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6 Steps to Skyscraper Content and Growth Hacking Blog Traffic

Skyscraper content marketing is trending within the marketing industry like never before. From the smallest to the biggest of brands, across various industries, they all swear by the tactic to get them the best of results. If you aren’t yet one of those to hop onto the skyscraper bandwagon, fret not!

In this post, we’re going to tell you what skyscraper content is and how it can be used to drive your blog’s visibility in this competitive (and ever expanding) digital landscape.

What is skyscraper content?

The skyscraper technique of content marketing is publishing content pieces around a framework that has previously done well in your industry and target market. This tactic involves looking for industry or niche specific content that is trending the market, and then creating an even more informative piece of content for the same audience.

According to a post shared by Aaron Agius on Search Engine Journal, creating skyscraper content shot up the number of backlinks and organic search traffic to the page. In addition to the organic traffic, he also noticed a number of referral visitors also reaching the content piece.

Here are the statistics that Aaron shared of his skyscraper content’s performance in one day:

 

Skyscraper Technique Results

Ever thought of going viral? This technique is all set to take your content marketing strategy to new heights!

How to use skyscraper content marketing to drive your blog’s visibility?

If you’re wondering how to get started with this viral technique of content marketing, well we’ve got you covered. All it takes is effectively completing these 6 simple steps:

1. Identify the market opportunities

The very first step is to uncover the opportunities available to you in the market. You need to understand what your target audience has shown interest in and also how you can pull all of that attention back to your website.

Here are a few ways to know what’s trending in your industry:

  • Set up Google Alerts for the keywords you want to focus on and are relevant to your business goals
  • Make use of BuzzSumo to identify the content pieces being shared the most across different social channels
  • Use the Google Keyword Planner to analyze the search volume of the keyword you’re targeting, and choose the one that has moderate competition.

2. Create an even better piece of content

Based on your research, you will understand what, why and how people interacted with the content piece previously generated. This will give you an idea of what your audience prefers reading as well as sharing, creating the base framework of the new content piece for you.

SkyScraper Technique

Using this framework, create an even better piece of content for the same audience. Throw in some industry specifics, share your own insights and case studies, and make the piece as informative as possible. The deeper you delve, the better your content piece does.

3. Shortlist your distribution partners and sites

Syndication is an important aspect of content marketing. You need to shortlist brands, blogs, influencers and other channels that will find the content you created interesting. A good place to start is your connections and the websites that the previous popular content pieces was shared on.

No matter what you do, make sure that your content piece is referred to on as many channels as possible, to reach the greatest potential audience.

4. Promote it to your audience and encourage sharing

Before you go all out and syndicate your content on different channels, make sure your current audience knows about it. Include it in your email newsletter, share it on social media, with your employees and encourage them to share it in their circles too. It is important to make the most of what you have, before putting in efforts to acquire a new audience for the content piece.

Make sure you have the social sharing buttons in place for your post and a button that allows them to share via email as well. The easier it is, the more shares you get.

5. Reach out to the right set of people

This step is very important. You don’t want to be reaching out to people who haven’t shown interest in a similar topic before. These are people who wouldn’t enjoy the read and are less likely to share it. From the blogs and influencers you have shortlisted, analyze which one has a greater following. You want to find the ones who are similar to your audience and who have shown interest in the previous viral content piece.

Reach out to these people with a message that highlights what value your content piece will add to them. It is important to focus on making it sound genuinely in their interests, instead of being too pushy about getting a share for yourself.

6. Keep your content piece updated

The market trends change faster than we ever thought they would. This makes it vital for you to ensure your skyscraper content doesn’t become redundant or irrelevant. Make it a point to keep a tab on what’s changing so that you can update your content piece accordingly.

Keep Content Fresh

If you keep your content piece updated – statistics, graphics, industry trends and more, you increase the shareability of it month after month (maybe even years).

Conclusion

Most businesses and individuals quit blogging simply because their posts don’t do well in the market. There is a lack of readers and definitely lack of shares that cause the demotivation. This is where using growth hacks like the skyscraper content marketing come handy.
Well for example, we learned all about skyscraper content marketing from the very popular post on Backlinko. While he shared practically everything you needed to get started with this marketing tactic, we added to it by breaking down the process in 6 even simpler steps. In fact, we found a few ways to find trending topics easily too!

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