Are you attracting a high rate of website traffic and generating quality leads with your content? If not, you are not producing highly shareable content. The quality and social capital of content is becoming increasingly more important to SEO. To attain high website traffic and generate new business, you need to create engaging, information-rich, high-impact and highly shareable content. To enhance SEO and lead generation, your content needs to achieve high rates of social content curation-social sharing. Excellent content creation requires commitment, creativity, real-time industry knowledge, fresh ideas and extensive research and writing skills. To rock content marketing, highly shareable content is required.
10 Characteristics of Highly Shareable Content
To create share-worthy content that gets ranked highly by Google and widely shared on social media, draw on these characteristics for inspiration:
1. Highly shareable content has breadth and depth.
2. It covers real-time, relevant issues or news.
3. It includes captivating images.
4. Its titles are actionable, concise, clear, descriptive, authoritative and intriguing.
5. Highly shareable content includes compelling and entertaining infographics.
6. It conveys fresh, original thinking.
7. It covers hot industry news topics a la newsjacking.
8. It is not solely focused on pushing products or services.
9. Highly shareable content is free of spelling errors, typos and grammatical flaws.
10. It is visually attractive and presented in an organized fashion.
5 Ways to Rock Content Creation and Marketing
1. Provide Relevant, Information Rich Content
Relevant, information-rich content will always be appreciated. Speak to the needs of your readers and prospects. Make frequently asked questions and common issues a focus on your company blog. According to MarketingProfs, content is deemed boring, when its main focus is a company's own product and service offerings, and only 40% of B2B marketing agencies create content that offers solutions for prospects and clients. Be helpful; provide your audience with informative content, which can be put into action to solve challenges.
2. Be Strategic About Content Type
There are certain types of content that readers are more likely to share on social media-boosting traffic, lead generation and conversion, and your online influence:
Newsjacked Content
Infographics
Research and Statistical Content
Video
SlideShare Presentations
In-depth content like whitepapers and ebooks
Content that triggers awe, anger or anxiety
Hybrid content, which mixes mediums like written content, infographics and video
3. Know Which Industry Topics Are Trending on Social Media
Stay up-to-date with what is trending on Twitter and LinkedIn Today; know what is hot on Social Media Today. Explore Topsy to discover the most popular content-sorted by topic-shared on Twitter and the internet as a whole. Use Klout to uncover the most influential content creators in your industry. Do not waste your time creating content that no one will care to read. Utilize these resources as inspiration for content topics, while ensuring that you convey fresh ideas and a unique perspective in your own original content.
4. Create Easy-to-Digest Content
People are deluged with a surplus of content and data daily. In order to break through the noise, give your audience a break. Maintain a captive audience by structuring your content so that it can be easily skimmed-including paragraph headlines, numbered lists and bullet points. A neat, ordered structure allows readers to skip to the information, which they find most engaging-increasing the likelihood of social content curation.
5. Syndicate and Promote Your Content
Embed social sharing buttons on your blog to encourage social content curation. Sharing your content on social networks and content syndication websites expands your reach and influence. Post your content on the big four social networks-Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn-and syndication sites like Social Media Today and Business 2 Community. Social Media Today has been instrumental in increasing my visibility and generating interest in me as a content creator.
Create content so high-quality, unique, information-rich and relevant that it compels social sharing. Strategic content marketing can amplify SEO, seriously increase website traffic, expand your reach, and prompt higher lead generation and conversion. Highly shareable content could even get you recognized as an industry thought leader.