Unlike most forms of marketing, which usually have a single goal, content marketing campaigns can have a variety of different objectives.
They can be geared towards generating leads and attracting new customers, earning coverage in newspapers and on top websites, or even establishing yourself or – your brand – as a leader in its category.
One of the most common marketing objectives of content marketing is link building. By creating content that’s newsworthy, educational, helpful, interesting or remarkable, you can attract links from other writers and content creators that have a huge positive effect on your SEO.
Luckily, standing out isn’t as difficult as it may seem. In fact, creating content that attracts high quality links naturally is far less challenging than it appears. All it takes is a little bit of creative thinking and the right approach to research, content creation and promotion.
Below, we’ve listed winning strategies that you can use to write (or create, in the case of audio, visual and video) content that other bloggers, journalists and writers can’t help but want to link to!
1. Be the best in your category
Given the choice between sharing “8 Cute Puppy GIFs” and “The 21 Cutest Puppy GIFs You’ll Ever See,” most people will pick the second. It’s longer, contains more content and even has a more intriguing title than the first option.
When people search for list-oriented keywords like “ways to train your dog,” then tend to click on the longest, most detailed examples. This is because comprehensive, attention-grabbing search results achieve the highest CTR, even if they aren’t ranked first in Google’s SERPs.
One of the most effective ways to generate links is to create content that’s the biggest, the best and the most authoritative in its category.
If your competitors have blog posts entitled “10 Tips for Cleaning Your Rug” and “The 7 Easiest Ways to Clean a Rug” that rank well and attract links, create an even more authoritative piece of content by listing more ways to achieve the same goal.
This method is called the Skyscraper Technique. The idea is to build content that resembles the tallest building in the city skyline – the tower that everyone will notice.
It’s an analogy that works. Many people know that the world’s tallest building is the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Far fewer people know the name of the world’s second-tallest building – the Shanghai Tower.
Imagine you’re a pet blogger looking for great resources to add to your weekly roundup. To find content that’s relevant to your audience, you search for “best dog treats” on Google and see the following results:
- “The 21 Best Dog Treats for Making Your Pet Feel Great”
- “Our 5 Favorite Dog Treats”
- “10 Great Dog Treats Your Pet Will Love”
Given the choice between these three resources, which would you link to? Since most people value longer, more comprehensive content as the best option, the first web page – which lists 21 dog treats instead of five or 10 – is the most likely to earn a link.
2. Simplify a complicated process
The current trend in content marketing is towards longer, more detailed content. Because of data indicating that longer content ranks better than shorter content, many content marketers aim to write the longest, most detailed content in their industry.
This is often a good thing. A guide to a DIY electronics project or business process needs a lot of detail, so long content is a great fit. But it’s also created a huge amount of content that’s just too detailed, lengthy and intensive for its target audience.
Very few people will find any value in a 5,000 word guide to baking cupcakes. Even fewer can find value in a 10,000 word guide to changing a flat tire. When people search for an answer to an easy, straightforward question, they’re not always happy to find an ultimate guide.
This creates an opportunity. If your industry is flooded with guides that are needlessly long and detailed, you can stand out from the crowd and attract attention by creating content that’s short, simple and to the point.
eHow is a great example of this strategy in action. Its content is short, focused and heavy not on text, but on images and helpful video content. The content is designed to deliver its point quickly and efficiently, without any fluff or unnecessary detail.
As a result of its simple, helpful content, eHow is one of the world’s most popular websites, with an Alexa rank of 603 in the United States and almost 10 million backlinks:
This method might seem to contradict the Skyscraper Technique, but it’s actually designed for a different purpose:
- If your industry is full of short content that doesn’t adequately answer people’s questions, build the best, most detailed content you can.
- If your industry is full of long, overly detailed content, simplify and create a resource that anyone can access in minutes.
It’s all about standing out. Sometimes the best way to stand out is to deliver a long, helpful post that answers every question. In other cases:
3. Create “reference content”
You may have noticed we’ve linked to several references throughout this content to back up our key points. We linked to a page about the Skyscraper Technique to explain how it works, and to a post on Search Engine Land about the link between long content and rankings.
This is a common practice for bloggers and journalists – linking to references that contain useful information, original data or compelling arguments. Great links strengthen a blog post and give it a more authoritative feel, since every fact and figure is backed up by real data.
One of the easiest ways to passively generate links to your content is to give facts, figures and other data that other bloggers can use to back up their arguments.
This is “reference content” – content that’s designed specifically to act as an authoritative fact or statement on a particular topic. Reference content works best for link building when a topic isn’t completely agreed upon, and when data can help a writer make a more compelling case.
For example, there’s debate among marketers over whether bounce rate affects organic search rankings. As a result, whenever a marketing blogger discusses bounce rate, they inevitably link to one of the top-ranked posts for keywords like “bounce rate and SEO.”
Whenever a political pundit writes a piece about an upcoming election, they’ll link to original poll data. Whenever a health blogger shares a new ingredient or supplement that improves physical health and performance, they’ll link to a study, statistic or case study showing its effectiveness.
Even Wikipedia, one of the world’s most authoritative websites, is built around citing useful data from studies and essays. Here’s the page for content marketing, with every reference in the first paragraph highlighted:
If your content makes a compelling, evergreen point, it might continue to attract links for years after it’s published. Provide useful reference data and you’ll attract links from bloggers, writers, marketers, forum users, “facts” websites and other sources for a very long time.
4. Be unique, controversial and remarkable
As the old saying goes, “any publicity is good publicity.”
Since people tend to share content that’s striking, unique and interesting, controversy, from an SEO perspective, works. If you have a controversial opinion, a unique and bizarre product, or something remarkable to share, it could be a fantastic way to build links.
For many years, SEOs have been using linkbait – content that’s deliberately designed to attract attention and create controversy – to earn great backlinks from intrigued bloggers and surprised journalists.
Early linkbait was somewhat crude, as can be seen in the examples former head of webspam at Google Matt Cutts shares on his blog here. But today’s linkbait is genius, attracting links not just by being controversial, but by being unique and remarkable.
Take the website Ship Your Enemies Glitter, which earned links from the Guardian, Time and other global media publications just a few days after it was published. Or OkCupid’s politics test, which went wildly viral during the lead up to the 2008 Presidential Election:
If you can create content that intrigues, surprises, shocks, offends or inspires, there’s a distinct possibility it will encourage discussion and generate links. Just make sure not to aim for a topic that could potentially damage your brand.
5. Create an Outline
Creating an outline is a GREAT first step in the content writing process. Outlines help your content come out better for two main reasons:
First, outlines force you to put all your thoughts down in an organized way (rather than writing everything off the top of your head). Which really speeds up the writing process.
Second, outlines usually lead to a much better structure for your content. That’s because an outline lets you see your content from a “high level” that’s impossible to see as you’re writing.
Plus, because you have an outline, your final content will hit all of the major points that you set out to before you started writing. So: how do you actually go about creating an effective outline?
Here are three main strategies that work well:
- Use a previous piece of content that did well.
So when we start working on a new guide, we use a lot of the structure from our existing guides as a base.
- Use a template: Most professional content writers work off of proven templates. Here are 5 content templates you can use to create outlines.
- Use top-performing content: Check out BuzzSumo to find popular content that you can use as the basis for your outline.
6. Make it easy to consume and share
Content that’s super easy to read and share is of the keys to great content. You can have a post written by the world’s top copywriter. But if that post is hard for people to consume, no one will read it..
7. Keep it snappy, rich and entertaining
Whether you’re writing about content creation or cars, your writing needs to grab (and keep) people’s attention. Otherwise, they’ll click over to something else.
How you grab someone’s attention depends on the format you’re working with.
And if you’re about to sit down and record some audio, you want your lines to be short and snappy. You also want to avoid parenthetical statements. Content in parenthesis is easy to follow when you’re reading it. But you can easily “lose the thread” if you’re listening to your audio as a podcast.
8. Quotable on social media
According to a study that we conducted, very few blog posts get shared or linked to. And to increase the odds that your content ranks in search engines and gets shared on social media, add shareable quotes.
For text-based content, this can be a statement that you highlight in your post. And if you’re making a YouTube video, you can pull out a short snippet from that video to share on LinkedIn.
The important thing here is to have these quotes ready before you publish the post. Then, highlight them in your content.
9. Choose interesting angles
With 2.3 million blog posts going live every day, you can’t just publish something generic and expect a wave of visitors. Instead, to get traffic to your content, it needs a compelling angle.
An angle is simply the hook that makes your content stand out from all the others on that topic. Your angle can be a personal story. A bit of controversy. Or something that simply looks better than what’s out there.
The angle you go with depends on your target audience. For example, when we published our guide to becoming an SEO expert, our 8-bit design helped it stand out.
10. Make it actionable
For most niches, your content can’t just be entertaining. And it’s not even enough for it to simply be informative. For your content marketing to work, your content needs to be super useful.
Here’s how:
- Include a step-by-step process: Most content out there is just a list of things you compiled from other people’s lists of things. When you organize a set of tips or techniques into steps, your content instantly becomes much easier to take action on.
It’s not a collection of random tips. This content is a step-by-step action plan that anyone can follow.
- Use examples: Examples make your content easier to put into practice. Which is why we pack our content with real life examples.
- Keep it up-to-date: A single outdated step or example can derail an otherwise great piece.
11. Make it trustworthy
For people to share and link to your content, they need to trust it first. And while design factors in to how much people trust your content, your writing plays a big role too.
Here are a few tips to make your content more trustworthy.
- Use proper grammar: If you want to improve your writing skills, a tool like Hemingway Editor or Grammarly can be a huge help.
- Do your homework: Research and references show that you know what you’re talking about.
For example, whenever we write a guide, we add lots of stats and references.
- First-hand experience: Report on things you have personal experience with. Why? Content written by subject matter experts is super rare. Unfortunately, most people hire random freelance writers on Upwork. And it shows. But when you write content that shows off your actual experience, your content is much easier for a random visitor to trust.
