Quality Bubbles to the Top

“We have to be clear about what we want people to remember us for” — Steve Jobs The signal-noise ratio compares the power of the desired signal to the background noise that it operates in. The more noise there is, the stronger the signal needs to be in order to get heard. Content operates in much the same way, where the fidelity of your signal is directly correlated to quality. Think about it this way. There is a lot of noise out there. In such a competitive environment, if an article stands out against all that noise, it’s likely that the piece is high quality. People get hung up on the idea of quality, because it’s hard to pin down quality qualitatively—but this is why it’s actually pretty easy to measure quality quantitatively. If articles for individual, trusted blogs within your market are shared a lot, for example, it’s a pretty simple way to benchmark what’s good and what’s not. Shares are more than just traffic or clickbait—it means that people care enough about what you’re saying to actually get it out there. Creating high-quality content is a data-informed process, which makes it deducible and reproducible.

Reverse Engineer Content

Figure out what’s working. Do more of it. It’s a fundamental principle that I run all of my businesses by. This rule applies to content, with a twist. Figure out what’s working for others. Imitate it but don’t rip it. Everything to do with content is publicly available and out there, so it can be measured. If you can measure it, you can reverse engineer it. Beware this caveat, as it’ll save you a major headache. If you rip off content from another company, their customers will know and they’ll rain hell down on you. Because content is such a powerful way to build a brand, their readers will support the company and go after anyone who threatens the production of more great content. The upside is that when someone rips you off, your audience will return the favor. The key to imitating great content is in first determining what content to imitate, since quality is specific to a market or customer. Fortunately, if you’ve gone through the 3-question framework of The Kissmetrics Content Marketing Secret, you already have your answer. The content you want to imitate is the highest performing content in the places on the web where your customers hang out. With the following tools, you can dig into the data for a given site that will show you what content performs the best. From there, it’s easy to study the piece, break down why it was successful, and imitate it. Buzzsumo: Easily find the most-shared articles on a particular topic or a specific website. Start by topic. Suppose you want to find the top performing articles on content marketing. Just search “content marketing” and Buzzsumo automatically gives you a breakdown of the most shared articles over the past month.Then, take the top 4-5 blogs in the data, and break them down further. Take their domain names, and copy and paste the URLs into Buzzsumo. This allows you to take the top 10-20% of content within your market by shares over a period of time, and get even more granular with your analysis. Export this data into a spreadsheet to have a master document on the best performing content across all of the sites that you care about. Open Site Explorer by Moz: Measuring shares is an invaluable way to track what content struck a chord and became hugely popular, if only for a short period of time. Looking at backlinks via Open Site Explorer, however, is like going through an album of greatest hits—it’s a good gauge of how quality lasts over time, and what types of content are evergreen. That’s because while social shares are ephemeral, backlinks are forever. The screenshot below shows Quick Sprout's top 3 pages by link quality for Quick Sprout: “The Definitive Guide to Growth Hacking,” “How Content Length Affects Rankings and Conversions,” and “The Advanced Guide to Content Marketing.”2 out of 3 of these are long-form guides. It should come as no surprise that big bundles of content value wind up getting linked long after they're posted, but what you may not realize is that those “advanced guides” are often just several blog posts merged into one expansive piece of content. Creating evergreen content doesn't have to mean spending weeks penning a brilliant post from scratch—sometimes all it takes is a couple super valuable articles on similar topics, tied together into a coherent whole. Google: Because you want to rank on Google, you should run searches on it to find out what’s currently ranking. Run the queries you expect your customers are running to get a feel for how the existing content out there solves those problems. Take the stand-out blogs and influencers in the arena and search their sites specifically. Type in site:[domain name] followed by a query in order to hone your results. Your problem becomes simplified, because you know your competition and you know what end product you’re trying to achieve. Now it’s just a matter of getting there.

Headlines are everything

Headlines are where you express the quality of your signal. Too many people spend all their time on the content, and let it go to waste by slapping together a shoddy headline at the last minute. That’s one of the biggest mistakes that you can make with your content, because of one simple fact. 8 out of 10 people will read your headline, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest of your post. Here are the 7 basic rules for constructing headlines:

Negative words and numbers cause more clicks
Keep under 65 characters to ensure search visibility
Use specific headlines that match your content
Odd numbers perform better than even ones
Aim to have six words in your headlines
Avoid words that have multiple meanings
Include power verbs and interesting adjectives

My co-founder, Neil Patel wrote a blog post for Kissmetrics called “Five Shocking Facts That will Change your Entire Approach to Social Media.”Look closely, and you’ll see that Neil’s post follows 5 out of 7 of the rules outlined above:

Negative word — “Shocking”
Title is deadly specific about what you'll be reading
Odd number — “Five”
No ambiguous words
Power — they'll “change your entire approach”

5 out of 7 rules is the perfect amount to follow—we tested it. Some people call this title (and ones like it) clickbait, but the data shows that visitors spent a significant amount of time on the page—around 4 minutes on average. That shows that the post is delivering on the promise of the headline and people are sticking around to read the post and getting value from it. Using a clickbait headline doesn't mean that the content you write has to be trash. The greatest content on the internet combines effective headlines that people want to click on with content that they can't stop reading—it contains the best of both worlds.

Quality Bubbles to the Top