3 Important Steps to Creating Relevant and Shareable Content

July 19, 2012 by Daniel Sharkov|

When asked about the most important ingredient to content that goes viral, most of you will probably say quality. They would of course have a good point. Miss that component and converting visitors into prospects will be close to impossible.

An issue that is less talked about however is relevancy. If you have an established topic and steer too far away from what you normally cover, you will hardly be able to keep the trust and authority you’ve gained ( see “ Tips to Help You Build Trust“ ).

I thought it’d be a good idea to share with you folks what I’ve learned about crafting content that is relevant and one that draws the attention. Below are the four most important steps:

Monitor and Analyze Your Competition

Whether you are a social media blogger or prefer sharing gardening tips, the chances are that what you want to write about has already been covered multiple times. That should not scare you though. It’s actually good for you.

I do not tolerate plagiarism. What I do tolerate however is taking ideas, transforming those ideas and adding your style to them to come up with a finished product.

Knowing what’s going on around your area of expertise can greatly help you produce content that poeple can relate to and articles that get shares and retweets ( see “16 Tips to Get More Retweets“ ).

All in all having a list of blogs, big and small, to follow is crucial. Monitoring their performance can be of a good use when determining which topic are worth the time and which aren’t. If someone else is able to get people listening, why not turn your head and try to see what he’s doing and what patterns there are that might be different from your approach!

Look into Your Older Articles

One of the best ways to find out what to write about is closer than you think it is. The posts you have already written can turn out to be the key for to your next viral article.

When choosing that approach I usually begin with the headlines. Often times simply checking the titles of previously written articles can be the spark for new ideas.

For example the article “Titles that Get Retweets” was simply an analogy from another post I wrote some months back “Keep Your Twitter Stream Alive”. Here the connection between the two is obviously Twitter.

Of course you don’t have to confine yourself just to the title. The subheadings can also give reference to a future blog post. You can even write a whole article based on a single subheading. Then you can link the two posts thus improving SEO and keeping visitors longer on your site ( see “Keeping Visitors Longer in 5 Steps” ).

If you decide, you can move on to finding specific keywords to use as a base. You can identify such words simply by picking an article and giving it a thorough read. From that point on, you only need to find the right direction and do some writing.

Find the Best-Performing Ones

Looking at your previous articles might indeed be the starting point for new ideas. If you however fail to come up with something promising through the above techniques, you can go a step further.

The approach I sometimes decide to take pretty much comes down to looking at a range of articles and monitoring their performance. If you have been adding your articles to categories, it might be easier to narrow your search down to specific topics.

Anyway, you should take a close look at the retweets and likes the articles of your choice have received. Then you need to identify the best performing ones and try to see what features they posses that the low-performing posts don’t.

It might be something in the title ( see “ Titles that Get Retweets“ ), it might be how the content is presented ( see “ Make Your Blog More Skim-Able“ ) or maybe how you’ve concluded the post and what call to actions you have included ( see “ 4 Strategies for Concluding Your Next Blog Post“ ).

From that point on it is only a matter of putting what you discovered to practice and doing the writing!

Final Words

Hope you guys enjoyed the post! Do try the above strategies if you haven’t already and of course
don’t hesitate to share your thoughts in the comments section below!

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