How to creat high quality content in 2020 new techniques

 Part #2. How to create content that people will care to read and share with others Most resources that I've examined while preparingfor this very course will advice you to "create great content,"and call it a day. I mean, what does it mean "to create great content?" Ain't the content you create great already? And how do you know if it's not? Well, I don't consider myself to be a contentmarketing superstar, but in the last few years I managed to make Ahrefs Blog one of the bestones in the SEO space. And I think, along the way, I figured a fewingredients that will make your content great: Here they are: Quality, Uniqueness, and Authority. Let me expand on each of them one by one. Quality. 

In all honesty, there's no shortage of adviceon how to improve the quality of your content. So I'll just do a brief recap of the things thatI'm sure you're already well familiar with. Here they are: #1. Learn to write well. Writing is a skill that almost anyonecan learn and master. Think of playing a guitar. When you first try it, you surely can producesome sounds, but it can hardly be called music. But then you learn some chords, how to pickstrings and so on. And after some time your friends are askingyou to take the guitar and play them something. Same with writing, at first it will be very clumsyand tough to read, but after some learning and practice people will start enjoying your articles. Luckily, there's no shortage of advice onthe topic of "how to improve your writing." Just start learning and practicing as soon as possible. 

Now, the next thing you do to ramp up the qualityof your content is... Improve how it looks. It is a well studied fact that most people willskim through the article before reading it, which will help them to evaluate if it isworth reading at all. And if your article doesn't look good, peopleare unlikely to risk their time reading it. Here are the things that make your contentvisually appealing. The design of your blog; Quality images, short paragraphs, subheadings,quotes, lists, and all sorts of formatting tricks. All these things make your article pleasingto a human eye and transmit a message to your blog visitors that the author of the articleinvested quite some time to ensure pleasant reading experience. But let's move on. The last, but not the least. You need to craft an eye-catchy headline. Headline is the only bit of your entire article that people will see on Twitter, Facebook,Google and on the homepage of your blog. Which means you only have about a dozen wordsto persuade people that your article is worth their attention. Writing headlines that lure people into yourarticle is both art and science. 

There are many ready-made headline templatesthat you can try using, as well as many psychological tricks that will educate you tocreate your own attention-grabbing headlines. I won't teach you any of that, becauseI'm not a professional copywriter. But there's one piece of advice that I can give you. Make sure to brainstorm at least fivedifferent headlines for every article you write. If you won't invest the time and effort intocoming up with just five headline variations to choose from, your entire article is almostguaranteed to flop, no matter how good it is. In the words of Andrew Chen, from Uber "Titles are often written as a vague pre-thought,but in fact, it's the most important creative decision you'll make." And this wraps up my brief recap of rampingup the quality of your content.

 

But in all honesty, all these things are justa proxy to the actual idea behind your article. Which brings us to the second ingredient ofgreat content: Uniqueness. I see a rather upsetting trend in the bloggingand content marketing space. When they go after some keyword, manypeople research everything that has already been published on that topic and then try tosqueeze it all into a single article of theirs. But this way you're only creating a clone ofexisting content and not adding any extra value. And if it's a clone, it doesn't deserve moreattention than the original. So with this approach you're immediately puttingyourself one step behind your competition. If you want to stand out with your content- it has to be unique.

 So how to create unique content? Well, you still have to research everythingthat has already been published on the topic. But then you don't create a clone. You create something that would be differentfrom what's already there. Ideally you want to say something thathasn't been said before. Which is rather hard to do, as it requiresyou to be at the very forefront of your industry. These people are called thought leaders. And most likely you're not one of them just yet. So another option is to find a new angle,which would be somewhat different from the conventional opinion on that topic. Ideally you'd want to turn 180 degrees andchallenge the status quo - this often generates a lot of buzz.

 But only if you have good arguments tomake your point. And finally, if the above is not an option, youmight simply try to explain that topic better. You might not be the thought leader of yourindustry, but you might be a great writer, teacher, and storyteller. If you invest enough time into finding betterarguments, better proof and better examples, you do have a chance to outperform the originalpiece on that subject. And now, here goes the last ingredient ofgreat content: Authority. Like I just mentioned, in order to saysomething entirely new and unique, you have to be at the very forefront of your industry. You have to be an authority in your niche.

 Let's say I do a few weeks of research and writea cool article on the topic of colonization of Mars. Would you read my article on that topic? Or would you prefer to learn about the colonizationof Mars from someone with more authority in that subject? Like Elon Musk, for example. If you go to YouTube and search for histalks on that subject you'll see that they get millions of views. That's because Elon Musk is probably the mostqualified person in the world to talk about the colonization of Mars. So you know he can teach you a lot of thingsthat you won't be able to find elsewhere.

 Hence the crazy amount of views. And that is a nice illustration of the impactthat authority and credibility have on the content that you create. But what if you're not the Elon Musk of yourindustry? Does that mean you're doomed to oblivion? Not at all! There's a simple trick to "hacking" authoritythat writers have been using for ages. Take a look at this article at Wait But Why, thatexplains the colonization of Mars start to finish. It is super long, so you'll need a rather compellingreason to spend your time on it, right? Well, how about that: this article was co-writtenby Elon Musk

. I bet now you're thinking that every paragraphof this post is totally worth your time, right? That's how you "hack" authority. If you're not the best person to talk abouta certain subject, find that best person and interview them. Obviously, it is almost impossible to geta hold of a person like Elon Musk and interview them for your article. But I'm sure that whatever industry you'rein, there are many high-profile people who are easily accessible. 

Think about journalists. This is one of the core duties of their profession -to find credible sources and use them in their writing. If you want to create great content, youneed to be a journalist. Here's an example of our own article at Ahrefsblog, where we tried to answer a question "how to become a marketing manager". 

We could easily crank up an article on thattopic in a few hours and call it a day. But instead, we took time to reach out to10 high-profile marketers and used their advice to create a great resource on that topic. As you can see, we featured all 10 of themearly in our article, so that to show our readers that there are quite a few very smartpeople behind what they're about to read.