Types of Content that Create Engagement and Build Influence

I’ve identified a few types of content that seem to drive engagement and allow people to build their influence. I’ll also talk about how most people approach content marketing and why most businesses struggle to get traction with their blogs.

1. Ongoing Case Study

One of the most successful content strategies I see is the ongoing case study. In this format, the blogger is simply sharing the results of their progress as they go along.

The reason that this format works so well is that people who are interested in the same topic and facing the same struggles can learn from someone else as they make progress in real time. Ongoing case studies often have more details than a single case study article because they involve multiple articles over a period of time.

Here are a few examples:

– WP Curve – Dan Norris founded WP Curve and in the early days when he was creating content for the blog, he shared lessons learned from his experiences as he was trying to grow the business. He also shared data on the business, like charts showing how their revenue was growing as time progressed. His blog quickly grew to over 10,000 followers and beyond.

– Groove HQ – Groove is another successful content marketing operation. Alex Turnbull shared Groove’s growth story as it grew towards $100,000 in monthly revenue. Once that goal was hit, he changed the number to $500,000 and then $1 million and then $10 million. Readers signed up for the newsletter to see what he was doing to grow the business in real time.

– Jungle Scout – Jungle Scout launched it’s “Million Dollar Case Study” campaign, where Greg Mercer decided to use Jungle Scout to find a product to sell on Amazon and grow the business until it generated one million dollars in sales. Most e-commerce blogs were just creating random articles about e-commerce, but people got excited about being able to see how someone grows an e-commerce business from product selection, to procurement and marketing.

Before deciding to take the ongoing case study approach, you should be sure that you can commit to doing the extra work required. This format can be challenging because you are doing more than just writing content. You are actually taking steps to become an expert in what you are writing about and that is why it works so well.

Ongoing case studies might be scary for some people because there is always the fear that you might fail to achieve your goal. One workaround is to wait until you are already seeing some success (and expect the trend to continue). But even if you fail, you’ve built an audience and you can always switch up your content strategy later.

2. High Volume SEO Targeted Content

A lot of businesses who have been doing content marketing for awhile focus on creating a high volume of content, sometimes with multiple authors creating the content. There are several pros and cons to this approach.

Hubspot, Social Media Examiner and Entrepreneur are a few sites that publish a high volume of content each day. By publishing often, these publications get a lot of traffic from long tail SEO keywords and social sharing. In fact, Hubspot published a study that showed that blogs that publish 16 or more times per month get 3.5x more traffic on average than blogs that only publish 0-4 times per month.

Creating a lot of content can work well if you already have a good number of links to your site. If you are just starting out and don’t have any online presence, then you may want to consider starting off with another strategy, like publishing more of your content on other sites first to increase your visibility.

3. The Content First Approach

Many business blogs focus on SEO because search engines can send ongoing traffic, but with so many other traffic channels available, you may want to consider a “content first” approach.

Benji Hyam grew ThinkApps to 35,000 unique visitors in 6 months by taking the “content first” approach. Rather than using keyword research to find content ideas, Benji instead focused on creating content that readers would be interested in reading. This approach makes it easier to stand out and get noticed because you aren’t restricted to writing about keywords with high search volume.

For marketers that think that SEO always comes first, Brian Dean’s skyscraper technique is a good example of a brilliantly executed “content first” approach. Before he wrote about it, “skyscraper technique” was not an SEO keyword with any search volume. While SEO is always an important consideration, even good SEO’s occasionally write content that isn’t keyword targeted.

4. Research & Data Driven Content

Research studies and data driven content also do well. People like seeing ideas backed by data. Such research is interesting and sometimes useful when we’re trying to achieve results in our business.

Here are a few examples of successful data driven content.

Andy Crestodina runs Orbit Media and one of his most popular blog posts is his annual blogger review where he surveys 1,000 bloggers and gets data on how often they write, how long their articles are, etc. Asides from providing interesting insights into blogging, he also informs the bloggers that participated in the study resulting in lots of social shares.

Buzzsumo is a content marketing tool that can find articles that are popular for certain keywords on social media. Occasionally, they publish interesting research information with their data, like this study that shows content trends in 2018.

Buffer produced a really popular article on 10 ways to be happy based on science that got shared on social media over 10,000 times. Citing scientific research made the article more authoritative, believable and compelling than simply listing ways to be happy.

Data driven content can also work well outside of the digital marketing niche. For example, the OK Cupid blog sometimes posts research articles like this one where they found that women who received mixed ratings on attractiveness actually got more messages than when men consistently rated a woman as attractive.

5. News and Trends

Some publications do well by sharing news in an industry and following trends. Search Engine Journal and Search Engine Land are niche publications that reveal the latest news about SEO.

One of the challenges with running such publications is that you have to keep up with the latest information and be prepared to publish quickly. However, if you have the resources to stay on top of news and trends in your industry, you can grow an audience that wants to be informed about the latest developments.

6. Stories

In some niches, stories can work really well and help readers connect with your brand. Scientific research has shown that the brain produces oxytocin when engaging with a good story, which increases the willingness of people to help others.

Thai Life insurance uses story telling to produce emotional videos that can bring people to tears in less than 3 minutes. Here’s one of their popular videos with over 31 million views:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaWA2GbcnJU

Stories are a powerful and often underutilized tool in content marketing that can make people become more engaged with our writing.

The Approach that Most Blogs Take…

Many blogs that aren’t getting traction are just writing about whatever they feel like without any content strategy or they are simply targeting keywords and writing an “article of the day”. While keyword targeted content can work well later on, telling your growth story, sharing unique research results and creating content that conveys authority through actual experiences are a few ways to grow an audience and start seeing results from blogging.

To Sum It Up…

Creating a solid content strategy can take time, but it’s an important step to take if you want to significantly increase your odds at succeeding with content marketing. Analyze your competitors, decide exactly how you will create content that stands out and gets results and also what steps you need to take to promote your content and your brand. Most importantly, be sure you are committed to sticking with it for the long term and have the resources to make content marketing succeed for your organization.

Check out the rest of this content strategy guide or click here to return to the first page of the guide:

Objectives and Metrics – We need to set goals and define metrics to track our success so that we can measure our content marketing effectiveness.

Content Creation Strategies – Creating content on an ongoing basis is one of the biggest content marketing challenges. In this chapter, we’ll discuss ways we can create content that stands out and drives traffic.

Content Promotion Strategies – We need to promote our blogs to gain visibility and grow our following. This section discusses some popular promotion strategies and when to use them.

Types of Content that Create Engagement and Build Influence – Certain types of content are effective in creating engagement and building influence. This section will examine the types of content that other influencers have used to outperform other content marketers.