We live in an era when a huge portion of our lives takes place online. There is virtually nothing you can’t do on the Internet and there is almost an endless source of information and content to choose from. For example, it’s estimated that on average, Americans used more than 2.5 million GB of internet data every minute in 2017 and that there were more than 3.5 million Google searches a minute every day. If you add that there are around 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created each day, you can start to wrap your head around this amazing virtual reality we live in. Now, if you are someone who tries to be seen in this whole mess, you have to offer something different to your customers, you have to stand out from a literally incomprehensible amount of information and you have to do it without resorting to dirty tricks and dark arts of marketing. Content is what makes your website what it is, and it is one of the most important branding strategies. It is one of the most important aspects of a page and it can even make or break your business, but it is often easily overlooked and not given enough attention. We are going to set things straight here and now.
What is High-Quality Content Anyway?
In order to provide high-quality content to your potential customers, you first have to know what quality means. What does quality mean to you and what does it mean to your users. In other words, quality is a subjective category, not universal, so you have to keep in mind not only your vision of what it means to be high-quality but even more importantly your user’s view of the same question. A big influence on the quality of your content comes from the choice of the topic. The topics you chose to bring closer to your users have to be something of their interest, not only something that you think might be worth writing about. Besides making the content interesting, engaging and relevant, you still have to think about the value it brings to the end user. A piece of content with the sole purpose of entertainment isn’t going to attract much of a following, which means that you have to make it original, with plenty of research to back it up and sources cited as they should be. With this in mind, good content is not necessarily long and hard to read, filled with long words and mind-blowing statistics and data. Although these things help, if your audience is not up to it, you have to think about if what you are offering them might be a bit too much, and tone it down a bit if needed. While great content comes a long way, it can’t do it on its own. If you do everything right, research your audience, set an interesting topic, make it fun and informative, but then just leave it online and hope to collect some followers, you might as well not have done it at all. Without a proper follow-up and without further engaging the audience through social media or through some other means, your content still might be doomed to failure. Increasingly, great content means producing engaging videos, which can be a costly endeavor if the video itself is not properly produced, optimized, and distributed. For this, it is advisable to go through a list of video production agencies and partner with the one that really suits you and your brand the most. It is important to work closely with them so as to avoid any possible misrepresentations of your brand.
A Waste of Time or an Investment?
High-quality content can be seen by some as a big waste of time. It requires a lot of resources, it’s time-consuming and at first, it looks like there is no effect on your overall success online. Furthermore, there is a bunch of people just waiting for funny content, with no engagement to it, to be thrown to their faces. It’s easy to swallow, it saves both your and your users’ time, so why not exploit this (seemingly win-win) situation?
Quality means evergreen
Do you ever think about why people still listen to Frank Sinatra or The Beatles, but hardly anyone remembers that one song from that guy that was really popular in 2014? The same goes for your content. If you want people to remember you and to keep coming back for more of the same than quality is the best way to stand out in the boundless sea of information.
Create value for visitors
Once you know your audience, you can pitch them anything that has proven to be of their interest, and once your audience knows that they can find the content of their interest on your website, you will have their hearts for good. By offering useful information and answering questions that your readers might have, you create a valuable source that can improve the sharing of your content, increase the level of engagement of your visitors and even increase conversion rates for your website. Transform link building into link earning. To an untrained eye, these two things might sound the same, but in the game of digital marketing, these two have a profound impact on how your website will perform and how many readers you will attract. It’s so important that it needs to have a separate subtitle just for itself.
The Sacred Art of Link Building
The importance of proper linking in your posts cannot be stressed enough. However, in a research conducted by BuzzSumo, it was shown that more than 70% of blogs failed to generate any backlinks at all to their domain. This means that all the work and time you invest might be wasted after all if only one piece of the puzzle doesn’t fit. Before you start building an intertwined network of links on your own, you first need to know whether you’ve got what it takes. Are you a natural born link builder or should you just let someone else do the job for you? Do you have the anatomy of a link builder?
Do you have the skillset?
Are you equipped with the technical requirements needed to be able to form natural and organic connections through the web? If you think that you are, then ask yourself if you are a PR and content marketing expert who at the same time knows at least one or two programming languages? If your answer is still a yes, you have the right man for the job.
Creative and original
You are either born creative or you’re not. Yes, you can learn how to be creative, but nothing beats the raw talent of natural born creative writers who can present an original piece of content with a different approach, but with even better results.
Trendy
While a link builder isn’t necessarily a good dresser, he is the one who always watches the news, reads relevant blogs and regularly visits forums. A great link builder knows that technology is advancing at a tremendous pace, and he tries to keep up with it as best as possible.
Link Building vs Link Earning
The aim of both link building or earning is the same – to form connections and backlinks in order to increase traffic and ultimately conversion. While link building is a legitimate way of doing this, the game is shifting more and more towards link earning, and while they both have the same goal, they have a completely opposite approach.
Link building
This is a practice of basically manually promoting your website and making your backlink portfolio as strong as possible. Once all the work is done, your website is up, your social media marketing is on the way and you start promoting your page, your goal would be to attract as many backlinks as possible by any means necessary. However, this can sometimes lead to some very clumsy constructions and even to spammy content which will only hurt your website instead of attracting followers and upgrading ranking.
Natural link building
In the modern era of marketing, it’s all about making those connections as natural as possible and making links reasonable and logical. Not all links are created equal. It’s not all about making that link and creating that connection just for the sake of it, but it’s about creating valuable resources for the readers and satisfying their expectations. What natural link building can really be called is link earning. You literally earn your links through natural connections that you make throughout your content. To achieve this, your content has to be high-quality and niche/topic relevant, not just something out of the blue, forcefully inserted into a blog or somewhere where it doesn’t belong. By converting to link earning instead of link building, you can easily convert your content from an easy to forget one-hit-wonder, to an evergreen superstar that keeps providing best and most relevant content out there. Well, ‘easily convert’ is a bit of an understatement, but that’s a whole other topic on its own.
