Is Your Unique Content Unique Enough?

Content marketing seems to be the biggest marketing bandwagon around these days, and for good reasons! Not only does content help improve your organic search presence, drive targeted traffic, and help earn inbound links, it can also be used to educate your prospects and drive potential customers through the buying cycle. Content marketing also helps build up your brand’s online authority, helping you reach new customers and give your website a leg up on the competition.

But here’s the thing—everyone knows it. Content marketing is not a “secret” marketing tactic for the privileged few. Any site owner can create a pretty good looking blog in WordPress and fill it with pretty good (and dare I say great) content over time. A quick Google search for “marketing blog” delivers 578,000,000 results. That’s a lot of content to compete with! So what’s the average site owner to do, especially when they work in an increasingly crowded market and blogosphere? Most would say (and I agree) that you have to push out unique content if you want to get found, give readers a reason to check out your blog. But for Eric Enge unique content isn’t enough. What you really need is differentiated content;

If you search on something like <intitle:”mortgage tips”> in Google you get 8,250 results.  You could write a brilliant, unique, new article on the topic, but no one will ever know.  You will simply be the 8,251st article on the topic written.  So the article may be unique, but there is really no chance that you are going to say something that others have not said before.  The result: it does not stand out.

Now coming up with ground-breaking, earth-shattering, life-changing information doesn’t usually happen on a daily basis. And the moment someone does publish something really insightful and new you can bet that everyone else in the industry will soon be throwing their two cents in on the “hot” topic of the day, possibly even pushing the original mover and shaker to the side. Unless you are launching a product or system that can completely revolutionize the way the world operates (think about cell phone technology pre and post iPhone), being 100% unique with your content marketing is actually pretty hard!

You can still produce differentiated content, providing you are willing to work a little outside of the box and present information in a way that no one has considered doing do before. It can still boil down to the same key points, but how you present those thoughts has to be wildly unique. For instance, I could write a post called “10 Link Building Tips for SMBs.” It could be chock full of useful information but it’s not exactly something that is going to blow people’s minds. But if I could somehow find a way to write a post called “10 Reasons Why Winston Churchill Would Have Been a Great Link Builder” that’s something that is bound to garner a little more attention. What on earth does Winston Churchill have to do with link building? I don’t know yet but when I come up with a way to present those same 10 tips and incorporate Winston Churchill into the post I will let you all know!

Depending on how cluttered your niche is and what kind of unique content your competition is producing and your audience is craving you might constantly be looking for new and innovative ways to present your information so that not only is your content unique, it’s also special. Sometimes you are going to flop and completely miss the mark (it happens to everyone), and other times you are going to strike a chord with your readers you didn’t even realize was there until you just went for it. But the great thing about content marketing is that one piece of content doesn’t have to define your entire brand—you just have to keep plugging away and looking for new ways to differentiate yourself!