FAT CONTENT – How To Supercharge Your Website Like The Big Mac Did For McDonalds
Since its inception on a local level in 1967 and then nationwide in the US in 1968, the big Mac has stayed as one of McDonald’s most popular burgers of all time.
Initially, it was designed to compete head-on with the “Big Boys” franchise, but the burger proved so popular it was added to the menu.
And as we all know… it's still selling just as fast today as back then.
So what does the Big Mac have to do with your business and your website in particular?
Well, there are a few principles you can learn from the concept of “The Big Mac”.
And as you’ll discover in a minute when applying these principles in your content marketing, you can really supercharge your website.
But let’s rewind for a moment…
First, we need to address the question, why do you need content in the first place?
And that takes us back to the core reason you have a website in the first place.
To get more exposure and sales.
Right?
The one thing every business owner wants is to increase their business.
Online this is achieved in the form of more traffic hitting your website.
And one of the best and most effective ways to drive this traffic is getting found in search engines.
And the No.1 way to get found these days is via publishing high-quality content. (Articles, blog posts, e-books, etc… that inform readers of a particular subject or topic)
But here’s the big problem…
It’s becoming harder and harder to stand out from the crowd.
And that’s where Fat Content, the concept of the Big Mac otherwise known as Big Content comes in.
Over the last few years, content creators have been told that they must publish ‘good unique content’ if they want to rank well in Google and avoid being penalised by their recent algorithm changes such as the Panda update.
However, ‘good unique content’ is now the entry-level of content that should be produced and NOT the goal!
Just like McDonalds realised they needed something bigger and better to compete with the big boys, in the same way, you need to create your own Big Mac in form of Fat Content to compete with your competitors.
Think about it…
Whenever you type a meaningful search into Google, you’re presented with results many of which are saying the same thing.
Some articles will be longer than others while a few may contain pictures and videos to try to “up the ante”.
Quite frankly, this is no longer good enough!
If you are serious about building your business online and want to do it through content creation and marketing, then you need to readjust your thinking when it comes to producing quality content.
You need to start thinking BIG – enter ‘Big Content'!
So What Is Big Content?
Big content, was talked about back in 2011 by Dr. Pete J. Meyers, where he shared his thoughts on how content creation will need to evolve in order to rise above content clutter.
Over the years many bloggers have discussed the idea of creating excellent content and here are some examples of the buzz words they helped to create that you may be familiar with:-
Pillar content – Yaro Starak from Entrepreneurs-Journey.com
Epic Content – How to article by Coppyblogger.com
Linkbait – Step by step creation guide by Distilled.net
All these methods and ideas of creating content are great and should still be considered an important part of your content creation process. But when they were once the definition of great content, you could argue that in today’s online world they should be seen as the standard level of content that you should aim to be creating – the starting point if you will.
Neil Patel recently did a study on content length and concluded that posts that were 1,500 words and above received more social activity, shares and links while also achieving better rankings and conversions than articles with fewer than 1,500 words. Proving that long-form content is important.
However, Big Content goes way beyond these concepts. To get a better idea of what I mean, here’s one example of ‘Big Content’ by Neil on his QuickSprout.com blog entitled “The Advanced Guide to Content Marketing”.
This is a 10 chapter, 40,000-word piece of mega content that attracted more than 360,000 visitors to his blog which resulted in over 8,000 email signups…. all this within a short space of time after being published. It still gets 2,000 visitors every day!
Neil reveals how it took him the best part of 6 months to complete the guide – that’s right – 6 months, and that’s one of the defining factors of big content.
Now I know what you’re thinking, 6 months for 1 piece of content? I could write so many ‘normal’ articles in that time!
Remember earlier when I said you need to “readjust your thinking” – well this is where it applies.
Rather than focusing on the amount of time, work and energy it would take you to produce a similar piece of content like Neil’s, you should be looking into the resulting payoff – I don’t know about you but 8,000+ email subscribers from one piece of content is a massive deal.
In essence, that’s what big content is all about. Content that produces massive results by way of shares, likes, links, email signups, traffic and don’t forget about reputation enhancement!
Why Creating Big Content Can Be Challenging?
Make no mistake, although creating big content can be thought-provoking and inspiring, it certainly isn’t easy to pull off. There are many reasons why we don’t see the web littered with the content of this nature. Here are some of the obstacles you need to overcome:-
Takes a lot of time to research and produce
Most people love easy and shy away from hard work – it’s the old pain vs pleasure story conveyed so well by Tony Robbins.
You see creating any type of big content takes a lot of effort. Imagine how much work it would take you to research and write up a 2k – 3k worded article…. now 10x it. That’s big content!
That’s why you don’t see much big content around, but guess what? This is precisely how you can gain a competitive advantage over your competitors. Push through the ‘pain barrier in your mind and start producing this type of mega content and YOU WILL see big results.
Can require skill sets you don’t posses
Later on, I’ll show you some tremendous examples of Big Content and quite frankly, trying to figure out how to reproduce something similar yourself will be too much to comprehend for most.
A lack of certain skills may prevent you from achieving the results you desire but this doesn’t mean it can’t be done either. Again, “readjust your thinking”!
If you need to hire someone who has the skill set required, then this is what you must do. Good content marketers know the value of investing in their content creation process. This leads us to another obstacle…
Can be expensive? – Hire a designer/programmer
Big Content production will require an adequate allocation of necessary resources of which one will almost certainly be money.
Unless you have in-house specialist staff you can call on to work on your project, you will most likely need to hire a graphic designer or even a programmer, depending on what type of resource you plan to create.
So unless you have these skill sets under your belt already, which most don’t, this is another potential stumbling block.
Big Content Examples?
To help you better understand what big content looks like, here are some excellent examples:
Google’s 97 Local Ranking Factors: Which Of The 28 Make Or Break Factors Is Your Website Missing?
This is one of our very own guides, where we discuss and reveal every Local SEO factor we have found to be relevant in getting a website found locally. It's a great checklist for business owners, it's very informative for anyone that wants to learn what to focus on in terms of Local SEO and it's a resource that many people link to and continually refer back to.
FirstSiteGuide.com – How to Start a Blog
Here is a great piece of content in the form of a guide. It’s a 7 chapter guide that is about how to start a blog, a subject that is well written about already, however it takes the subject to the next level with its visual presentation.
It’s clear to see that this piece of content has probably taken weeks or even months to put together in terms of layout and design – all things that are associated with Big Content.
Here is an infographic that has ‘moving parts. It’s not like a normal static infographic, which essentially is just an image. This piece of great content is what I believe is the ‘new age' of infographics.
We all know how a well-researched and constructed infographic can generate buckets of links. Now imagine adding animation to it as well to make it come alive!
Also, the information contained in it is actual text so it’s readable by the search engines.
Here is a great interactive piece of content that typifies what big content is all about.
It shows how successful every 007 movies has been at the box office.
The data could easily have been presented in a long-form article but the publisher has taken all the data and presented it in an interactive way.
This makes it really enjoyable to ‘explore’ the facts and I’m sure the time spent on this page by visitors is going to be high in their Google Analytics dashboard too!
Here is an exceptional piece of big content. It’s probably THE BEST example of big content that exists online today.
It’s a highly interactive piece that ranks the world’s billionaires according to various criteria which you control.
Everything about this content is big, from the research involved to the design and the interactivity. The other amazing thing is that this is a piece of ‘living’ content as it is updated DAILY!
Curated content when done well can be very useful and takes a lot of research and digging around the internet in order to collect all the links to great resources.
This piece of content takes things to the next level by presenting the curated information in a visually appealing way.
The design itself would have taken a lot of thought, preparation and coding and these are all things that go into creating big content.
Ultimate List of Marketing Statistics
Thorough research is the basis for big content. It takes time to find and verify facts and figures.
However, the payoffs can be great as they help to form a solid base for your content and often ends up becoming a ‘go to’ resource resulting in links galore.
Statistics can often times become overwhelming but this piece of content presents the information in a way that is easy on the eye.
Is Big Content Evergreen?
While it may not always be possible to create evergreen content, by its very nature big content invariably ends up being evergreen. When you look at the examples above you can see how they probably attract vast amounts of traffic on a daily basis month after month.
Here’s what evergreen content would look like in your analytics account:
You can see that timeless content has ‘stick ability’ resulting in a steady flow of visitors to your site, month after month – year after year, and this should be the aim when creating big content.
By ensuring that you create big content that is evergreen, you increase the pay-off of your investment and time in creating it with more views and increased exposure for your business.
Big Content Is Worth The Risk?
Too many people focus on the risks associated with investing so much time and effort into creating long-form pieces of content. What if you hit publish and you only get a trickle of traffic that dies out within weeks?
Readjust your thinking! – Big content requires planning and much thought. You can’t just come up with a title for your piece and go from there.
This may work for regular content and sure it has its place in your content creation process but everyone is creating this type of content.
If you want to stand out from the crowd and get your voice heard you must plan and produce big content that is important to your readers and creates value for your niche.
Don’t think of it as a risk but rather an investment in your business's future.
Break The Mold And Go Forth?
Big content isn’t necessarily big in length. Take this one-page checklist that Dr Pete put together for example. It’s just a one-page PDF but it took him about 40 hours to create.
It was created back in 2009 and has become so popular due to its users that it has since been translated into 6 other languages!
Big content is big because it takes a lot of time, effort and resources to create and most importantly it breaks the mold of regular mundane content that 99% of content creators are producing.
Producing ‘regular level’ content, the type you see everywhere nowadays is going to be obsolete soon. You can keep producing it but it will eventually be irrelevant to the growth of your business, that’s for sure.
So if you’re looking for a way to really cut through the noise and get more eyeballs on your brand and presence online, you need to embrace ‘Big Content’.
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