The cornerstone of any successful content marketing campaign is excellent content.

As the amount of content being published each year grows exponentially, it’s getting harder to make yours stand out. Even really good content gets ignored most of the time.

But truly exceptional content has no problem getting shared.

In fact, a study by Backlinko found that the top 1.3% of articles generate 75% of all social shares.

So when you’re optimizing content, improving its quality is a big opportunity.

Here are some ways to turn your work into excellent, “10x” content that people will share.

• Make it more in-depth. Articles of around 2,000 words get more social shares than shorter content.
• Give it a unique angle. Take a contrition viewpoint, include an expert’s opinion, or add real-life examples.
• Make it more entertaining or interesting than what’s already out there.
• Use high quality production values or web design.
• Ask yourself: “what is this content missing?” If it’s a simple introduction to a topic, can you include more in-depth information? If it’s already informative, how about adding some actionable instructions? Or think about what comes after: what’s the next step someone might want to take after reading your article? And how can you help them with that step?

In my opinion, it’s not worth having optimized content in the first place if that content is low quality.

So don’t ignore this factor.