An Example of Exceptional Content

It’s no longer enough to produce good content, you must be producing exceptional content.

Exceptional content will get you to the number one spot. In this article we look at a piece of content from Canva.com, a design blog and yet they rank no.1 from “taking long walks”.

Content is not King, the focus should always be on the reader. Find out what excites the people you are publishing for and give them what excites them, which is a little different than giving them what they want, because they will always tell you they want something other than they actually chose to read.

The evidence of course is in the data, let us look at an example of exceptional content and try to figure out what is it about the content that makes it exceptional. And maybe ask some questions of our own that will help us increase our own potential to create exceptional content.

Exceptional is an interesting word, we bandy around superlatives and it’s important we agree on terms used to give valid descriptions. I say this because a lot of marketers use superlatives as punctuation rather than for analysis. Exceptional means it is uncommon, above the average, stands out from the rest.

Here I am going to pick out exceptional content I have found that are worth analysing and picking over.

This from Canva.com, which is a graphic design tool enabling you to produce quick and effective graphics and images for your web content.

Benefits of Walking: Why the Great Minds Take Long Walks

Imagine as the writer trying to sell this idea to the blog publisher, “Hey that Steve jobs, he liked to walk and he was creative, how about I do a piece on the psychology of walking”.
The publisher may possibly reply, “Why the hell do we want to encourage people to go walking? They can’t use our tool if they are out and about.”

However, the type of people who are reading the Canva blog, lapped this content up.

Getting 246 links and being the 9th most linked to page on the website.

We see from the Social Visibility tool that the sharing has been exceptional.

A massive amount of Facebook shares and a smaller, but highly significant 2k+ shares on Twitter.

But why such a high response for a design website for what is essentially a piece about physical exercise?

At this point we can only speculate and use our knowledge of the sector and the types of people of people who read the Canva blog and the type of people who respond to such content.

The data can only take us so and then experience and intuition kicks in. If experience didn’t matter and it only depended on the data the people performing this analysis would be the same people flipping burgers in McDonalds. Not that there is anything wrong with flipping burgers, but you simply have to learn a strict process to be able to do the work. No art or experience needed, you just follow the process.

Which is why it’s important you have people around who have spent decades in creating content if you wish to learn how to get it to go exceptional.

What are the elements of the story?

A number of famous, respected people also walk.

Steve Jobs is mentioned, not only that but Marc Andreessen nearly killed him.

A promise of creativity (always needed in this space).

It cites “scientific evidence”, reinforcing the authority of the blog post.

Tapping the desires of the design community, a statement that “this will make you more creative” is catnip to a designer. It’s a must read, even if just to verify that it’s not what it says.

The piece goes on to break down the process of increasing your creativity through walking and the benefits you will get from such actions. In other words it delivers.

Conclusion

We can learn a lot from other successful content. But we can learn a lot more from exceptional content. There is little point in simply copying the content, what is learned is about your state of mind. It’s about how to look at a piece of content, not for the way you like it, but for the way the reader is going to like it.

Ask the questions:

• Why are people liking this content?
• Where are the people from, as in what tribe?
• What are the people actually responding to, is it because it has the name “Steve Jobs”, in the article or is it more because the reader has an aching desire to become more creative and thus earn more money and get more respect from social peers?
• How is the content constructed, are special skills or insight needed, if you don’t have them what would you need to get them?
• Who is creating exceptional content?

But there are other questions you need to ask yourself when digging around for exceptional content which inspires:

• What is your definition of success? Is your target specific?
• What do you need to do next to create exceptional content and what gaps are missing in your skillset?
• Who is your tribe and do you have preaching rights to the tribe you are targeting?
• Why do you need to create this content and are you sure you are the right person to do it, if not go find someone better than you?

These are questions I constantly get people to ask of themselves when helping them create content. Once people get to ask the right questions and answer them honestly then it’s not that hard to increase your ability to create exceptional content.