In the digital world, content is everything and in fact, it’s one of the reasons why the term “content is king” has become overused to the point where it’s almost meaningless. While this phrase may seem like a cliche, it still holds true that quality content is important, but creating content that is high quality will take time, planning and a good content strategy to promote.
There are times that inferior content can outperform your higher quality content simply because it is marketed better than the rest. This means that creating quality content is just half of the battle and you will need to promote your content effectively as well.
In this article, we are going to look at various ways that you can start creating link worthy content for your business in 2019.
What makes content “link-worthy”?
In general, there are 4 different types of content that do well in the digital world and attract natural backlinks. These 4 categories are:
Informational: This category could be anything from recent news to how-to guides about specific topics.
Inspirational: This type of content will help to motivate the readers to develop themselves, support a cause or take some other form of action.
Educational: This type of content will always add value to the reader’s life, and teach them something that they didn’t know before.
Entertaining: This type of content will usually amuse the reader, and may even probe at other emotions such as happiness, fear, anger etc.
While you always want your content to be worthy of a backlink, you’ll want to make sure that it is relevant to your niche and the interests of your readers.
Having said that, the vast majority of all link-worthy content will fall into 1 of those 4 categories.
Find Influencers
If you are creating new content every day but nobody is finding your website, then you may be asking yourself what the point is. After all, you may write high-quality content that could change someone’s entire life, but if that someone isn’t reading it then it makes zero difference what you have written.
Writing amazing content alone won’t necessarily mean that you are going to start jumping off the charts with new readers, or viewers. Your content needs exposure and this is where influencers play a huge role in the success of content creation.
Find influencers within your niche that could become a good fit with your business, and have an audience that would be interested in what you have to say. You may have to pay these influencers (unless you become good friends with them) to promote your content.
Once you have their followers reading your content, you’ll have a higher chance of others sharing your content and even getting linked to as well.
How to create link worthy content
Creating content that is engaging and relevant to your audience will take time, energy and perhaps even money, and of course, there are tactics that can make your job easier.
Here are some of the tactics that I use when creating link-worthy content.
Focus on evergreen content
Evergreen content is the type of content that will stand the test of time and likely be relevant or current several years from now.
Think of news articles, for example. These types of articles have very short life spans, whereas you can create content that has a longer shelf life and has the potential to be linked to for a longer period of time.
This is called evergreen content. This could be anything from complete guides, motivational quotes, checklists, templates or anything that won’t age quickly.
If you do a good job of visually presenting your evergreen content, then you’ll be sure to build backlinks and social exposure from it.
Create podcasts
With the internet quickly embracing podcasts as the new way to learn instead of reading, it would be smart for you to start your own podcast. While this may not be practical for many types of content, it is a proven way to generate more backlinks.
Once your podcast begins to build an audience, you’ll naturally have others linking to your podcasts as a valuable source of information.
Partner with a brand
You may have been wondering if your business should partner up with another brand or business to create content, and the answer is “Yes”.
Both of your businesses will benefit from networking together and sharing your audiences with each other. This strategy will also give you the opportunity to build another backlink from a trusted source like a brand or business.
Start using visuals
In today’s fast-paced world, everything is turning to visual. Fewer people want to spend 10 minutes of their life reading an article that could be explained more easily by an infographic in half that time and in a more engaging way.
Here are some popular visuals that you can start using:
- Images
- Videos
- Charts with Data
- Infographics
- Gifs
Visuals such as these can help get your point across to your audience, and when your audience understands what you’re saying they will feel as though you have brought value to their lives, and then they will be more likely to share or even link to this content.
Use proper formatting
I don’t think that there is anything more boring than a blog post that isn’t formatted properly. Even though the writer may have valuable information, the viewer is more likely to click off a website than to read what it has to say if it looks boring or hard to read.
If you want others to link to your content then you need to start formatting your content properly with:
- Proper headings
- Shorter sentences
- Bullet points
- Block Quotes
- Bold or Italics for emphasis
You can expect others to link to your content if it isn’t readable, so it’s important to do everything you can to keep your audience engaged.
Change the presentation
If you want to get ahead in your industry through content creation, then it will be far easier if you have a fresh presentation on old concepts.
What is unique about the way that you present your content?
If you can’t think of anything that would set your content apart from your competition then it’s safe to say that your content isn’t worth linking to.
Many times older content will still provide a lot of value, and so if you can find a way to make older content appear newer and more engaging then you’ll increase your chances of others linking to your material.
Conclusion
If you want to create content that will generate natural backlinks it’ll take a lot of time and effort, but it will be well worth it in the long run.
Never limit yourself to producing one type of content, instead, try to produce various forms of content so that you can start branding yourself as a leader within your niche and an industry expert.