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My recipe for outstanding content (including a take-home checklist)

Author

Perrin Carrell
October 29, 2023

Helloooo content connoisseurs.

It’s Perrin from Content Bites.

Kind of weird that we haven’t talked about this yet, but it’s important: we’re going to talk about what separates great content from everything else, and I’m going to give you a checklist at the end that I use to keep quality high. And, of course, I’m going to toss you some links of the best stuff I read this week.

  • Appetizers: Links from Sprout Social, Contently, and more

  • Main Course: My recipe (and checklist) for great content

Let’s dig in.

Appetizers: content marketing links from the week

  • 8 Landing Page Copywriting Tips for 2023 (With Examples) (link)

  • Smart Steps to Content Development (link)

  • I Deleted the Content From Two Posts To See if They’d Still Rank. Here’s What Happened (link)

  • 5 Writing Tricks That Treat Audiences to Better Data-Based Stories (link)

  • The Benefits Of Content Marketing: How It’s An Unfair Advantage (link)

Main course: My recipe (and checklist) for outstanding content

What does it even mean to create great content?

Actually, scratch that.

This is the better question: what’s the cost of creating mediocre content?

Spoiler: it’s high.

Why? Because mediocre content has all the cost and none of the benefit.

In my experience, mediocre content is just as bad as poor content. People don’t read mediocre content and take action.

They skip mediocre content, just like they do the bad content.

So the reality is: your content actually does have to be great. And that’s a little daunting (at least it is for me).

But here’s the good news. There are lots of ways to be great, and there’s usually no better person to create great content for your customers than you.

And actually, you probably already have some pretty strong intuition about what “great” means for your tribe.

Still, I was hoping to give you some guide rails today.

I have a recipe for great content; it’s one I’ve used for every piece of content I’ve created that I’ve considered to be truly great.

Hopefully, these can make producing great content a little more straightforward.

Disclaimer: I’m not going to talk about the value of purely entertaining content. Yes, content can be great by only being entertaining, but it’s by far the most difficult way to achieve greatness. That, and entertaining content usually does not convert to sales, and we’re marketers, so actual revenue is our north star – and basically nothing else.

First: Great content needs to be at least one of these three things: tactical, inspiring, or enlightening.

This is especially true if you want your content to turn people from readers/viewers into living and breathing customers.

I’ve tested lots of different content “adjectives.”

In 15 years of content marketing, content that meets one of these criteria has done the best by a country mile.

Quick breakdown of each.

Tactical content.

Tactical content = content that is useful in the present moment.

I don’t mean that in some general sense, like “oh, yeah, I guess this is kind of useful.”

I mean it will help a reader/viewer take some kind of action RIGHT NOW.

For example:

If you sell running shoes, tactical content might be, like: a guide to know when to replace your running shoes with concrete steps someone can follow to literally pick up their current running shoes and test things to see if they need to be replaced.

If they do, guess what? They already have your website in front of them.

If you help someone take action, and if they get a good result, it also establishes trust, which is difficult to get in any other way.

This is the one I like the most.

You can see examples of this in this very newsletter:

  • I end every newsletter with a summary of how to take action

  • When I can, I try to create free resources for you to download and actually use as you right now (spoiler alert: there’s one at the end of this guide)

I tend to gravitate towards this particular type of content mainly because I like to teach. I find it enjoyable.

But when I ran my content agency, our absolute first rule for content was that it had to be tactical.

Probably one of the best and most common types of tactical content is recipes. Recipes are, by nature, super useful, and people seek them out in order to take action. It’s also why they’re one of the most popular content formats to ever exist.

A few good examples of tactical content:

Tactical content can truly be anything.

The most important thing is just to help readers/viewers DO something.

Inspiring content.

Inspiring content = content that shows what life could be like.

This is actually something good marketers do, like, in general, every day.

One of my favorite marketers, Shaan Puri, once said on a podcast (I think he may have been quoting someone else, so don’t quote me quoting him lol) that marketing is just a matter of showing small mario what happens after he eats the mushroom.

When small Mario eat mushrooms, he turns into big Mario. So to sell small Mario mushrooms, just show him what big Mario looks like.

And that’s marketing.

It’s also something great content can do.

This is what I mean by “inspiring”: it shows people what life can look like after they use your product / take your advice / join your community / etc.

This is why one of the single most effective types of content is case studies – because the nature of a case study is to show the before, the after, and the how-we-got-there.

Types of inspiring content includes:

  • Case studies (e.g., “How We Helped Company ABC Do XYZ in 90 Days”)

  • Documenting any kind of journey, yours or someone else’s (e.g., “My Journey from Out of Shape to Fitness Competitor”)

  • Problem-solution content (e.g., “Clean Up Your CRM in 30 Minutes”)

Of course, this kind of content is ripe for emotionality, so feel free to tug on folks’ heart strings.

Go nuts. Show them big Mario.

Enlightening content.

Enlightening content = content that shows people new ways of doing things.

It’s NOT just new ideas or telling people facts they didn’t know or something.

Enlightening content says: “Hey. Not many people know this but THIS is actually the way the world works.”

Of the three here, this is typically the most difficult.

It’s difficult because it requires real expertise and novelty.

Both of those are generally rare.

But when you can be truly enlightening, it can yield ultra, ultra-powerful content, mostly because it’s probably the fastest way to position yourself as an authority in a space.

But it can also be tricky because it’s difficult to do that in a way that sells stuff. Usually, producing lots of enlightening content does lead to lots of revenue, but it’s a bit more of a long-game, because what this kind of content does best is create trust and build a loyal following. Both great, but both long-term.

Still, it works. And it works super well.

Examples of this kind of content:

But you gotta have at least one of those three (or more than one).

Tactical. Inspiring. Enlightening.

Great content has to be interesting.

Note: I did NOT say “entertaining”.

“Entertaining” is super hard.

Being “Interesting” is still tough, but it’s usually much easier to be interesting than entertaining.

Being interesting just means that you can keep people reading/watching.

When I taught college writing classes, I used to ask them to run their content through something called “the subway test”.

I asked them to imagine they were sitting on a bench waiting for the train in a subway station (we were in Chicago, so this made sense).

And then I asked them to imagine that they found their own content on the seat beside them. That content would be competing with a million other stimuli: people talking, ads playing, a podcast in their earbuds, and so on…

…and then I asked them to ask themselves the question: Is my content interesting enough that I would keep reading it in that situation?

If the answer was no, it wasn’t interesting enough.

You make things interesting by:

  • Using hooks: every section sells the next section by making promises, fulfilling those promises, and then making new promises, and so on

  • Having strong, punchy first lines for every section, but especially in the opening of the content

  • Being tactical, inspiring or enlightening

  • Having a strong voice/style and/or specific personality

  • Having strong opinions

  • Being unique / not just restating info that already exists

I want to put a finer point on that last bullet… in order for content to be interesting it has to be unique. Exclusive scoops. Proprietary data. YOUR unique opinions. Anything will do.

But it’s got to be unique, and it’s got to be interesting. Add to the body of knowledge; don’t just regurgitate old news.

And lastly: great content has to be clear.

Last but not least.

If your content is not clear, nothing else matters.

In a clear piece of content, a reader should never be confused about what they’re consuming.

They might be curious or intrigued or in suspense. But never confused. Confusion is death.

The best way to solve for clarity is to have an editor, but if you don’t have an editor, the best way I’ve found is to read your content aloud.

And as you read your content aloud, look for places where you pause, because those places are most likely to be confusing.

How to make sure your next piece of content is great:

First, here’s a checklist to fill out and follow for every piece of content you produce. And here’s a summary of that checklist.

  • Make a point to take a tactical, inspiring, or enlightening angle; if you don’t have ideas, model one of the pieces above

  • Use hooks in the intro and in every section to sell the next section

  • Create the content with a strong personality/stance/opinions

  • Run it through the “subway test”

  • Read & edit for clarity

Bonus: Great content often (but does not have to) includes freebies (PDFs, other free guides, a video, etc.), so that’s usually on my checklist. And great content also includes CTAs, so that’s on the checklist, too.

That’s the issue.

If you missed the last issue, you can read it here: How to Do Content Marketing If You Have No Audience.

Go forth & conquer.

—Perrin

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