How to Create Killer Content
By Leo Babauta
If you were to focus on just one thing to improve the number of subscribers you have, to really boost your traffic, it would be creating great content.
There is no other single element that will help skyrocket your subscriber count faster than Amazing Content.
When I took Zen Habits from 0 to 100K subscribers, there were many factors that played a part in my success, but the biggest by far was my focus on creating content that was as useful to my readers as I could make it. Other factors, such as simplicity of design, the ability to create a community on my blog, and social media success, all helped. But without powerful content, none of those factors would have mattered one whit.
Let’s look at a few ways really useful and powerful content can boost your blog’s traffic and subscriber number:
- Other bloggers will link to your posts, send their readers your way.
- Readers who do find you (from other blogs or elsewhere) will find so much use in your content they’ll want to come back, or better yet subscribe so they can get regular updates of your great content.
- Great content will be shared by readers on delicious, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg and other social bookmarking services … and if the topic is hot enough, it could get on the popular page of one of those services and send you thousands of readers.
The benefits of great content go far beyond these three things, but they’re hard to quantify. When readers really love your content, they will bookmark you as a reference and keep coming back. They’ll share the content with their friends via email and social networks. They’ll start to look to you as an authority, ask you questions, buy your ebooks. Great content is the start of amazing things for bloggers.
And the good news is that while it definitely takes hard work creating great content, learning how to do it isn’t the hardest thing in the world. We’re going to look at some ways you can turn an ordinary blog post into something powerful.
How to Create Great Content
Let’s start by remembering the goals of great content — you want the readers, and other bloggers, to find your content so useful and powerful that they will link to you, subscribe, bookmark the content, share it with others, and come back again and again.
So with that in mind, what does great content need to be? One or both of the following:
1. Something extremely useful.
2. Something remarkable – content people will talk about, share, blog about, link to, vote for, retweet, etc.
A great post can be both, or one or the other. For example, I did a post on how to clear out the queues in your life (email inbox, to-do lists, social networks, etc.) and readers found it pretty useful. But a little while before that, I did a post called “Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway (Or, the Privatization of the English Language)” — this post wasn’t very useful to readers, but was “remarkable”. It got hundreds of comments, Diggs, Tweets and bookmarks, and was blogged about many times. Being remarkable means saying something that people will take notice of, will talk about, will pass on. It catches people’s attention — not just to be flashy, but to get a conversation going.
Let’s look at how to do both of these things, and then we’ll look at a couple other factors that make great content.
1. Be extremely useful.
It all starts with the topic of the post. You need to consider your reader, and center the topic of your post on your reader — not on yourself, your ads, your blogger friends, or anyone else but the reader. What are his needs, wants, hopes and dreams? What problems does he have in his daily life that you can solve? It helps to get to know your readers, and don’t be afraid to ask them to share their goals, dreams, problems with you. Think about the problems you’ve solved in your life, both personal and professional. Often, if you’re an experienced professional, you forget what it’s like to be just starting out, so you need to think back to the early days of your career and remember the problems you faced, the challenges you had to overcome, the uncertainty and ignorance you had. Remember those, and you have some extremely good post ideas.
Now choose a topic that will solve one of the reader’s problems, help him achieve something he’s always wanted to achieve. Create a resource for him: an extremely useful set of practical tips, links, tools to solve that problem. Again, it’s useful to have a beginner’s mind as you write this guide or resource: what does the absolute beginner need to know? What misconceptions does he have? What practical tips worked for you? What doesn’t work?
The more practical your tips, the better. It’s not enough to say that the keys to losing weight are eating less and exercising more. Those are both difficult things to do. Give the reader extremely useful ways of doing those things, and you’ve created a resource.
Creating extremely useful posts is a skill, but it’s probably the most important skill you’ll develop as a blogger. Read dozens of other extremely useful blog posts to give you some inspiration and guidance — learn from the best. And then imitate them — not in content but in style and depth. It’s in this imitation that you’ll get better. And with practice — writing dozens of in-depth posts of your own — you’ll get good at this skill, and develop your own style and voice.
2. Be remarkable.
To be a blogger is to be part of a large conversation that happens not only in the blogging world, but the Internet in general. To be a remarkable blogger is to make a strong contribution to that conversation, to say something worth listening to, to say something others will find worthy of talking about.
Start with bold ideas. Every post starts with an idea — take the idea you come up with for your post, and see if you can make it bolder. Be daring — aim for a big post, not just a regular one. Aim to say something huge, not just what everyone else is saying. Aim for a post that a major blog would link to, and that people will talk about. Get noticed!
Also see if you can take a stance on an issue that others are talking about … but make it something different. Not just different for the sake of being different, but different to be a devil’s advocate, to get people to think outside their normal patterns, to shake things up, to challenge traditional ideas.
Find a way to provide new information, a twist on what’s been done, or a fresh perspective. If you’re just doing what everyone else has done, in exactly the same way, people will yawn at your post.
3. Make the post scannable.
You’ve got your great topic, your killer headline, and an extremely useful post. Your reader decides to give your post a few seconds of his time. But then he comes upon the post, and it’s a huge block of undifferentiated text, and he thinks to himself, “This is going to take a good chunk of my time.”
Your reader, of course, is a very busy person, and doesn’t have 20 minutes to devote to each post. In fact, even if he does have a spare 20 minutes to spend on a single post, he won’t give those 20 minutes to yours unless he’s convinced that it’s going to be extremely useful — and he can’t do that unless he knows what’s in the content.
Don’t make your reader dig through paragraph after paragraph to know what your post has to offer. He won’t do it — he’ll move on quickly to the next item in his feed reader
Make your post scannable — your reader should be able to quickly glance through the post and pick up the main points without reading too deeply. The best ways to do that are with lists, but other great methods are subheds (the smaller headlines for sections within a post), block quotes, images and graphics, and the use of bold or italics.
4. Write in a plain, concise, common-sense style.
Once your reader decides to spend some time with your post, he’s going to want to get through it without too much work. The key to that: simplicity.
The great writing manual, The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, instructs us to write in a way that comes naturally. It also says to avoid fancy words and to omit unnecessary words. Readers enjoy writing that is conversational, without being wordy. Write in a way that speaks to your reader, not down to him, and doesn’t confuse him with jargon and acronyms and technical stuff.
Pretend that you’re having a conversation with a friend, and write like that. Then go back and edit out sentences and words that are unnecessary, and revise sentences that aren’t clear. After you’ve written your post, go over it for a few minutes. It’s tempting to just press “Publish” and be done with it, but it’s actually very useful to trim your post down a little where you’ve been wordy. See if there are unnecessary words or even sentences or paragraphs that can be cut out, or reworded in a less awkward or confusing way. Write simply, with force, and people will enjoy reading you. Write in a convoluted, fumbling way, and people will move on.
Your blog becomes more powerful if you omit the noise and leave the signal. Do this, and your reader will not only read the post, but will likely stick around long enough to become a long-term reader.
P.S. I’m so happy people are loving the podcasts I’ve created with Mary! If you haven’t listened to them yet, here are the links: