500 million tweets are sent each day, not to mention Facebook status updates, Pinterest shares, blog posts and the likes. There is an abundance of content on the web you can’t possibly keep up with. In order not to sink in the flood, you shouldn’t aim to keep up with the frequency or, god forbid, volume of the content. You should write amazing stuff, consistently.
3 Rules for posting amazing content
#1. Tell a story, an opinion–something
Your story should be cold or hot, never lukewarm.
For example, juxtapose the following sentences:
- “Mississauga cats like our web design so much firefighters have been using clients’ websites to lure them down the trees”
- “Cats seem to be enjoying our web design services, but we cannot tell for sure.”
Even if 1) is an exaggeration, you would get a better reaction from the visitor. Even if you need to complain (but better stay positive) about a given topic, there will be people bound to see that, beneath it all, you deeply care about the subject at hand. And that opinionated magic is what attracts people to your content. If it’s not opinion, it’s just information, and information is plentiful on the web.
Oh, and by the way, stray and feral cats are a real problem in Mississauga, one that you should think about.
#2. Incorporate multiple sources
Don’t worry about your PageRank–it’s not that important. Well, even if you do, use nofollow links. They’re still effective. People want to read content that incorporates multiple sources, because articles that weigh different opinions (or statistics, or diverse information) give the visitor an impression that there’s a real discussion taking place, and they’re part of it. Even if there’s no real discussion.
Besides, citing blog posts will leave trackbacks and pings that are likely to attract the site owner’s attention to you, driving you traffic in the long run. Don’t be afraid to allow your visitors see somewhere else, it’s clingy and it’s bad.
#3. Revise, possibly more than once
The person writing this is a ghostwriter that failed at a Google job interview a few months ago. Don’t worry, he’s not about to brood on past failures. What was intriguing at the test, however, was one of their main guidelines for handing in finished content, the “clear pair of eyes” rule. It read as follows: “take a few hours off and review the content with a fresh pair of eyes”. Well, if Google does it, you should at least give this a try.
Publishing houses do something similar with print publications. They edit the text on a computer screen, then print it and review the print. That way they can catch more errors, because apparently people really do read differently on screens and on paper. If crafting catchy content really matters to you, why not do that as well?