How To Write Noteworthy Content

One of the hot new trends in Content Marketing this year is “content syndication”.In case you haven’t heard about it before, imagine this:You write an article and publish it on your own blog. Your audience checks it out.Then you take that same article and republish it on a dozen wildly popular sites like Huffington Post, Fast Company, Inc, Lifehacker, The Next Web, tapping into their massive audiences and getting huge traffic and some high authority links from them.

1. The secret to great writing is great reading material.

This applies to both: what you write and how you write it.

We aren’t born with tons of knowledge in our heads. So if you want to write something noteworthy — you have to learn something noteworthy first.There are a lot of ways to learn new things, but reading is probably the quickest one.

Gregory writes a lot about human psychology and by looking at his list of “50 Must-Read SocialPsychology Books” you can guess where all these great ideas of his articles come from.

2. The “M. Night Shyamalan Technique”

Another great “hack” that I’ve learned from Gregory.M. Night Shyamalan is a movie director and screenwriter who made a name for himself by having a unique “twist” ending in his movies.

That’s what you need to do with your content — add some unique “twist” to it to help people remember you.This “twist” can take many different forms.Gregory Ciotti mostly writes about personal development and customer success and he is known for using a lot of psychological studies and research data in his writing.

Derek Halpern has the same “twist” as Gregory (referencing a lot of psychological studies), but he applies it to a different niche — online marketing.The twist these guys have picked for themselves takes tons of effort to master, so you may think of an easier “twist” to start with.For example Ana Hoffman is strongly assiciated with a cup of hot coffee and Noah Kagan with a bunch of tasty tacos.

3. The “White Bread” & “Wheat Bread” Content

This concept was totally new to me, but it makes so much sense!

• “White bread” content (not healthy, but very tasty) — the kind of content that is easy to digest. It won’t make you think too hard and you may not learn a lot, but it would surely be a fun read.
• “Wheat bread” content (not tasty, but very healthy) — the deep dive kind of content that breaks down some difficult topic. An article like this can teach you a lot of new stuff and even change your day-to-day life.

Both types of content can be “noteworthy”, but each in its own way:

• “White bread” content is the one that will get a lot of social shares, because people enjoyed reading it and they want to immediately share their experience with others.
• “Wheat bread” content won’t get many shares, but it might get a lot of references. After learning something valuable people tend to reference the origin of their knowledge when they talk about it.

I decided to browse Brian Dean’s blog Backlinko.com with Ahrefs’ Content Explorer tool to find a few examples of of “white bread” and “wheat bread” content.

4. Strategic Controversy

It’s quite boring when everyone has exactly the same opinion on the matter, right?That’s why controversy drives shares so well — it makes people talk and express their opinions.But you have to be really careful with it. With highly controversial topics there’s a chance to offend a lot of people and bury your own image.

How do you play safe?

Just pick a topic of moderate controversy.

5. Don’t Write It, Visualise It

Can you explain in words “how to tie a tie”?I bet it’s going to be a pain both for you and the person reading your explanations.But you can do this instead:And you don’t have to use any words at all.Visuals help you to explain things that you struggle to put into words.

And besides, what do you think your readers will do once they get asked “how to tie a tie”?Instead of trying to explain it, they will just use your visual!This is what Gregory calls “The Swipe Factor”: visuals are very easy to reference and even easier to share.They are the “snacks” of the internet!