How To Measure Content Marketing ROI

When marketing a business, it’s important to understand how your advertising budget impacts your company’s success. No matter what type of business you run or how you advertise it, you need know your marketing’s ROI — return on investment.

For businesses that reach their customers online, calculating the content marketing ROI is especially important. The following is an easy guide to figuring out your content marketing ROI, along with a few tips on how to maximize it.

Knowing your content marketing ROI lets you evaluate content marketing campaigns

It’s impossible to evaluate any marketing campaign effectiveness without knowing its ROI. Content marketing campaigns, along with any other form of advertising you use, should be evaluated using this metric, becauset’s the ROI that lets you objectively assess the effectiveness of a campaign.

Basically, calculating ROI requires two raw data points to calculate a campaign’s efficiency: the cost of the campaign and the value of the leads generated.

Content marketing ROI puts these two main data points in perspective, so you can evaluate, monitor and adjust campaigns to maximize your business’ advertising resources. It helps you identify how well a campaign is working and, if tracked over time, you can understand the adjustments of the content marketing campaign’s effectiveness.

Producing more content doesn’t automatically generate more sales

Like all forms of advertising, the content doesn’t automatically generate sales. If your content is effective, then increasing your production will likely lead to more sales. If your content isn’t effective, or if you have a breakdown in your sales process, however, then producing more content will simply eat up your company’s marketing budget without growing its sales.

Blindly upping your content production won’t necessarily provide the boost in sales that you’re looking for. You need to know your content marketing ROI if you’re going to increase sales. More important, you must ensure your content do rank in Search Engine result page.

The simple theory for calculating your content marketing ROI

As mentioned above, you need two data points to calculate each content marketing ROI. Here we show you how to calculate your content marketing costs and the generated leads’ value.

Figuring out how much your content marketing costs is easy. Simply add up how much you have spent on generating content over the past month, keeping in mind that content marketing involves much more than just creating and posting content.

You need to calculate each content performance and amend it accordingly because by doing so, you can improve each content search ranking in Google to gain search traffic from Google.

The individual content performance is the critical factor for improving your content marketing ROI. You need to go over the small details, such as grammar, structure and content integrity. It is not a good idea to publish your content prematurely without going over it thoroughly first.

Now, you need to calculate the value of a lead based on your monthly sales history because we are using Google Analytic to calculate leads value per content. In formula form, this process looks like:

(Total number of leads in a month) x (Average lead conversion rate) x (Average price of your product) = (Per lead value)
With your cost of content creation (CCC) and Per lead value (PLV), you can figure out your content marketing ROI with a simple formula:

[(Total PLV of a content) – (CCC)] / (CCC) = ROI of a content

The first step, [(Total PLV of a content) – (CCC)], gives you the profit you earned through content marketing in a month. The second calculation, dividing that figure by CCC, puts it in a ratio to give your content marketing ROI. This final figure is best expressed as a percentage.

Looking at an example

For a simplified example, assume your company spends $100 on each content marketing. From this $100, you generate $400 Per lead value.

The cost of the content (CCC) is: $100.

The ROI of content marketing is:

[($400 Total PLV of a content) – ($100 CCW)] / ($100 CCW) = 3% ROI

How to use Google Analytic to track ROI

Personally, I prefer to use Google Analytic because it is free and enables me track all of my content campaigns in one place. With Google Analytic, you are able to drill down traffic sources. More importantly, Google Analytic helps you track leads from each content and improve it.

Ok, let’s start talking about how to set up a goal in Google Analytic

Step 1:
Sign Up To Google Analytics

Step 2:
Copy the Tracking Code to your website header. If you are using WordPress, it is great to use this light plugin to help you insert the tracking code easily on “plugin setting page”

Step 3:
Set Up Goal for Your Content Marketing

To create a goal for Leads:
1) Click On “Admin” Button in the top

2) Click On “Goal”

3) Click on “+New Goal”

4) Click on “Custom” template and then click “Next Step”

5) Name Your Goal, select “Destination” and then click “Next Step”

6) Enter your Leads Thank You Page into Destination. Turn “Value” on and assign Your “per lead value” to it. Lastly, Click on “Create Goal.”

7) Track your content performance in Reporting > Behavior > Site Content > All Pages > Page Value

Step 4:
Record your performance in a spreadsheet. I will be using Google Sheets as an example to record down the performance. Click on the following link to access the template

WorkSheet

Also, be sure to check out more advanced Tracking hacks from Navneet Kaushal for SEO purposes. He has some awesome tactics to help you identify the strong points and weak points of your SEO content marketing strategy.

Additional Google Analytics metrics for you to become a better content marketer

These are the additional metrics you must track in order to increase the quality of your content.

Traffics Source/medium: When using Google Analytic, you need to know where the traffic comes from. You can accomplish this by selecting “Secondary Dimension” and ” Source/Medium” in Behavior > site content > All page. Identifying sources of traffic is crucial in Content Marketing. From the SEO perspective, it is important to measure “Organic Traffic” because any changes should be investigated as they could mean a change in Google Search Rankings. It might also indicate that your competitors are trying to outrank you.

Time On Page AKA Dwell Time: This is a metric for measuring a user’s time on a page. Thus, it is a great indication of your content quality. This is also an important signal for Google to sense your content quality. If your content quality is bad, the user will not spend any or much time on your content, it’s as simple as that. Therefore we need to improve the dwell time. Improving dwell time will lead to excellent rankings in Google.

Entrances and Unique Pageviews: These two metrics often confuse a lot of marketers. I personally think measuring entrances is a more reliable metric because, for example, when visitor Z from Google lands on page A, it will count as 1 Entrance and 1 unique Pageview for page A. However, if visitor Z then goes on to page B, then page B will show 1 unique pageview but 0 entrance value. Measuring entrances metric will help you understand how effective your content is in attracting visitors from SERPs.

Keywords CTR: Moz Dr. Peter J Meyers mentioned about this in his article back in 2012. The metric is located at Acquisition > Search Engine Optimization > Queries. It looks something like this:

It helps you know what keywords your website is ranking. Furthermore, it helps you to optimize SERP CTR to increase more traffic. We know Google takes into consideration CTR and great CTR leads to high rankings. CTR is an important factor for improving search ranking.

Moz Rand Fishkin also said so.

The best stab at measuring average CTR in Google SERPs in years: http://t.co/NGc0N24JdK via @philippetrescu pic.twitter.com/MIKCyb9c8k

— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) October 1, 2014

The true story of content marketing challenges

These calculations will give you a snapshot of your content marketing ROI Remember, content marketing isn’t a one-month effort. Successful marketing campaigns take months, even years, to develop and grow. It’s not uncommon for the first month’s budget to exceed the value of your leads, generating a one-month negative ROI.

As you continue to invest in content marketing, though, each month builds upon the previous ones. The second month will be more effective than the first, and the third more than the second, and so on. By the time you’re six months in, you should see positive results.

For this reason, content marketing campaigns should be evaluated on a six-month basis, at least. After six months, you will have an accurate idea of how a campaign’s performing. Before this time, however, it’s impossible to gauge a campaign’s effect on prospective customers and long-term search engine rankings.

To ensure that your campaigns have sufficient time to produce a positive return on your investment, budget for at least six months of content marketing and ranking in Google for the long term. Don’t throw a bunch of money at your online marketing in one month and then stop those efforts the next when they don’t produce the ROI you’re looking for, and be sure to make adjustments to your content when needed to improve search ranking.

In short, make a plan for six months and run a sustained content marketing campaign. Your business will benefit from it, and you’ll be able to gauge your content marketing’s ROI accurately.

Updated: 19/7/15

The 7 Things You Must Know About Local Ranking

When you begin implementing an SEO strategy into your smaller business, one thing that you’ll need to focus on is local SEO. There are a number of reasons for this. First of all, more and more people are doing local searches due to the increasing amount of mobile use.

For example, a person with a sudden craving for sushi will use Google in order to find sushi places nearby, whether they are close to where they live or out of town. Using local SEO to boost your local ranking will help ensure that you reach users such as these.

Ranking For Local Keywords Is Tough, We All Know It

Then there’s the fact that for mid-sized businesses and larger corporations, trying to rank on Google is a challenge but not unfeasible – all it takes is a solid SEO strategy and some time and effort.

However, if you own a smaller, local business, trying to compete with mid-sized and big businesses is nearly impossible. You just don’t have the resources that bigger companies have.

Why You Need Local Ranking

You also don’t have nearly the same amount of reach, which means targeting every consumer in the country just isn’t going to be very effective if you only have one physical location that happens to be in Tallahassee, Florida.

You’re going to have more success marketing to people in that area than you are targeting everyone in general – because while there might be a person that’s part of your target audience living in Seattle, they’re much less likely to convert than someone actually living in Tallahassee.

What Is This All About?

This is where local SEO comes in. Trying to improve your local SEO ranking makes more sense than just trying to rank your pages in general.

Not only will you not be competing with the same number of businesses as you would if you were trying to rank on a national scale, but you’ll be reaching consumers that are more likely to be converted into customers.

So now that you get the importance of improving your local ranking, let’s figure out how to actually implement local SEO.

The following are a few proven tactics for strengthening your website’s local ranking:

1) Use Local Keywords

Using local keywords is a good way to boost your local SEO, as long as you use them where they are appropriate. Obviously you don’t want to mention the location of your business in every sentence of your content, but you should mention at least once on every page.

For example, if you’re running a blog for a small plumbing company in Detroit, you could mention this in the call-to-action at the end of your website, such as “for emergency plumbing services in Detroit, contact us at…” You should also try to use local keywords in your H1 tags.

If you run a larger business that has locations in numerous locations, you’ll want to use different landing pages for each location, using separate H1 tags using local keywords for that particular location.

2) Create Unique Landing Pages for each location

One of the biggest mistakes that larger companies make when crafting their landing pages is to use the same landing page for every location and just swap out the local keywords where appropriate. This is basically using duplicate content and is a big no-no according to Google.

Every page of content should be unique, and this includes your landing pages. If you have locations overseas, then you should use local domain names. For example, if you have a location in Europe, your domain should be www.place.eu. Obviously, each landing page should support the local language.

The following are a few other ways to create a unique local landing page:

Address and phone number – Provide the correct address and phone number for the location that the landing page is representing. This is known as a NAP (Name, Address and Phone number) and should be on every landing page. The NAP is also helpful to the user so that they know that they are on the right landing page.

Embed directions – Go the extra step and provide text directions to the location represented by your landing page. You should also embed a Google Map of that location. Since driving directions and maps will be unique to each landing page, they will help boost your local SEO ranking. While the text directions are helpful, the Google Map will go a long way in improving your users’ experience since Google Maps provide click to directions.

Use unique content – When it comes to actually writing the content on the landing page, don’t use the same thing. You’ll want to describe the services of that particular location. If all of your locations provide the same services, go into some detail about the surrounding area and things that are unique to that location.
For example, you could mention what year that particular location opened up in, how long you’ve been serving that area and more. You could even add details about some of the people that work at that particular location. If you run a small chain of restaurants, you could name the chef and write a little bit about him or her for each location.

A Great Example from Feng Sushi, Feng Sushi has unique landing pages for all his outlet around the UK.

Example of Feng Sushi [URL]

The Result?

Feng Sushi is ranking number one for the keyword “Sushi Borough Market”

3) Use Location Citations And Directories

You can build local citations in a number of ways. For example, share blog content from other local companies on your social media pages, like and follow other local business pages, write guest blogs and more. These local businesses will most likely return the favor, thereby helping to build your local citations.

Try to connect with local influencers as well. For example, if you’re running a restaurant, then you’ll want local food critics to write up blog posts about your business.

You should also submit your business to different local directories in order to improve your local SEO ranking. Sites such as Facebook and Google+ Local are invaluable for accomplishing this.

Other pages to which you should submit local company information include Yelp, Yellowpages.com, Local.com, CitySearch, FourSquare and Mapquest, just to name a few. These are some of the bigger directories on which to post local listings, but you can also find smaller local directories to use as well.

Moz has a Local Citations by Category page that we highly recommend you use as it allows you to find top local listings based on category. Getting your business listed in the appropriate category on this page is an excellent way to rank better for local keywords.

4) Add Q&A’s

A Q&A section can be incredibly helpful in informing your customers about your company and your products and services. What’s great is that you can take common questions that have been asked by your customers and post them on this page. Creating a different Q&A page for every location shouldn’t be difficult to do either if you’re actually taking the questions that you are getting from your customers.

5) Build Out Submarkets

It’s important to remember that residents of surrounding towns and cities have access to your business as well. For example, if you run a car repair shop in Durham, North Carolina, residents of Durham aren’t your only potential target customers – bordering cities, such as Raleigh and Chapel Hill, contain potential target customers as well. These submarkets can be quite valuable, which is why you should consider building separate pages for them as well to strengthen your local SEO ranking even more.

6) Full Testimonial Or Customer Story Pages

Adding testimonials to your landing pages will certainly help, but having separate full testimonial pages will really boost your local SEO as customers often talk about things that are relevant to individual locations, such as customer service.

While testimonials are basically a great way to generate content without having to write it yourself, a customer story is a piece of content you write focusing on one of your customer’s experiences that goes into more detail than a testimonial. A page of customer stories is another excellent way to add to your local SEO.

Not only will customer testimonials help drive conversions, but you can match your testimonials to your locations so that each landing page is unique. If all the customer testimonials are broad in that they are about your products and not necessarily location-specific, you can still use different ones for each landing page to help make your landing pages unique from each other.

Example: Feng Sushi’s Testimonials from customers

7) Optimize Your Website For Mobile Use

Hopefully you’ve been paying attention to the fact that mobile optimization has gone from being a recent trend to a vital component of every company’s website. The thing is, it’s even more important for smaller businesses that are trying to rank for local keywords.

Why is this?
Basically, it boils down to the fact that mobile use has never been higher and is going nowhere. People are accessing the Internet through their mobile devices multiple times a day. In fact, many people use their mobile devices more for searches than their desktops.

Then consider this – how often have you been out of the house and have looked something up on your phone, whether it’s a place to eat nearby or a place that sells a certain product you’re looking for? People do this everyday. This means that there are consumers in your area that are looking for your products or services on their mobile devices while on the run. If you don’t manage to reach them, then your direct competitors will.

So what exactly does this have to do with optimizing your website for mobile use? Google’s new algorithm update emphasizes the importance of mobile-friendly websites.

Websites that are mobile friendly will rank higher for mobile searches, while websites that are not will rank worse. This affects your local ranking on mobile and which is why you need to ensure your site is optimized for mobile use.

There are a number of ways that you can make sure that your website is mobile friendly. We recommend checking out the mobile optimization tips outlined in Ben Seow’s article to learn some of the best practices.

More Awesome Local SEO Tip

It doesn’t matter if your business has one location or 20, your local SEO ranking is important for drawing in customers from your targeted areas.

Updated: 9/7/15

How To Building Online Community By Engagement

Have you followed the content marketing playbook, but are still having trouble building an audience for your website? Your content may bring a lot of traffic to your website, but something is still missing. Your visitors are not staying long or returning often. What can you do to make your readers engage?

People may come to your website for content, but they will stay for the community. Ultimately, your readers are looking to connect with other people with similar interests.

They want to belong to a community of like-minded people. Great content marketing gets you started, but you need to build an online community around your website or blog to grow your readership.

You have to go beyond the basics of content marketing to convert the traffic drawn to your site by content into a loyal group of readers.

Building Engagement Is Still Important But Ignore By Many

company-dont-understand-engagement-is-important

Many bloggers and companies do not understand the values of building a community that consist engaging with your contents. Building engagement wasn’t a crazy idea, but it is a practical idea used by many content marketers.

Engagement develops an emotional bond between you and your audience. It also forges strong connections between the individuals who make up your readership.
The emotional connection creates a loyal and passionate readership that is committed to the values and message that you are trying to promote on your site.
With a community of loyal readers, your site takes on a life of its own. The whole is larger than the sum of the parts.
The community amplifies your reach. As people share your content on their social networks, you reach more people.
You can take advantage of the two-way communication of the Internet. By listening to your readers’ comments and suggestions, you can improve your site.

That is why it is important to get beyond content marketing and do more than just post attractive content. You have to follow through and engage with your readership to build a community.

How To Create Successful Engagement

There are many useful strategies to create engagement. Here is just a few tip to create engagement:

Don’t shy away from controversy:- Your niche probably has some controversial topics. You should pick a side on these issues and explain your position. People who agree with you will enjoy your post and people who disagree will read it as well. You don’t have to be rude to the people who disagree with you, but you do have commit to a side. You could even engage other bloggers and thought leaders in your field in respectful conversation about these topics with your blog and social media.
Ask for comments, likes and shares:- By letting your audience know that you are interested in having a conversation, you make them more inclined to leave a comment on your blog or social media. When someone does leave a comment, you need to respond to it. Even a simple “thank you” lets the person know you are engaged in a conversation with your audience.
Respond to questions:- If someone asks you a question, take it as a request for more content. Answer that question in a blog posts and mention the reader by name (if they give permission). You can also develop your responses to reader comments into full-fledged blog posts.
Trust your audience:- Building a community means giving up some control of your message. Your website becomes a cooperative endeavor between you and the members of your audience. By empowering your audience to contribute to your site, your readers can become marketing ambassadors for you. If you try take complete control of your message, you will damage your credibility with your audience.

Why storytelling is the way to create Engaging Content

Everyone loves stories. We tend to insert ourselves into the narrative and develop an emotional connection. That is why stories are some of the most engaging content that you can create. Here are some tips for telling stories on your site.

Be vulnerable:- Open up to people, they can relate to you better. This is a bit scary, but in the end, it is very rewarding.
Evoke emotions:- By revealing some of your emotions, you can forge a connection with your readers and what they are experiencing.

Get excited with your audiences

Use case studies:- These are great story-telling tools for businesses. Fizzle is a great example of sharing many successful moments, crazy moments and failure moments from their customer in their podcast. Their audiences are more willing to come back because these are moments they can easily related to and understand.

Ask for Testimonials:- Let people tell their story about the issues and values that your site deals with. You don’t want people to say how great you are. You want them to tell their story about how their life changed. Mindvalley is also a great example; Mindvalley provided a valuable technique for meditation and asked for feedback. Therefore, everyone is more than willing to share the results because they just simply asked. “Matthew 7:7 Ask and you shall receive”

Another Look at Fizzle

Check out Fizzle.co, a site that offers training for entrepreneurs who want to start online businesses. It is deliberately building a community of creative entrepreneurs to share experiences about starting on online business. It offers a lot of content for members who pay a monthly fee, but more importantly, it offers an online community to be a part of.

Fizzle offers a blog and podcast to promote the site. This gives you a taste of the content that you will experience when you join the community. The podcast is an hour long conversation where the hosts respond to member questions, tell stories of success and failure, and give tips and advice.

It uses narrative as a powerful tool to share experiences and bring people into the community. Entrepreneurs can recognize their experiences in these stories. If an entrepreneur listens regularly to the podcast, he may become a member of the site.

This is why narrative works. The listener sees himself as a part of the story. When you create a narrative, it draws your audience into your brand and helps them to connect emotionally with you.

To connect with people, you need to bring your site beyond content marketing. Building an online community is the way to get your message out. You can’t fake this with tool or tricks. You have to open up and engage with your readership.

Updated: 23/6/15

Becoming A Pro At Links Earning With These 7 simple Tactics

There’s no doubt about it: Link earning is one of the most challenging aspects of SEO today. This difficult doesn’t mean giving up on this essential aspect of SEO.

If you are interested in a basic primer on link earning check out my post on avoiding Google penalties for bad links.

You will sleep well at night knowing that your links will not generate SEO penalties. Armed with basics, you can earn links to help your SEO.

But that is not the end of the story on link earning.

Link Earning Is The Way To Go

There are still many avenues for link earning that you can pursue. Authoritative and organic links boost your SEO, so you don’t want to miss any opportunities.

Ever since Google put the hammer down on black hat link schemes with the Penguin update in 2012, it seems like SEOs have focused less on link earning.

Before Penguin, manipulating links to your site was the norm. Now, links have to be earned. By shying away from link earning, you are missing important opportunities.

You might say that these natural authoritative links are hard to come by, but that would be a mistake. You are probably overlooking some basic link earning tactics that would help your SEO.

Here are 7 tactics that you should consider for link earning:

Use Slideshare for Presentations

Large file sharing sites allow you to post content that includes links back to your site.

One good example is Slideshare, a website for sharing PDFs and PowerPoint presentations.

You can create a solid presentation from scratch or re-purpose older content into a new form.You can even include links in your presentation.

Place links on the title page, the resource page and throughout the presentation. Link back to your site and your social media accounts.

Embed your presentation on your blog so you can promote it on your social media sites.

Post Podcast to Soundcloud

Fizzle is a great example of using sound Clound platform as Link Earning

Soundcloud

This site is designed to post audio files for users. Many post music, but some podcasts or other content.

All you need is the microphone on your computer to record something simple. You can open an account, post your content and get an authoritative link.

Soundcloud and Slideshare are just two of the most popular file sharing sites out there. There are many others that allow users to share video or images.

These can be good places to get links for your content. You always want to remember to post solid content to these sites.

Do not just post spam, as it will eventually get flagged and deleted.

Create an Infographic

Another popular form of content is the infographic.

These are exciting and engaging ways of presenting information that people enjoy, share on social media and link to on their blogs.

It is not hard to create an infographic.First, identify a topic. You can use search engines to check out what infographics are available on this subject.

Based on what is out there, you can identify an aspect of the topic has not yet been made into an infographic. Collect the information you want to include.

Design the infographic. There are free tools available to do this, such as Canva.

But if you consider hiring a designer to put it together for you.

Upwork might be useful for you.

While Fiverr can helps you get your job done within $5.

Create an embed code so to make it easy for people to link to your infographic.

Finally, post the infographic on your site, submit it to directories and share it on social media.

Big Content on Link Earning

Nomad List’s Big Content are providing complete list of best places to live and work

Go over to a search engine and search for a “best places to work remotely” keyword and you will find out Nomad is ranking against high domain authority from Telegraph.co.uk, Forbes.com, and fastcompany.com.

And a big content really does rank better than other even you have low PA(page authority) and DA(Domain Authority)

If you look closely, the big sites like Fast Company, Telegraph and Forbes have the higher PA and DA but it is ranking lower than Nomad List’s Big Content.

Nomad Ranking on “Best places to Work Remotely” effortless

This is mind blowing

And now, take a gander at the content you find on top 10 Google Search Engine.Ask yourself how your content fairs against what is already out there.

Hopefully, you can say that your content is about at the same level as what is out there. So you’ve reached the bare minimum.

But that will not be enough if you are going earn links from this content. Why is anyone going to link to your content if everyone else’s content is just as good?

If you want links, you need to blow everyone else out of the water. You need to create content that 10 times better than what is out there.

This way when other bloggers are searching the Internet, they are going to take notice of your content. Then you will start to get links. Creating truly excellent content will garner you natural authoritative links. Moreover, these big contents should emphasize in providing the excellent user experience that is linear to Google’s Goal.

Link Reclamation

Some people will mention your content or your brand without linking to your site. No need to stew over your misfortune. Be proactive and ask for the link.

You can use tools like Google Alerts, BuzzSumo or Mention.com to find mention of your brand or content.

Like just Rand Fishkin said you can check those sites to see if they link to you. If they do not give you a link, you can send them a polite email asking them for a link.

Be sure to thank them for mentioning you as well.You can even use a reverse image search on Google Images to find any picture infographics or memes that you have created.

Commenting on Other Blogs

If you’re practicing the above tactics, then you should have a list of bloggers, thought leaders
and other influencers in your field and related fields.

Besides to creating your content, you want to pay attention to what these folks are saying on their blogs and social media accounts.

Getting into a conversation with these influencers is an excellent way to share information and provide values for your site.

Let’s say that an influencer writes about a particular controversial issue. You could write a blog post extending this perspective in some way or even respectfully disagreeing with it.

Then, you post a comment on the blog with a link to your content. The Influencer may even respond to your post and include a link to it.

You don’t want to spam the influencer’s blog, but engaging in legitimate discussions about important issues is part of the purpose of blogging.

This is a very natural link earning tactic.

Website Feedback Sites

These are sites where you can post your website and ask for advice to improve it.

When you post your website, the feedback site will give you a link back to your site.

Here are a few feedback sites to get you started:

-ConceptFeedback.com
-SuggestionBox.com
-Criticue.com

These 7 simple tactics are really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to link earning.

Google’s Penguin may have made it more difficult to get solid links to your site, but it is not impossible.

You don’t want to neglect with an important area of SEO.

Now, Your Turn!!! What is your Link Earning Tactics?

Updated: 19/6/15

You Can’t Believe it, Content Marketing Is Going To Evolve Again

As more and more businesses and websites are using content marketing as an important part of their marketing plan, attracting Internet traffic has become more competitive. In the past, having quality, valuable and unique content set you apart from your competitors. But now, everyone has this kind of content. In order to succeed, you have to go big! You can’t throw up just any old content, you have to create big content.

Big Contents Will Be The Next Thing

What Is Big Content?

Big content is content that is head and shoulders above anything else available on the topic. It is designed to be a resource that users continually engage to, a valuable tool that helps solve problems or a comprehensive summary of information in a field.

Why Is Big Content the Next Big Thing?

Think of one your primary keywords that you are trying to attract traffic for. Do a search for this keyword, and see what comes up. Say you searched for “social media marketing.” You are going see a lot of articles that basically offer the same basic advice for getting started in social media marketing. This is great for people looking to find out info on social media marketing. They can easily find out the basic info about the topic. But if you are trying to rank for this keyword, it is a real problem. Why should anyone click on your site if it basically duplicates the content on all these other sites?

There is so much content out there that is basically good, but does not really engage the reader. Lists and videos of the same tips over and over again don’t give Internet searchers anything to sink their teeth into. That is why big content is the next big thing.

Big content is content that makes readers go “wow!” It truly engages the readers by providing valuable information or a useful tool. It is the kind of resource that people will return to again and again because it is so useful and solves important problems.

Benefits of Big Content

Creating big content has many benefits. Here are just a few:

It gets more shares, likes and mentions. When people find something that is truly helpful, they want to tell others about it. Truly creative content make people say, “Wow! I really need to show this to my friends!”

Because a piece of big content is such a share magnet, it will help your SEO. The increased social signals to search engine algorithms will bring this piece of content to the top of the rankings and help your entire website as well.

Big content increases visitor engagement. The content is so engaging that visitors will linger on your site for a while. They will not click away and may even view multiple pages. These signals tell search engines that your content is very valuable.

It creates conversations. People are going to talk about your content both online and around the water cooler.

Creating big content will help you enhance your search engine rankings and social media shares so that more Internet traffic flows to your site. It helps you to stand out and shine in what has come to be a very bland world of content.

Challenges of Big Content

With great benefits, come challenges. If you going to try to create big content, you need to overcome these obstacles.

It is expensive – maybe too expensive for small blogs. It is really easy to whip up another article with 5 tips for doing something basic. But creating a piece of big content takes time and research. In addition, it may require skill sets that you do not posses like graphic design or web software development. In order to create an attractive and useful tool, you may need to hire extra help.

It is risky. It can be hard to predict whether a single piece of big content will actually make it big. You have to have multiple pieces of big content in the pipeline to make sure that one of them goes big.

It is challenging to measure the ROI. The content is only responsible for bringing traffic to the site. Converting that traffic to sales is another issue. It is difficult to determine the amount of sales that is coming directly from big content.

You need a truly creative idea to make this work. It will take some focused attention and brainstorming to come up with something truly big

I think the future of "big content"/"10X content" is, paradoxically, bite-sized content.

— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) June 7, 2015

Examples of Big Content

It may help to see a few examples of big content to get an idea of what this looks like.

SEOPressor’s Blog Topic Generator: Have you ever been stuck for a topic for your blog? SEOPressor provides a tool to solve this problem. Type a keyword and description that you are interested in, and the tool will give you five titles for a potential blog post. This is engaging because it helps bloggers solve a problem. It is fun to play with, so people spend time on the site playing with the tool.

The Mozcast: The SEO experts at Moz have provide this tool to assess the stability of search engine rankings. In a creative move, they describe the stability of Google’s search algorithm in terms of the weather and temperature. This enable SEO experts to judge whether Google is up to something, and they need to check the rankings of the sites they shepherd. This nifty tool gives users a reason to return to Moz on a regular basis to check the MozCast. They are providing valuable information on a daily basis in a creative form. This is truly big content.

Drug Bless America: This is powerful information about illegal drug use and its effect in America. It is presented in a visually stunning fashion by rehabs.com. This piece of content brings together a lot of information and connects the dots for people who may be interested in a rehab center for themselves or a loved one. It is certainly a magnet for shares and likes on social media.

How Do Our Favorite Tech Companies Make Money?: This engaging piece of content presents a beautifully designed comprehensive look at tech companies. It offers information on what they do, how they make money and if they are profitable. Created by Seer Interactive, a digital marketing company, it is easy to spend 10 or 15 minutes poking around the interesting information that this content provides.

Coschedule Headline Analysis : Coschedule Headlines Analyzer has the ablility to rate your headline quality to result in social shares and increased click through rate.

Steps To Successful Big Content

Now that you have a sense for what big content is and what it looks like, the real question is how can you go about producing this kind of content. Here are a few basic steps:

You must identify and understand your audience. If you are going to provide a valuable resource that solves a significant problem, you have to really know what the pain points are for your audience. You have to understand what is really going to enthrall your audience and grab their attention.

Once you develop a deep understanding of your audience, you want to create a list of the challenges that your audience faces. For example, SEOPressor’s tool recognizes that sometimes bloggers have trouble coming up with topics to blog about. It provides some quick inspiration to get started. A successful piece of big content is going to help the audience face a challenge.

Develop a tool or a resource that will help overcome these challenges. Here is where you have to think big. You can always scale back your idea, but you have to start big or you will not wind up with big content. In order to produce an effective tool, you may have to hire a designer or programmer to implement your idea. If you win a lot of traffic from your content, then this investment will be worth it.

Finally, measure the results. Big content will get a lot of social shares and page views. You want to monitor these metrics to make sure that your content continues to succeed.

Stop creating boring, repetitive content. Start developing big content now before everyone else. Don’t wait or the field will be too competitive. A well planned piece of big content can generate thousands of social shares and increase your site traffic.

Updated: 16/6/15

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