We don't have short attention spans. We have short consideration spans.

Ads fail for most companies. Sales is unfeasible for many of the rest.

Content marketing can propel underdogs to market leaders.

Yet, the vast majority of companies are terrible at it.

Today, we discuss the most important element for effective content marketing.

Let's dive in

– Neal

The First Commandment of Content Marketing

Insight from our Growth Guide.

The typical company hires an SEO agency that pumps out low-quality content at high rates. Or they hire meh contract writers to write fairly meh content that are thinly veiled sales letters. Or they write surface-level and basic stuff.

And the typical person spends less than 30 minutes writing a LinkedIn post and wonders why it flops.

Which brings us to the first commandment of content marketing:

Thou shalt write for extremely high quality.

Until you've earned a reputation for quality in the reader's mind, they don't read closely. Instead:

They skim.
They don't fully appreciate your arguments.
They assume you're just trying to sell to them (instead of educate).

The ultimate “hook” is the author's reputation. In other words, the “from line” is more important than the subject line. The author more than the title. The podcast more than the episode title. The YouTuber more than the thumbnail.

You want to train people to see your name (or brand) and associate it with being worth the time investment to stop and read it.

Because most content is not.

You can do that by not shying away from great, in-depth content.

People don't have short attention spans for content: They finish three-hour Joe Rogan episodes and binge fourteen hours of Netflix.

They have short consideration spans: they must be hooked quickly. To do so, ensure your first minute is incredible.

Extreme quality stems from four factors:

Engagement — Are you hooking readers with your intros? Are you exciting them about what they're about to learn? Are you effectively conveying how valuable the material is? Does it spread out hits of dopamine? Does it break up lots of text with images?
Concision — Are you conveying your points without fluff?
Depth — Are you offering a thorough analysis that exceeds the self-evident parts of the material? Are you giving them access to knowledge or data they wouldn’t normally have access to?
Novelty — Are you sharing counter-intuitive thoughts that readers wouldn't have pieced together on their own? That's how you trigger dopamine hits.

Yes! All of this matters for SEO as well. A huge factor in SEO is whether someone clicked a link in Google and terminated their search on your post. It has to be good if the person stopped trying to find other resources to answer the question.

The criteria for different content types

Search-driven (SEO) content should fulfill these criteria:

You have something comprehensive and actionable to say about the topic that can resolve someone’s query.
Potential customers search Google or YouTube for this topic.
The topic can naturally segue into a pitch for your product.

Sharing-driven (social) content should fulfill these criteria:

You have something novel and surprising to say about the topic.
The novelty resonates emotionally or intellectually, which prompts sharing.
The topic can naturally segue into a pitch for your product or cement you in their mind as an expert in that topic.

And both types of content benefit if you go over the top. It makes it noteworthy, shareworthy, “bookmarkable,” and “linkable” (in other blogs and newsletters). The best backlink strategy is making content that people organically link to—also known as the Skyscraper Technique.

In short: quality is king

The world doesn’t need more content. But it desperately needs better content.

Across almost every industry or niche, there is opportunity to become a respected name by writing in-depth, quality content.

Train people to associate your name with quality, and you’ll have their attention.

What’s next?

This is an edited opening of our Content Marketing guide. Continue reading here.

Here are some additional resources:

I enjoyed this podcast episode on Lenny Rachitsky’s writing process (writer of a 7-figure, 650,000-subscriber newsletter).
My guide to writing hooks.
My cofounder's guide to Writing Better (read by hundreds of thousands)
Go through the 64 content marketing insights shared in this newsletter.

Something fun

Use this copywriting cheatsheet to make your content better. Click here for a high-res PDF.