Create Content That’s Better Than 10 of Your Competitors (aka 10x Content)

The idea of creating 10X content can be a little misleading. No, we’re not talking about creating ten times as much content as you already create. This refers to digital marketers who want to create content that’s as good as the top 10 competitors in the search results. But as you’ll see, the real goal is to make content that is better than theirs.

Great UI and UX

UI and UX (user interface and user experience) are the first of many criteria that need to be met to set yourself apart in a saturated market – and it needs to be met on every device. When you ignore device types (take various smartphone models, for example), you are essentially ignoring entire segments of your market.

Meets Crucial Requirements and Characteristics

Your content needs to be high quality, trustworthy, useful, interesting, and remarkable. If your content meets all five characteristics, great! If it doesn’t, don’t beat yourself up. Not all things that are useful are interesting, and so on. For example, the last thing I want to do is troubleshoot HVAC and air conditioning problems in my home. But if a website has a great how-to video that solves my problem, I’d be ecstatic.

Scope & Detail

Your content also has to be different in scope or detail from other competing content. But the question is whether or not your content should go wide or deep. This is a judgement call, and it should be made based on the core needs of your audience.

Create an Emotional Response

Emotions drive human decisions. If you can evoke an emotional response in your content, chances are you’re going to have a greater impact with your audience. But you don’t always have to make your audience members weep tears of joy or create a life changing moment (though it would certainly be more impactful). Even by injecting humor into your content, you can set yourself apart from competitors in an otherwise boring niche or industry. Over at Moz (an SEO tools website), markers for emotional reactions include awe, surprise, joy, anticipation, and admiration, and I think these reactions will help create inspiration.

Solves a Problem or Answers a Question

This factor is critical, because if your content answers a question or solves a problem for your audience, you will undoubtedly add value to their lives. But you don’t always have to create informative content from scratch. Why reinvent the wheel? If your industry already has a guide or other resource, you can link to that content and expound upon it.

Originality

Last but not least, creating original content will help you stay ahead of the curve. Though this quality is hard to achieve – especially with content relating to news and industry developments – most often there is a new perspective from which the topic can be attacked.

Now, does your content have to meet all of these qualities? Certainly not, and in some instances it may not be possible to check all of these boxes. But doing so will help you rise above the competition.

There are a few steps that will help business owners, bloggers & marketers inject their content with these qualities:

Step 1: Determine Why People Are Interested

The first step is understanding why people are interested in the topic at hand (this step assumes you have already chosen a topic and done your homework with keyword research). At its core, how does the topic affect the lives of your audience members? Does a new security issue threaten to steal their personal information? Is a new cooking technique going to save them time preparing dinner? The key benefit to the user is that it helps them find the best entertainment.

Step 2: Create Unique Content

When I say that the content needs to be unique, I don’t mean that you have to have novel ideas. Rather, the content needs to be original in some way. Perhaps your content is more accessible, or perhaps it is presented in a way that has never been shown before. Can you aggregate, connect, or link to other valuable and related content in ways that haven’t been done already?

Step 3: Create a Powerful, Hard to Replicate, High Quality Answer

Trust is key to running a website and should already be part of your strategy. Only after you have completed these steps can you present unique, powerful, and valuable content that shines above the competition.

Final Thoughts

If your content doesn’t do any of these things, you are likely just more white noise in a saturated market. And trust me, it can be tough work finding holes and gaps in your industry. But doing so will help you find the pain points your visitors need solutions to, and thereby differentiate you from other content creators.