Write about information. Make it good. Have a plan for how it will spread.

Every company should write about its data

Companies don’t need content; they need things to happen when they publish content. Good content is just the catalyst for performance.

we urge you to think of content marketing like a campaign that must be waged with tremendous effort. Nothing good ever happens by accident. You need to start with great ideas, you need to have a plan for how to distribute that content, and then you need to execute that plan.

if you make a good piece of content, it increasingly doesn’t matter if you publish it on The New York Times website or your company’s blog.

While getting covered by TechCrunch sent 6,000 visitors to our site, we learned that a popular blog post on our website could send 20,000 visitors in a single day. It was better to write popular things on our website and attract our own crowd than to try to cajole journalists into writing about us. When we published interesting information on Priceonomics, the journalists came to us!

If you’re going to spend time and effort blogging, there is no point in writing things that aren’t good. Instead, spend a little more time and write something great.

the Effort-Performance-Outcome theory: you will only put forth the effort necessary to succeed if you reasonably expect that effort will pay off. This explains why workers slack off once they believe that their output won’t be used for anything important.

The default state of the internet is that no one cares. So many articles, videos, and blog posts compete for people’s attention that average work often goes unrecognized. It’s pointless to publish anything that isn’t fantastic, because it will certainly be ignored.

Most commonly, imitators try to be funny, because “funny” is one of the currencies of the web: people share things that are funny on social networks. But funny doesn’t get you attention from The Wall Street Journal, doesn’t inspire confidence in front of potential customers, and doesn’t highlight your company’s expertise.

your focus should be on making interesting things that also have some benefit for your company.

You should write about information.

authentic information that your company has access to is the currency of truly valuable content marketing.

Make sure this is original information your company has authentic access to, and that the information is novel and interesting. Your company is an expert on its own information — that’s what you should write about.

If you do it right, it will get you press mentions and customer leads in perpetuity. It will establish your company as a leader in certain areas. And it may even get you invited to speak at conferences in your field.

The goal is to create something that helps other people (journalists) achieve their goals, while making your company look good.

Writing about data isn’t easy. The OkCupid team had two people working on its blog full time, which is a huge investment for a startup company. Most people who look at data will find it boring or impenetrable. As we’ll talk about later in the book, it takes a lot of time to pull a story out of a data set and make sure it’s right.

Beyond journalists, people like to read (and share) stories that are about their industries, hobbies, and home towns.

Every industry has a history, every set of data has an insight, and every person has a story.

What if instead of pestering journalists to write about your company, you created content that was so good that they want to write about it? That’s the process we created; if you create great information, you have a chance of developing a similar process at your company.

At the end of the year, you always see lists like “The Most Popular Google Searches of the Year,” or “The Year’s Most Played Artists on Spotify” because journalists and the general public love getting information. This is precisely why people are always quantitatively ranking things like “The Top Schools in America,” or the “Most Diverse Cities in America.”

You have to keep things interesting for yourself, otherwise your enthusiasm will wane, and it will show in your writing.

Our theory is that your content should be a mixture of things that promote your products and things that don’t.

information is not limited to data: you can also write about people’s lives.

One of the core tenets at Priceonomics is that everyone has an interesting story. Every person you come into contact with on a daily basis has a deep-rooted story about heartbreak, triumph, tragedy, or comedy.

The key to writing about stories, anecdotes, and small pieces of data is this: Stick to what you know. Don’t extrapolate and try to turn an anecdote about someone’s life into something else.

Just talk about what you know, and stick to the facts.

Our style is to give you information and let you decide how you feel: Here is information about a book we just wrote, here’s why we wrote it, and here’s the link to buy it.

what are easy ways you can write about this kind of story-based information on your company’s website? Start by interviewing people at your company and writing about them on your site.

Information is valuable. It gives reporters something to write about; it brings potential customers to your door; and it establishes you as an expert on your subject.

as you write about information, it’s important to keep in mind that the upside of doing a good job is enormous, but the upside of doing an average job is absolutely zero.

If you write something good, it doesn’t matter if it’s published on your obscure company blog or on The New York Times. It can be successful either way. In fact, it’s probably better for your company if you write incredible content on your blog rather than letting other publications publish them as op-eds or guest posts.

Today, virtually every content website’s largest source of traffic is Facebook. Content has to be so exceptional that people will choose to go through the effort of sharing it with other people: On Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, and even email.

To get this story out, we wrote a tweet about the article, and appended the words “tip@techmeme.” What does this mean? Well, it meant that we were submitting a tip to the tech news aggregation site TechMeme, a website that lots of tech industry reporters read.

When you write content, you must have a channel in mind for that content to spread. It’s important that you publish incredibly useful information, but unless you think about how that content will be distributed to the audience you have in mind, nothing will happen.

It isn’t enough to publish great information. You have to wage a campaign to make sure that the right people find out about it. More than 50 journalists rejected us, but finding one person who wanted to write about our study made the post successful.

When you start writing content based on your company’s information, force yourself to send at least 50 personalized emails to people who you want to cover your report. Your email to them should be short and have one goal: pique their interest enough that they’ll click the link and read your content.

When it comes to content, the internet is just a network of people looking for stuff to read and videos to watch. Journalists are some of the network’s “supernodes”: they curate information and then relay it to lots of other people. This is why emailing journalists is a good way to get your content to millions of people.

focus your efforts on convincing a handful of people who are gateways to a larger audience. That’s a much more tractable task.

The most powerful supernodes on the internet right now are social news sites.

The beauty of these sites is that they democratize the sharing of content. If your work is good and appeals to enough of their readership, it will get voted up. If it isn’t, it won’t.

The bullshit detectors of people on Reddit and similar sites keep the flimsy, promotional blog posts that most companies churn out at bay. Information that is a byproduct of your business, on the other hand, is real and actually helps people out.

If you consistently write great things, other people start doing things that help you out.

We produced quality information, and things started happening to us. Our fans submitted it to social news sites, journalists found it on their own, and the content started ranking highly in Google Search results.

you need to participate in the news site as a community member for a while before doing anything with your own content. Understand the content people like and the norms around posting it. If moderators keep deleting your content, figure out why.

Don’t try to game the system, because you can’t.

‘The Power Law’: If you invest in early-stage companies, most of your fund’s returns will be dominated by the one or two mega-successful companies you fund.

In 2014, Priceonomics wrote 319 articles. Of those, 10 of them made up over 50% of our traffic. Those were our hits. And for the hits, the overwhelming source of traffic came from going viral on Facebook.

“[Facebook is the] demand generation. We’re not really demand fulfillment, when you’ve already figured it out what you’re going to buy–that’s search. We’re demand generation, before you know you want something, before you know you’re interested in something.”

In this new world of social content distribution, anyone can be a star. You just need to make content that people want to share. When you post something, ask yourself this question: Is this the kind of content that Facebook will want on its platform in the long term, given its goal to be a hub for quality content that rivals television?

What we share on social networks is a form of self expression. What matters when we share something is how it makes us feel.

We also share media and content that reflects how we want to be perceived. What’s more, we often share things that we have reactions to: I read something online and now I feel disgusted. Or surprised. Or in awe. Or smart.

More often than not, after you read something, you have nothing to say about it. If that’s the case, you will not share it.

before we even started gathering the data, we considered: (1) What is a person expressing by sharing this?, and (2) What can they say about it?

To drive a lot of traffic, you have to write good things that have a channel through which they can get The Bump, and there has to be a reason for people who read it to share it.

If your goal is to get the media to write about your data, you’ll find that Twitter is more important than Facebook. For journalists, Twitter is social media.

Start every essay by punching your reader in the face. Obviously not literally, but you need to grab his or her attention. Assume that a reader has stumbled upon your article by chance, and is seconds away from closing or burying the tab forever.

The introduction is by far the most important part of the article.

The conclusion matters because it reminds the reader what she should take away from the piece. It provides, on a silver platter, sharable nuggets of information that would be a hit on Facebook or at a cocktail party.

If there is an important point you are trying to make, you need to bring it to the front of a paragraph to increase the probability that the reader actually reads the sentence.

There are only three guidelines for the Priceonomics Blog: 1.) Bring new information to the world 2.) Be interesting, and 3.) Be right.

There is a secret to minimizing your chances of making a catastrophic mistake: keep the scope of your argument narrow.

The language you use matters because it circumscribes the scope of what you’re trying to prove. Be careful which words you choose.

Our goal with a title is twofold: it should honestly convey what the article is about, and it should emphasis the point that we think the reader will share.

the title is where there is the greatest temptation to compromise yourself.

when you first start, don’t write every day. Spend 40 hours on your first post, and then make it succeed. Do whatever it takes to find the story that’s in the data to make it genuinely interesting.

The returns on writing something great are enormous; the returns on writing something average are zero.

The right information at the right time can be incredibly valuable to someone. Never underestimate that your company has a tremendous knowledge base about its industry that could be helpful to other people.

The Hero with A Thousand Faces. In it, Campbell details the 17 steps every protagonist goes through in a typical story line. After a while, we realized we were subconsciously applying this cycle to many of the articles on the Priceonomics Blog.

the essence of the Hero’s Journey: The hero is just a regular person. One day, an incident causes the hero to start a journey. There is a huge problem the hero tries to solve. It looks like the hero is going to solve it, but he fails. After failing time after time, the hero perseveres and triumphs.

Coming up with good ideas takes some judgement, but you can build your judgement by reading great content. Pick one of the “Supernode” social news sites we listed earlier, hang out there, and get a feel for the types of articles that go viral. Go to a sub-Reddit, pick a subject that matters to you, and view the articles with the highest votes ever. What is it about those ideas that makes them spread?

talented people expend effort in a system that rewards that effort.

in order for your content to succeed, the people who make it have to really care about your business. They need to understand the information your company has and how it can be made interesting.

If someone doesn’t care deeply about your problems, don’t expect him to solve them. Someone at your company need to start working, invest those 40 hours in making one piece of content, and get good at it. If you’re a small startup, that means a founder of the company; if you’re a large company, that means someone who’s in charge of marketing.

While only 1% or so of applicants will get one of these interviews, about 50% of them make it to the next stage. This is the most important stage, and we highly recommend you do it.

We then pay the applicant to do a freelance article for us. Jointly, we pick an idea, tell him or her how much we will pay, and come up with a process for working together. Then, the applicant goes off and writes the article.

If you’re going to write content that even remotely promotes your business, the quality of it has to be higher than competing information from professional news sites. Your blog needs to be great, and blog posts that promote your business need to be even greater.

When you start off with content marketing, we suggest you use your company’s data to see if you can create data-driven stories. Why?  If you can pull that off, then you know how to write content that promotes your company and is interesting.

the less promotional your content feels, the larger audience the you can build up.

Most content sites bundle their work with advertising. That’s their prerogative. At Priceonomics, we have a different model: we bundle our content with things we sell. Content attracts an audience to our website, and we sell things to a percentage of them.

you have an advantage, because you have access to information through your company and your industry experience. Great information spreads, but only if you design it to spread. It needs to be packaged into a great story, and you need to anticipate the channels through which it will spread. Being talented and doing a good job isn’t enough; you need to have a plan.