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- What Makes a 10x Content?
- Brainstorming 10x Content Ideas: Where to Look At
- Validating Your Content Ideas: What to Check
- Winning Examples of 10x Content
More than 3 million blog posts get published every day, based on data by Hosting Facts.
With so much content competing for your audience’s attention, how can yours stand out?
And this is the harder question: Can you possibly convert casual site visitors into loyal customers?
Yes, through 10x content, claims Rand Fishkin.
The idea is simple: create 10 times better content than anything else in the search results for a certain topic. It means offering something valuable to help people achieve their goals.
What Makes a 10x Content?
10x content goes beyond good writing. It’s 10 times better than others if it meets at least three of the following criteria:
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Great UX
Does it provide a seamless experience through stunning design, visuals, user interface, and other UX elements?
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High-quality and trustworthy, among others
Is it high-quality, trustworthy, useful, interesting, and remarkable? Having all or some of these qualities shows your expertise in the subject, catches attention, and builds trust.
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Unique
Does it present fresh ideas? A piece of content stands out if it’s different in scope and in detail from others in the same niche.
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Quick page loading and optimized display
Does it load fast enough? How fast you deliver content to your audience is critical to your content marketing success. Check how you can make your content load faster with a site speed analyzer such as GTmetrix.
Also, does your content display correctly on any screen size? Optimize it for any device and browser. You can use Responsinator to see how your content will look on various mobile devices and adjust accordingly.
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Emotionally stirring
Is it relatable, moving, or entertaining? Serve boring content, and you’ll turn readers off. People will want to read your entire content if it makes them happy, surprised, inspired, excited, or curious.
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Likely to spread online
Is it shared a lot on social media? Do other sites link to it? If so, it means your content is valuable enough for people to share online.
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Helpful
Does it solve a problem or answer a question? People come to your site to fulfill their needs. Provide value to your audience with well-researched, comprehensive, and accurate content.
If you answered “yes” to most of the questions above, then you’re already winning half the battle.
Brainstorming 10x Content Ideas: Where to Look At
Do your ideas align with the requirements for 10x content?
No need to fret if they don’t. You can still tweak them—or start over if you must—when planning your content.
Time to brainstorm topics to build content on and pump up your creative juices. Get started with these great sources to find ideas for content that converts:
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Customer data
Gain insights directly from customers, so you can craft content that’s tailor fit to their needs. You can find them from surveys, comments on your social channels, sales reports, and other sources of customer data.
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Competitors’ content
Check out the best-performing blog posts of your competitors—you can pick up some potential ideas from there.
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Buzzsumo
This online tool is useful for finding content with the highest social engagement. Get your inspiration from those popular pieces of content on social platforms.
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Facebook
Search for pages that your brand’s followers like on Facebook. This way, you’ll find out what other interests they’re likely to share.
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Quora
Look up your topic on Quora to see questions people ask about it, especially those without an answer yet.
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Reddit
Subreddits that cater to a specific industry can give you an idea of what your target audience is talking about.
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Popular content forms in your industry
Check the authority blogs in your niche for ideas and best practices you can use for your own. Also, take a look at popular videos, communities, infographics, SlideShare presentations, and other content forms. You might find your aha moment there!
Validating Your Content Ideas: What to Check
So you’ve gathered and recorded your team’s content ideas, making sure they have that 10x potential. Good enough? Not just yet.
Just because an idea seems good doesn’t mean it’s worth pursuing. Before you start creating content, vet your idea to confirm your target audience’s interest in it—and why. You need solid proof that it will resonate with them.
This is where idea validation comes in.
A crucial step in content ideation, validating ideas involves checking these seven essential items for your topic:
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Search volume
If your topic has a high search volume, it means many people search for it online. To find that out, do keyword research using one or more of these tools:
- Google’s Keyword Planner
- SEMRush
- Keyword Tool
- Keyword Finder
- Moz’s Keyword Explorer
- Mondovo’s Keyword Research Tool
The tricky part is that nobody’s probably searching for your exact topic. Be creative with the search terms you use. Think of other related terms your target audience may find interesting. You can use Google Autocomplete to easily find keyword variations for your topic.
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Linking and relationship-building opportunities
Are the top-ranking pages for your topic getting plenty of links? Use tools like Buzzsumo and Ahrefs to look for backlinks of the most shared content.
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Industry influencers
Make sure there are key influencers who will promote your content once it goes live. Buzzsumo allows you to find influencers with the most Twitter followers and highest retweet and reply rates. Just click the Influencers tab and search for your topic.
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Timelessness and relevance
Content that never gets outdated—also known as evergreen content—provides value to your audience for a long time. It can sustain good search engine rankings, too.
To determine if your content can stay timeless and relevant, check your topic’s interest level over time on Google Trends.
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Unique value
Check the content of your competitors on your target topic. Is there any gap you can fill? Because you want your content to be 10x better than theirs, you’ll avoid what they’ve already done. Instead, you’ll build on what your competitors are lacking.
For example, if no one uses interactive elements or presents case studies, consider doing it for your content. This way, you provide unique value to your audience.
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Ability to rank for your target keywords
What are your content’s chances of ranking well in search engines? It depends on how well your strategies for link building, influencer marketing, and content marketing will work together.
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Ability to generate leads
Your content ideas need a clear goal to support your client’s business objectives. More than driving traffic to your client’s site, can your content help generate leads and convert readers to customers?
Winning Examples of 10x Content
Need proof that 10x content works? These two success stories will inspire you to reap its benefits for your content marketing campaigns.
Typeform’s Susan Bennett blog post
This is a perfect example of content that’s so good it barely needed promoting. In a tweet. Rand even dubbed it as the future of content.
What makes it a 10x content:
- Positive UX: conversational and interactive, with audio clips and a clickable timeline
- Unique, high quality, and useful
- Shared over 10,000 times on social media
How they did it:
Typeform’s content writing and web development teams collaborated to produce this one-of-a-kind blog post. They interviewed Susan Bennett, the voice behind Apple’s Siri. Not only that—they explored an angle that’s different from the interviews Bennett had done before.
“We created our own custom audio player, researched and wrote an article, and integrated an interactive timeline into the whole thing,” shares Typeform Marketing Director Sançar Sahin.
Why it’s successful:
- Brought over 475,000 visitors to its site
- Earned over 2,000 backlinks with 50+ average DA
- Zero promotion—the article marketed itself
Cactus Technologies’ Solid State Drives 101
How do you create an exceptional piece of content for a client that sells flash storage devices? The marketing team working for Cactus Technologies used 10x content ideation to produce an educational material on solid-state drives. Now, this blog post is one of the site’s top five landing pages.
What makes it a 10x content:
- Helpful and comprehensive resource on a highly technical topic
- Positive UX: Plenty of detailed diagrams and illustrations in its ebook
- Shows expertise through high-quality, trustworthy, and useful content
How they did it:
The marketing team did keyword research on relevant topics, targeting long-tail, high-volume keywords that would rank for a year and beyond. Then they helped the client create optimized content, complete with detailed visuals to achieve their goal of being “highly educational.”
Focusing on click-through rate, the team used a compelling, clickable headline for the 10x content: “Solid State Drives 101: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know.”
Why it’s successful:
- Increased conversion rate by 4.14%
- Earned four times more views than regular blog posts
- Got double social traffic than regular posts
- Got a Google Featured Snippet for one of its target keywords (“solid state drive technology”)
Final Thoughts
You need a solid strategy to win the content marketing game. Adopt 10x content ideation into your campaigns to provide value to your audience and help your clients meet their business goals. Learn the best practices from businesses that succeed in creating content that converts.
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Jolina is a marketing strategist working with several startups and websites based in the US, UK, and Australia. She is devoted in helping businesses bridge relationship gaps by providing in-depth, actionable advice on online marketing, business development, and growth hacking.
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