If you want to be successful in content marketing, there's only one real path to success: shares. People have to share your content with other people in order to get a significant number of views and engagement. In this context, I'm using the term "share" generally, referring both to the "social shares" of someone posting your material on social media, and "sharing" your material as a citation or reference, including inbound links. Collectively, links and social shares can build your audience, improve your brand reputation, and increase your website's domain authority so it ranks higher in search engines.
There's just one problem--shares are increasingly hard to get. By some reports, only about 25 percent of all content produced ends up getting any likes or shares at all. This is partially due to oversaturation of content in the online world, and partially due to a misconception that more content is always a good thing, regardless of quality. If you want your content to be a part of that 25 percent, or an even higher percentile that gets shared more often, you'll have to adopt qualities and tactics that make those pieces unique.
Achieving "Exceptional" Content
Your goal here isn't necessarily to reach a certain milestone, like achieving a certain degree of thoroughness or writing a certain number of words. Your goal is to be exceptional, because only exceptional content gets shared. Think about the term "exceptional" literally--it implies that a piece is an exception to the rule, or otherwise stands apart from its contemporaries. It's no longer enough to have a "good" piece of content--you have to be better than the other pieces already out there.
Types of Content
To start, you should know that some types of content get shared more than others. These content formats aren't automatic gateways to more shares, so don't think of them that way; instead, view them as rough templates that can get you started in a certain direction, just as the genre of a film should have no influence on its overall quality:
- Original research. These pieces tend to be reports, whitepapers, case studies, or other analyses that present and discuss the findings of research that hasn't been done before.
Key Qualities
Now comes the "exceptional" part. If you want your piece to get noticed, no matter what format it is, you need to exhibit the following qualities, at a minimum:
- Originality. If I had to pick one quality more important than any of the others, this would be it. If you aren't original, you aren't going to stand out, and that means people aren't going to share your piece. Your topic needs to be unexplored, your voice needs to be unique, and you need to have at least one surprise in store for your readers.
Further reading: