The 5 Ingredients to Making Great Content

Content is only worth the effort you put in. If you put in no effort, don’t be surprised if you get no results.

Writing great content is a choice. Getting great results is a consequence of that choice.

But just like a great dish, great content requires the right ingredients.

Do you want increased traffic? A boost in your SEO rankings? More leads?

Use the right ingredients and your content will be serving up dishes of success. For you and your readers.

Use poor ingredients with no flavour, and you’ll only be wasting your time, energy and resources.

Here are my favourite ingredients that I believe should be in any content dish.

1. Create Original Content

Google has made it clear that they hate and will penalise sites using duplicated content. Visitors hate it too. When they visit your websites they want to read about new and interesting ideas. Not re-hashed concepts they’ve seen elsewhere.

I like to put it this way… Have you ever header the saying:

“If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all”

Well, I’m going to modify it to drive my point home…

“If you don’t have anything new to say, don’t blog about it at all”

Keeps this in mind, and you’ll most likely have a successful content campaign for years to come.

2. Create Attention Grabbing Headlines

Great content get’s conversions, but it’s great headlines that gets clicks. And you need those clicks to drive readers to the rest of your article.

According to copyblogger:

• 80% of people read headlines
• But only 20% will read the rest of the content

This demonstrates how important the headline really is.

To make sure I come up with great headlines I use attention where I can, keep it positive, make it actionable if possible, and always create a few before picking the best one.

3. Make Actionable Content

Readers come to you to solve a problem or receive answers, make sure you give them what you’re looking for. Make your content actionable.

Great content doesn’t just give readers information, it tells them how to apply it.

Not only is it more useful, it shows that you’re an authority and generates goodwill with your audience. After all, a business with content that solves problems, probably has a product or service that does the same.

4. Answer a Question

Why do we use Google? Because we ask a question and it gives us the answer right? That’s why people go to blogs too. And that’s why people keep going back to good blogs. It keeps giving answers.

Why do we use Google over other Search Engines? There are hundreds of them to choose from. Because it gives us answers faster.

If you want the best results from your content, don’t just give an answer. Give it better and faster than your competition.

Make your content easy to scan and the answer easy to find, and let your readers decide how much further time they want to invest in reading.

Either way, you have helped them and they will be thankful for it.

5. Back Up Your Content With Facts

The worst possible outcome you can have from an article is to get your facts wrong.

Think about it. You write an article that does insanely well with thousands of views, and what you wrote turns out to be inaccurate. All trust in your business would be gone.

Supporting your content with facts not only makes your content more believable, it also keeps you in check and makes sure what you’re writing is factual.

Make your site trustworthy by including statistics in your articles, and make sure those statistics have verified sources to make sure the reputation you gain is never lost through bad reporting.