The 10 essential elements of high-quality content

1. Write for your audience and answer their questions. Consider the frequently asked questions your sales and customer services team answer every day. Think about the search queries your prospective customer enters into a search engine. Produce content that answers those questions.
2. Aim to educate, entertain and/or inspire your audience with your content. Consider how you add value and insight to the subject matter.
3. A headline of 55 characters tends to be best, both in terms of how Google will display your post in search results, and in getting click-throughs. CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer is a great tool for testing your headline.
4. Include statistics – facts and figures demonstrate that you’ve done your homework, give you credibility and make sense of the content.
5. Quotations – everyone loves a good quote. Include quotes to support your viewpoint or to provide the counter opinion.
6. Use subheadings/bullets/numbered lists – as well as helping you to structure your thoughts, these devices make it easy for the reader to navigate and easily digest your content.
7. Choose a relevant format – will your content work best in written, visual, audio or video format? Consider re-purposing your idea into different formats for different audiences and different marketing channels.
8. Call to action – what do you want your audience to do after reading/watching/listening to your content? Let them know!
9. Add links to further resources; your own content and/or third-party content.
10. Sleep on it. Ernest Hemmingway said, “The first draft of anything is shit.” Spell-check, proof-read and read your article aloud before you publish.