10 Tips for Great Content

How can you produce content that is readable and Google-friendly as well as being relevant to the audience and highly effective?

There’s certainly no magic solution to persuade all of the various algorithms that your content is worth pushing up the list, but there are some core must-do tactics that vastly improve your chances.

We’ve pulled these basics into a quick checklist below, as a guide to producing great content. For every blog post, social media post or email newsletter, content should meet all or most of the criteria below to be effective;

1. Digestible There is a reason top 10 lists do well, especially on LinkedIn, they’re both punchy and accessible, cramming value and order into information quickly.
2. Relevant Both in terms of topic and tone. Content must be relevant to the audience, and something you would like to read if you were your own customer.
3. Useful Packed with top tips and if possible exclusive information. Make it the kind of post people will want to bookmark, share and come back to in the future.
4. Timely Timing can be everything when it comes to content. Consider how to use the various channels to break key information to your audience to encourage engagement, registration and referrals (for example many marketeers use email or social media marketing to offer VIP access to information, new release and sales / discount codes).
5. Not spammy The years of black hat SEO, keyword spamming and link farming are long gone, instead think about acquisition tactics and quality of content at the core. Too much of a sales push will also likely be seen as spam by your viewers.
6. Shareable Encourage customers to share your content by making it content they would want to share in the first place!
7. On-point Content should be considered and aligned to the objectives and vision of the company or your own business, otherwise it has no place in your marketing strategy. Planning tools can help ensure content is aligned to the end-game.
8. Tailored and optimised to specific channel Readers know when a generic post has been posted across multiple channels – it looks lazy and it isn’t as effective. That said, there isn’t anything wrong with re-purposing content. Just ensure that you consider the differences in channels in terms of messaging and ensure text and images are optimised and tagged appropriately. LinkedIn doesn’t currently support hashtags!
9. Measurable Consider correct use of hashtags and how to best track each route to the call to action. Keep track of your campaign analytics shortly after posting it and continue to engage.
10. Have a call to action! Most content has a goal, even if it is subscribe or share, so consider yours and the best way to integrate it into your message, or make it stand out in the right place.

Thanks for reading. Do you have other tips any to add?