with their friends and communities.
Mainly, they want to share things that make them look good. That’s why they rarely share old content, which is probably not applicable anymore. But if you keep updating your content on a regular basis, visitors will have no problem sharing it far past your first publish date.
I’ll let you in on a little secret:
Most of your ROI is going to come from your content promotion.
While great content is a good start, it’s nothing without a substantial amount of promotion.
Some top marketers, like Derek Halpern, even spend up to 80% of their time promoting content (the other 20% on creating it).
But here’s the problem: Even if you do a great promotional push for a week or two, your traffic will spike but then quickly die down.
I guarantee that you haven’t reached even a fraction of the people that could benefit from your content during that time frame.
There’s no rule that says that you can promote only new content.
If you want to maximize your ROI, you likely need to spend more time promoting your old content as well.
For starters, you can simply repost your content on social media and forums every once in awhile.
Additionally, you can set up Google Alerts to let you know when anyone is talking about the topic you wrote about. You can then pop in and suggest they visit your guide.
On top of those, most promotional tactics are still viable. Very few don’t work simply because your content was published a month or two ago.
This is where creating great content gets really tricky.
Generally, I’m a supporter of creating truly “epic” content.
But it’s not always a good idea.
Sometimes, making your content better will leave you with a worse ROI.
The reason behind this is pretty simple. To design custom images and layouts, it takes a lot of time and/or money.
Even the table of contents for my advance guides (in the sidebar) cost a ton to make:
At some point, you may have a piece of content that’s really good. If you spend another $100 on a custom image, will that bring you more than $100 later on?
That’s the question, and it’s a tough one.
When do you stop improving content? It’s going to vary in every case, but I’ll get as specific as possible.
Let’s start with a fundamental principle: your content should be better than that of all your competitors.
If it isn’t, you’ll be lucky to achieve any positive ROI at all.
The better your content is, the more it stands out from the rest:
But you reach a limit.
Once your content is significantly better than all the other content on that subject, readers can’t tell when it gets even better.
Readers determine the quality of your content in large part by comparing it to others. So, even if you improve your already-better content, in the eyes of most readers, it’s still just “better” than the rest.
If there’s no significant difference in perception, there won’t be a significant difference in your return. And since you spent more to improve your content, that means your ROI declined.
Your practical takeaway: Make your content significantly better than your competition’s, and then stop. Any further improvements will be costly and your ROI will likely decrease.
Of course, you should test this yourself, but that’s a good rule of thumb to follow.
The one exception to the rule: I mentioned my ultimate guides before. These obviously broke the rule because I went way above and beyond what was already out there.
I did this for one main reason: So that no one could come in later and create something significantly better.
These guides have driven hundreds of thousands of visits to my site since being published. Even though they are years old, no one has comprehensively been able to create content that “beats” them.
They allow my site to retain its position as the leader in each of those areas and deliver constant traffic even now.
If you know that a piece of content has the potential to deliver a large volume of traffic (usually through SEO) for years, and that others will try to create better content than yours, you can take this route.
Alternatively, you could just upgrade your content as others catch up and hope that none of them create a guide like this that you can’t really beat.
I told you earlier that Facebook is an important channel for Quick Sprout.
But if you’ve used Facebook for your business, you know that the organic reach percentage—the number of your fans who see your posts—is dismal:
If you rely only on organic traffic on most social channels, you’re missing out on a lot of reach.
But a lot of marketers, especially newer ones, hate advertising. If you’re a strict inbound marketer, you might not want to tap into outbound marketing options.
But outbound (“interruption” in the picture) marketing and inbound marketing do not need to be exclusive.
You can use both of them at the same time to promote a piece of content. And when you find the right combination, you can see big gains to your ROI.
It’s the first word in ROI: return.
If you have no way to make money, no content will have a positive ROI.
It’s absolutely essential that you have some sort of sales funnel in place, ending with some sort of product (or alternative monetization method) for visitors and subscribers to buy.
Most of what I’ve written in this post focuses on your content and promotion, but just as important is what happens after.
Have you optimized your email marketing? Do you have a clear path to generating revenue from visitors?
If you don’t, you need to.
Doubling the conversion rate at any point near the bottom of your sales funnel is an easy way to double the ROI of all your content.
Here’s a good starting point to optimizing your sales funnel.
Your ROI for a piece of content is determined based on a variety of factors.
You need to understand how to calculate your ROI and then measure it for every piece of content you produce.
If you don’t measure it, there’s no way to try different content creation and promotion techniques and see which ones actually improve your ROI.
Good marketers continually refine their content marketing strategies and find incremental improvement.
Content marketing can be a great tool in your marketing arsenal.
But only if it actually makes your business more than you spend on creating it (aka a positive ROI).
I encourage you to test the ways to maximize your ROI I just showed you. In most cases, you’ll see a significant bump in your ROI.
how I went to number one on Google for a competitive term by just getting people to click my page
