What’s the difference between good and awesome content
You’ve had your own website, sharing some valuable content for a while now, and you think it’s doing pretty well. You keep the site running fast and smoothly, and you regularly follow the advice of the most experienced marketers, who claim that you should be consistent and share new content regularly.
All of that is true, but in everything, including blogging, there is a moment when the fact that your content is good is no longer enough. Your content needs to stand out from the competition and among the millions of pieces of content shared literally every minute on the Internet.
Let’s say your content is good.
But what do we need to do to make it awesome?
What’s even the difference between good and awesome content?
That’s what we’re going to discuss in this article. There’s a tiny but significant difference between good content and great
content. Tiny, in the sense that the key is in just one step, and significant, in the sense that it makes a huge distinction.
So, let’s dive in.
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The difference between good and awesome content
Research Makes Content Stand Out
Yes, we are all expected to research before writing any content. But how many of us are doing the original research? Are you still not quite sure what I mean by original research? Let me explain it.
By doing original research, you create original content.
Now, when you go to the first few blog posts that show in SERP as a response to a question on Google, you will notice that most of them provide the same information, just in a different way. In the end, you read five separate articles and didn’t get any additional value from any of them that the others didn’t provide. None of them stand out in any way from the others.
The problem many bloggers have is that we tend to replicate content that already exists somewhere online and make it just a little better. Ricky from “Income School” calls such content commodity content.
The research you want to do is the one that will make your content stand out. Surface-level research stops being enough as we grow. Google is too clever, and the competition is enormous.
How Do I Know If My Research Is Original?
Even after learning about original research, many bloggers still make mistakes and cannot recognize when their breakdown is authentic and when not. Therefore, before we move on to 5 ways to do original research, I’ll list below two indicators that the research probably is not original:
- If you can find the same information on the Internet within 10 seconds;
- If another blogger can replicate your content within an hour.
5 Ways to Make Good Content Awesome
Now, we can go through 6 ways to make your content stand out and be great.
Combining Information and Then Doing Your Own Study
What I don’t mean by this is that, for instance, if I’m writing a product review, I go to the company’s website and gather all the specifications. Then I visit Amazon and copy some of the qualities listed there and perhaps even some info from the reviews, and then I arrange it in a tidy table.
That table closely resembles the table on the company’s website and the specifications provided on Amazon. It doesn’t appear to be original content, so it’s not frankly original research.
Here’s an example of a blog post where someone consolidated information from the web but did their own analysis as well. This person wrote an Apple iPhone 11 review and comparing it with other iPhone models and currently popular mobile phones, he did a personal study of the data he collected on the Internet:
If you want to take a look and read the whole article, you only need to click on the screenshot above.
Running an Experiment
I really enjoy this one. Sometimes we use this for product reviews where we want to run an experiment and see how long it takes, for example, for one juicer to squeeze out 2 deciliters of juice.
For example, here’s an article on how long it takes to charge your AirPods, and the writer(s) of this article ran some tests on different models and made an original blog post on that topic:
If you want to take a look and read the whole article, you only need to click on the screenshot above.
Here’s another example of an article where the writer ran a test and saw how much power a fridge uses.
It’s beautiful how they gave us exact information right at the beginning of the article but emphasized that it is not that simple. They performed their experiment using a power meter, and 24h later, they saw how many kWh a fridge uses.
They answered that question very thoroughly, and the information is first-hand since it is from their personal experiment, so if anyone wants to replicate their content, they have to go through the same process by buying a power meter and measuring the average consumption of the fridge which most bloggers wouldn’t actually do.
Testing a Product
When you write a review based on your unique experience with a product, it is indeed original research and, therefore, original content.
This time I will show you an example I saw on YouTube, but the same can be applied to writing blog posts. In this case, you should include authentic photos you personally took instead of generic ones from the Internet.
This guy did a drop test comparing iPhone 14 Pro Max and Galaxy S22 Ultra. He ran several experiments, so he was able to see how these two phones break when they fall at a certain angle.
At the end of the video, he also made a scoreboard and came to the conclusion that the overall score was the same for both phones but advised us to get a case if we were worried about dropping our phones.
Do an Interview
It is okay to do a blog post as a transcription of an interview, but only if the content or the person in the interview were something people would want to search for or something they really wanted to click on.
If the person you’re interviewing isn’t well-known or is known in a small circle of people and the interview is about their personal life and career, that isn’t something many people would search for or click on. Therefore, it is not something that I would recommend you write in that way.
Instead, if you wanted to write a blog post on specific topics that this person talks about in that interview, you could quote the person from the interview. In that way, you would add credibility to your blog post. And, since that’s the content you cannot find online or anywhere else, it is original content.
If other bloggers wanted to replicate that blog post, they would have to find a similar expert and interview them.
Here’s a great example of that kind of content:
It is an article about cats catching colds and whether it is even possible for them. Since this is a blog post on a veterinary hospital website, the writer(s) probably interviewed the vets working in the hospital, and, based on their responses, they were able to write a blog post with decisive answers.
If this blog post were posted anywhere else, for example, on the blog of a cat lover, it would undoubtedly have much more credibility if it was written based on the answers of experts, such as vets, instead of the blogger coming and saying: “Hi, I have two cats and here’s what I think about if a cat can catch a cold.” Therefore, it is more original and valuable.
Do Surveys
Before you say anything, I need to mention that you don’t need a massive audience for this. It is fantastic if you have an audience, but it is not vital.
By doing polls, you can collect a tremendous amount of data from a group of people with similar interests and ways of thinking and find some information. After gathering that data, you can create your own statistics.
If you don’t have your own audience, you can go to Facebook, Quora, Reddit, or whatever kind of forum and create a poll out there or post a question and then take all the answers you get and group those that are similar and from that, you’ve got original content.
Here’s an example of a blog post that includes data gathered from a poll:
It would also be great if you would show that info through graphs or tables or share screenshots of the polls:
So, to conclude, if you want to create awesome original content, you shouldn’t think much about the form and how you should structure the article. Yes, it is influential, but it is not crucial.
The crucial question you should ask yourself before writing a blog post is: “What is the original content I could add to this blog post to make it awesome and almost impossible to replicate?”
After writing your original article, you should consider a few things more before publishing it, and here’s a whole article I wrote on that topic.
