Sure, we all know that truly phenomenal content rules. Yet, so many webmasters and SEOs continue investing in just an “OK” content, or rehashing someone else’s content. - This approach is often rationalized as an effort to “scale” the content creation process, as if content is some sort of a commodity measured in quantity, not quality. But, regardless of the number of pieces of the “average at best” content some newbie SEOs decide to employ, there usually isn’t much ROI, as mediocre web-based content is largely ignored by the audiences and search engines alike.

Furthermore, having a whole lot of so-so content on your site, along with “too many” external links from low quality pages is a recipe for becoming yet another statistic of Google Panda and Penguin penalties. What’s worse, mediocre content bores, confuses, and alienates your audience – your existing and your would-be clients/consumers!  

Mediocre Content can Hurt your Brand

When a visitor stumbles upon a piece of content that is mediocre at best and fails to inspire, she will click back in a heart bit, and you will miss the opportunity to create a connection and positive impression associated with your brand. So what do we really gain with lackluster content? Instead of gaining brand ambassadors, we gain negative sentiment, while creating poor first impression and turning away our readers. Do you really want your mediocre onsite content, or low-quality external content used “just for links” to be a reflection of your website, company or brand? Not really? Well, unfortunately that’s what happens!

Positive Effects of Truly Remarkable Content

It’s important to recognize that truly remarkable content has an innate power to spread like wildfire via social media, thus bringing your company/brand into the spotlight, while establishing you as one of the thought leaders in your industry, and helping your company/brand win over the hearts and minds of your existing and your would-be consumers.

It is true, great content requires lot of time and effort to produce, but if your content is truly great, your benefits will be far and wide. Mediocre content, on the other hand, drains your resources without really offering much of a return on your investment at all. So, if you are going to allocate any of your hard-earned money or time (your most precious resource) towards content creation, make sure that you do not compromise on quality. - Go for the Gold, or Go Home!

Going for the Gold: Publishing Content that Really Works

What to do when old habits hold you back?

Next time you feel tempted to push live a piece of content that is just “OK”, but has not been fully polished, hence leaving much room for improvement -- stop, and ask yourself the following questions:

1. Why bother with a piece of content that will almost certainly disappear into obscurity the moment it gets published? - You can keep it alive by making it powerful, relevant, and useful!
2. What is the point of pushing content that is anything less than stellar or remarkable? – Polish it up, and make it fun to read!
3. Why associate your company or brand with mediocre? – You can associate it with the best!
4. Why alienate your users? - You can earn brand ambassadors, instead!

Overcoming Creativity & Content Creation Fatigue

What to do when you hit a road block in your writing?

Work smart, not hard: The next time you catch your attention span drifting away while working on your next masterpiece, or you start feeling like your creative juices are drying up, stop. - Let it sit. - Take a good, refreshing break. - Resting your mind and your eyes is very important. Freshen up, come back strong, and whip that “bad boy” into shape like you mean business! 

More great ways to overcome that temporary "Writer's Block": Unleashing your creativity

1. Did you know that exercise can be a great way to boost creativity (Surprise, Surprise!) and improve your concentration? Interestingly, the study findings suggest that creative potential will be greater after a two hour lag time following the exercise. - So, do you enjoy biking, walking, or running? Have you ever felt inspired (the runner’s high) after a good run, or a biking session? Great! Why not “get some endorphins going” to help you power-through that piece of remarkable content in a big way!
2. If physical activity alone does not seem to do the trick (although, I really honestly doubt that it would not...!!), or getting “sweaty” isn’t really your thing, then consider the following approach: Why not set aside some time to bounce back and forth some of your writing ideas with a friend or a co-worker, preferably in a relaxed atmosphere in order to boost creativity. This may ultimately help you zero-in on and uncover that often-elusive, “surprisingly-unexpected” connection/angle/point, or idea that can help your content truly stand out from the rest, while engaging your audience in a creative, and perhaps, even daring way!
3. Ever go for a relaxing walk after work? According to a scientific research, people demonstrate a consistently-greater insight problem solving performance during non-optimal times of day compared to optimal times. Why not start carrying a pen and paper next time you go for a walk after work? Start jotting your clever content ideas down as they come in, and keep ‘em coming!

Discovering your Secret Content Creation Sauce

CopyBlogger did an excellent job of defining the very essence of highly effective content. Here’s the Copyblogger secret formula for content that works for your audience and meets your business goals:

"Create content that is remarkably useful, that is enjoyable to consume, and that lets the reader know exactly what to do next."

So, rather than reinventing the wheel, I would encourage you to apply this simple formula to every single piece of content you create. - Simplicity is the root of all genius.

Get these basics right; satisfy your audience by providing actionable (practically useful to your audience) content presented in a positive, fun to read way, and get rewarded in a big way! Your content may just “find its wings” to fly by earning links, mentions, and social shares that translate into an improved visibility and exposure, increased brand awareness, and better organic search rankings. All of these will usually result in an improved business potential provided that your website and its content is properly optimized for conversions. It is really that simple!

Content Creation Ideas for Boring Topics:

So, you would really like to come with some exciting content ideas for your site, but you do not think your website's theme is exciting enough? Check out Copyblogger's approach to content creation ideas for boring topics.

Can your Content Go Viral? - Here is what it takes:

According to the UPenn research on virality, a study of the New York Times list of most-e-mailed articles, by Jonah Berger and Katherine A. Milkman, people preferred e-mailing articles with positive rather than negative themes, and they liked to send long articles on intellectually challenging topics.

Perhaps most of all, readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe (NY Times Article on the research findings), an emotion that the researchers investigated after noticing how many science articles made the list.

“Science kept doing better than we expected,” said Dr. Berger, a social psychologist and a professor of marketing at UPenn’s Wharton School. “We anticipated that people would share articles with practical information about health or gadgets, and they did, but they also sent articles about paleontology and cosmology. You’d see articles shooting up the list that were about the optics of deer vision.”

Bridging the Gap Between Relevancy and Creativity

Although, you may not be able to make an immediate “awe-inspiring” connection between your company’s products/service offerings, and the rest of the world/universe, if you really want to produce “relevant to your audience” content that has any chance of going viral, according to Carter Bowles, you will need to get creative and remember that viral content tends to have the following attributes:

• Surprising
• Interesting
• Intense (ideally awe-inspiring)
• Positive
• Actionable (practically useful)

Smart Content Creation Ideas for Companies and Brands

Are you a part of a company, brand, or an organization that does many great and remarkable things in the real world, boasts knowledgeable and loyal workforce, has a beautifully-designed website, yet struggles to gain any meaningful traction online due to a lack of appropriate content? Sounds familiar? You are not alone!

Read on to learn how your company or client can turn the corner to deliver some truly useful, social/conversational content by tapping into the existing resources:

Round up your talent! - Your workers are the subject matter experts. Chances are that many people in your organization will be excited and happy to contribute a piece of content to your company's blog. In fact, you may discover that some of your employees have a hidden talent for creating masterpieces that can grab the attention of the leading blogs and online magazines covering your industry. What a way to get noticed!

Make use of videos! – SEOmoz is enjoying a lot of success with their White Board Friday videos. Why not encourage your employees to share their knowledge and passion with the world, and provide an outlet for them to do so? It could be fun and even exciting for many people in your organization. Chances are that not all of your employees are natural-born writers, but you may well find that some of them have a hidden talent and desire for sharing their industry knowledge and passion in front of the camera! Why not have a fun brainstorming session to help your employees come up with some good video-based content ideas, sort through the list, and shoot some videos?

Incentivize! - Do you know what motivates your troops? How about giving away some Starbucks Gift Cards or Movie & Popcorn tickets to incentivize and reward people in your organization who step up to the writer’s challenge? People like to be recognized and rewarded for doing good work. It helps boost morale. Be sure to show your appreciation, your workers will appreciate that you care!

Have a little fun with it! - People love games, competition, and contests. You could have a monthly writer’s challenge contest, where your company would officially recognize and reward the top three writers of the month! – This is also a great way to boost content quality.

Measuring Success – It is important to establish a baseline in order to measure progress and success of the content creation initiative within your company, brand, or organization.

You Need Baseline

For the baseline you will want to assess where your website is in terms of the organic search and referral traffic prior to the launch of content creation initiative. Ideally, you will want to measure not only traffic, but also goals and conversions such as sales and/or lead generations. – These can be set up using your Google analytics.

You can also assign monetary values to completed goals, which will help you calculate the ROI from your content marketing efforts.

You may also decide to measure and monitor the rate of growth in the inbound links and social media citations. SEOmoz has some great tools to do just that! :)

Rinse and Repeat!

Taking your Content Marketing Initiative to the Next Level - After the initial success, which can be measured in terms of increases in the organic search and referral traffic, goal completions and conversions, your management team may feel compelled to further invest into the content marketing initiative.

This should be an easy decision since they will have the before-and-after traffic-growth and conversions information to help them measure the ROI from the content marketing initiative. Some of the things they can do to get things to the next level would be establishing a content calendar, hiring a content marketing manager, and/or conducting content creation training session to inspire creativity and demonstrate commitment to transforming their company into a lean-and-mean content creation machine!

In closing: Learn to Swim with the Big Fish!

Remember, if you aspire for excellence and would like to swim with the big fish, you will have to cultivate a winning attitude and desire to go for the gold, otherwise you will forever be stock in the minors; the choice is yours. Enough said!

I would love to hear your strategies for creating truly great content for your site, and/or in your organization. How do you push your content and your brand to the limit of excellence? What’s your secret sauce?