You might agree with me when I say it’s hard to get noticed.

People seem to be in a constant adrenaline rush, frolicking towards the next big thing.

No wonder no one wants to engage with or share your content. There’s just too much of content.

As more and more people become aware of the benefits of content marketing, better content gets produced. Shiny, polished, content rife with hard to debate facts.

Google has made it hard to survive in the search landscape without content that goes beyond the norm.

The effectiveness of content starts declining. The law of diminishing returns is at work here. The more you do of a thing, the less effectual it becomes.

That’s not to say you cannot make your brand visible.

Shun the cloak of invisibility.

You aren’t Harry freaking Potter.

Here’s how to get your brand the attention it deserves.

Get out of the pigeonhole by creating controversy

Create content everyone’s creating and that’s the perfect way to never get noticed.

Try fitting your content into a pigeonhole and you never stand out.

When Brian Dean created a blogpost listing 200 SEO factors it broke the internet.

He started getting mentions, links and was began to be seen as a well-rounded expert.

Moz published a rebuttal titled ‘The Myth of Google’s 200 ranking factors’, which too went on to become popular.

The same goes for skyscraper formula which was refuted very well in this post on the Ahrefs blog. With 89 comments the post did generate some fervor.

People piggybacked on Brian’s success by creating content that questioned the factors and his techniques.

Brian’s post argues that that epic content followed by outreach is enough to promote one’s content. But that case isn’t always so.

Create unique research

Let me tell you something about most writers.

They are plain lazy. They are incredibly short on time.

And that’s a good thing.

Their laziness works in your favor.

They need to churn out the next piece of content and are in need of research to back up what they say.

Give it to them.

When doing my own freelance projects I reference hundreds of research materials. I link to them.

I don’t have time or the means to gather data. I do secondary research.

By doing the hard work, you are creating a resource that’s going to be referenced a few hundred times on different publications if it gains traction.

This feeds a cyclic effect. More links mean more people see your research and it goes up in rankings.

Because of the rankings even more people see it and reference it. The cycle never stops.

In this news article I referenced a piece of research that Conductor SearchLight did.

They create many more such reports. That content got linked by SearchEngineJournal a site that averages 1 million visitors a month. To download the report, a visitor has to sign up.

How many more people have now discovered that brand because of the research they did.

The good thing is it need not be earth shattering.

Matthew Woodward conducted an experiment where he tested opt-in popups against standard lead gen methods.

Pop-ups captured more leads.

I referenced his research in my article here and so did another writer.

Got the flow.

Easy peasy. Next

Build relationships by networking and linking out

Psychological studies reveal that someone might do you a favor because they feel obliged to i.e. if you have done them a favor.

In Robert Cialdini’s book ‘Influence’ he devotes entire pages to make you understand how if someone feels obliged they want to pay it back to you in kind. The principle is simple: I scratch your back and you scratch mine.

Want to see it in action.

Neil Patel’s posts often tear apart every topic he covers. They aren’t your average run-of-the-mill cookie- cutter content that chokes up as it barely ekes out 500 words.

Often they go up and above 5000 words.

You cannot pull stuff of your ass when you write that much. Such content needs ton of research. Plenty of back scratching. I counted the number of external links on a post that went a few days ago.

It had 30 external links.