Tag Archives: Content writing tips

How to Generate & Use Data-Driven Content for Link Building

How to Generate & Use Data-Driven Content for Link Building

In this data-driven world grabbing the attention of readers, journalists and links are one of the hardest jobs. Your content must be eye-catching, exciting and unique. Data journalism one of the best and easiest ways to create content that stands out from the crowd.  Content with data and statistics makes it interesting, newsworthy and shareable. And it also helps to bring more traffic to your website. A data-oriented content can drive traffic to your website also.

Be The Source

Creating your own data is not an easy thing. If you able to create your own data, people will want to link back to the place they cited. Using Google Trends and Google Consumer Survey, you can search for trending topics and build your own data.

Pick Your Topic 

Google Data doesn’t always ensure good content. You have to figure out how to tell a story using data. First, you need to decide what the content is about. When researching about topic, you should use Google Trends and BuzzSumo. These tools are built for researching and exploring trends.

Gather Your Data 

The most important thing about creating a data-driven content is actually find the data. While building content with your own data, you should remember that more in quantity doesn’t mean you’ll achieve your goals. You need a good content to achieve your goal.

  1. Conduct Surveys

Surveying is the go-to place for collecting information, to get statistics and data that you specifically focus on. Think carefully before asking questions. You want to get best results possible to generate a variety of angles for you to use in your content. Make sure your question should support the story and limit the number of open-ended questions you ask. Include a variety of demographic questions which answers given with the details about the respondents.

  1. Ask Your Community

Do you have your own community or fans? If you work for a bigger brand and have forums where they discuss a range of topics. Many businesses also have a large database of customer contact details to which they send newsletter on a regular basis. You can send them questions on a regular basis to understand their desires.

  1. Use Your Own Data and Reports

Many SaaS companies don’t realize that they’re sitting on amount of data. You have some analytical tools to track success of your own website and marketing efforts. These tools can give you useful insights and data to create a content marketing strategy. Google Analytics is a good place to know your consumer demographics such as their age, gender and location, what they buy, what device they use and more. You can also carry out your own tests and experiments to generate data and insights that will generate data and insights about your industry and your customers.

Search for Interesting Angles

Once you have the data, you’ll analyze which angle you want to give your story. Analyzing data isn’t always easy. That’s why try and highlight any key points in your content derived out of the data. Remember, once you have the strong data with you, you’ll be able to segment your results demographically. This will help to find a range of local angles you can pull out for your content based on gender, age, location etc.

Visualize Your Data

Presenting data is the key to the success of your content. Visualizing data is the first step of making your content engaging and shareable. But data visualization is not easy. Ideally, you should work with a designer to visualize your data. If you don’t have an access to a designer then you can work with a data visualization tool. Once, you’ve created the visual you should add relevant content to make it a story. You should make sure to make content which is responsive on mobile and tablet devices.

How to Structure Your Content Support Activities

If the content is truly a unicorn, you need to do all the supporting staffs around that content. The structuring process should start collaborating with the PR team to create a strategy. PR teams develop high-quality link opportunities.

Then you should conduct manual outreach to industry blog to create back links and guest blogs.

Partner with other companies on a webinar to discuss data.

Create a blog post series to give further context to data and optimize for new search items.

Utilize the data at presentations.

Recreate the data in nfographics, charts, and graphs.

Don’t Have Any Data?

Don’t have any data to collect? Don’t worry. There are plenty of sources you can use and combine to make a whole new data set. You can get access to data from Pew Research Centre, Wikipedia, Google Scholar, The Office for National Statistics, and Reddit’s Data is Beautiful subreddit. You can also get data at Google [keyword] market research, or [keyword] data sets.

A great content don’t have a shelf-life. You will see spark at the beginning and even after 6 months of its publishing. Data-driven content always works because you create something that people want. If your research is done right then you should have a powerful piece of content.  

Create Link-Worthy Content

11 Ideas to Create Link-Worthy Content

Creating link worthy-content is not easy. It requires time, planning and strategy. The type of links that you want is editorial link or natural link and the hardest to get. Editorial links are the best kind of links which Google wants you to build. But before doing that you need to understand what is link-worthy content?

What is link-worthy content?

To put simply, link-worthy content is useful content. Link-worthy content typically comes in four forms:

  • Informational: Typically the latest news.
  • Inspirational: Any content that inspires people to take action, such as self-improvement or supporting a cause.
  • Educational: Educational content teaches something new to people.
  • Entertaining: The content that provides amusement and plays on the emotions of consumers.

Ultimately you want your content as the best answer asked by your target audience. There is a lot of content available on the web. Most marketers fail to gain any traction using content such as views, shares or links.

Utmost Focus on Content

Creating awesome content that attracts links isn’t easy. The competition is also fierce. There is multiple number of content available in the web in the form of blog, infographics and video.  It is often found that a good content gets out-performed by inferior content. The reason – the good content isn’t marketed properly.

Consider content as an asset. Just like property and stocks, your content has the potential to generate valuable links that will help your SEO. But creating link-worthy content is the half of the battle.

Establish Relationship with Influencers

You create a awesome content and if nobody finds it on the web, it’s all waste of time and effort. Unfortunately, great content doesn’t guarantee you links. This is the reason you need to build relationship with influencers. When you’re working with influencers, you’re not only working with that influencer. But you’re also adding their entire network.  A recommendation from a true influencer can instantly make your content more appealing to a whole new audience. Influencers may have a loyal following on social media. They may run a blog or website. Or they may be journalists.

11 Ideas to Create Link-Worthy Content

To create something engaging, relevant and link-worthy, takes time, skill and money.

  1. Create Evergreen Content

News content has a short shelf life. That’s why you should pick up on topics that are more evergreen. Evergreen content are the resource that remain useful and relevant long after it published. It rarely changes and always in demand from the audience. This could be:

  • Guides
  • E-books
  • How-to-posts
  • List
  • Explainers
  • Checklists

 

  1. Start a Podcast

A podcast naturally attract links because every time you interview a guest, they will likely link to your page.  Plus, you’ll attract links from other industry sites and blogs if your podcast is popular.

  1. Create a Resource Centre

In addition to publishing and promoting your content, you also have to organize in such way that will make sense for your audience as well as new visitors. A content resource center is the perfect solution for you. Creating guides, case studies, webinars, whitepapers and checklists requires time and money both. Some people would rather just link to your resource center rather than creating their own.

  1. Be a Thought Leader

Even if you don’t consider as a thought leader, start writing like one. Do things that make you stand out.

  • Be Confident: You know your staff. Show it to the world.
  • Be Original: Don’t just rewrite old ideas. Lead, don’t follow.
  • Be Authentic: Just be you.
  • Be Interesting: Being interesting demand people’s attention.

 

  1. Expert Roundup

Write something that attracts the attention of marketers. Rather than writing about marketing, use quotes of the marketers. The concerned marketer will eventually share it.

  1. Partner With Another Brand

Partnering with another brand is really important. Co-authoring through your partnerships exposes your piece of content to a new community or audience. It is also important to co-author as they never disappoint. When you co-author with someone else, you agree to spend equal cash flow on paid amplification. By utilizing both teams for paid amplification, you can utilize different target audiences with our content syndication partnerships, social ads and native ads.

  1. Target & Optimize for Relevant Keywords

Create content that relevant to your company. First decide your keywords and create content around those group of keywords.

  1. Add Visual Content

Add images, infographics, data visualization, Gifs. All these can help you to tell story.

  1. Formatting Matters

Nothing is off-putting for readers to read a giant block of text. It is ideal to use subheadlines, short, simple sentences, bulleted list, block quotes, bolding and italics.

  1. What’s Your Angle

What makes your content different from other published on the same topic? If you don’t know then you may not have a link-worthy content. Rework on your content until you find your own angle.

  1. What Would You Link To Your Content?

This is probably the ultimate test. You should know your audience, your industry/niche and what they want.  So the big question– would you link to your own content? If you don’t like to link it then you can’t expect from others.

 

The benefit of link-worthy content is that it attracts links in short-term and long term. It also helps to build a positive relationship inside and outside of your community. It position you as a thought-leadership role.