Using Conic Gradients and CSS Variables to Create a Doughnut Chart Output for a Range Input

Recreating the GitHub Contribution Graph with CSS Grid Layout

Ire Aderinokun sets out to build the GitHub contribution graph — that’s the table with lots of green squares indicating how much you’ve contributed to a project – with CSS Grid:

As I always find while working with CSS Grid Layout, I end up with far less CSS than I would have using almost any other method. In this case, the layout-related part of my CSS ended up being less than 30 lines, with only 15 declarations!

I’m so excited about posts like this because it shows just how much fun CSS Grid can be. Likewise, Jules Forrest has been making a number of brilliant experiments on this front where she reimagines complex print layouts or even peculiar menu designs.

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What Does It Mean to "Write for SEO" in 2018? - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

"Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat its mistakes" — it's a quote that's actually quite applicable when it comes to writing for SEO. Much of the advice given to copywriters, journalists, editors, and other content creators for SEO writing is dangerously out of date, leaning on practices that were once tried and true but that could now get your site penalized.

In this edition of Whiteboard Friday, we hope you enjoy a brief history lesson on what should be avoided, what used to work and no longer does, and a brief 5-step process you should start using today for writing content that'll get you to the front of the SERPs.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're chatting about writing for SEO and what that means in 2018.

So writing for SEO has had a long history, and it meant something many years ago that it does not mean today. Unfortunately, I see a lot of bad advice, terrible advice out there for journalists and editors and authors of all kinds about what you need to do in terms of writing for SEO, meaning writing to get you to the top of search engines.

"Writing for SEO" in 2001

Now, let's be clear, some of this stuff is mired in pure mythology. But some of it is mired in historical fact that just hasn't been updated. So let's talk about what writing for SEO used to be back in 2001, how it evolved in sort of the middle era of 2008, let's say, and then what it means today in 2018.

So, back in the day, writing for SEO did mean things like...

I. Keyword stuffing

If you wanted to rank highly in early search engines, especially the late '90s into the early 2000s, keyword stuffing was a real tactic that really did have effectiveness. So SEOs would cram keywords into all sorts of tags and locations.

II. They would use and reuse a bunch of different variants, slight keyword variants

So if I'm targeting the word blue watches, I would have blue watch, blue watches, blue watch accessory, blue watch accessories, blue watches accessory, blue watches accessories, ridiculous little variants on plurals because the search engines were not great at figuring out that all these things sort of had the same intent and meant the same thing. So raw, rough keyword matching, exact keyword matching was part of SEO.

III. Keyword use in every tag possible

If there was a tag, you'd cram keywords into it.

IV. Domain name and subdomain keyword use

So this is why you saw that brands would be outranked by, to use our example, blue-watch-accessories.bluewatchaccessories.info, that kind of silly stuff would be ranking. Some of it even maintained for a while.

V. SEO writing was writing for engines and then trying not to annoy or piss off users

So, a lot of the time, people would want to cloak. They'd want to show one set of content to the search engines and another set to searchers, to actual users, because they knew that if they showed this dense, keyword-stuffed content to users, they'd be turned off and they wouldn't find it credible and they'd go somewhere else.

"Writing for SEO" in 2008

2008, we evolve on a bunch of these fronts, but not all of them and certainly not perfectly.

I. Keywords are still important in important locations

II. Exact matching still matters in a lot of places. So people were crafting unique pages even for keywords that shared the same intent.

Blue watches and blue timepieces might have two different pages. Blue watch and blue watches could even have two separate pages and do effectively well in 2008. 2018, that's not the case anymore.

III. Domain names were definitely less powerful, subdomains more so, but still influential

They still had some play in the engines. You still saw a lot of debates back in '08 about whether to create a keyword-rich domain.

IV. Since links in 2008 were overwhelmingly powerful rather than on-page signals, writing in order to get links is incredibly prized

In fact, it still is, but we'll talk about the evolution of that a little bit.

"Writing for SEO" in 2018

So now let's jump another decade forward. We're in 2018. This year, what does writing for SEO mean? Well, a bunch of things.

I. Solving the searcher's query matter most -- writing that doesn't do this tends not to rank well (for long)

Because engines have gotten so much better, Google in particular, but Bing as well, have gotten so much better at essentially optimizing for solving the searcher's task, helping them accomplish the thing that they wanted to accomplish, the writing that does the best job of solving the searcher's task tends to be the most highly prized. Stuff that doesn't, writing that doesn't do that, doesn't tend to rank well, doesn't tend to rank for long. You can sometimes get to the top of the search results, but you will almost certainly invariably be taken out by someone who does a great job of solving the searcher's query.

II. Intent matching matters a lot more in 2018 than exact keyword matching.

Today, no credible SEO would tell you to create a page for blue watch and blue watches or blue watch accessories and blue watch accessory or even blue timepieces and blue watches, maybe if you're targeting clocks too. In this case, it's really about figuring out what is the searcher's intent. If many keywords share the same intent, you know what? We're going to go ahead and create a single page that serves that intent and all of the keywords or at least many of the keywords that that intent is represented by.

III. Only a few tags are still absolutely crucial to doing SEO correctly.

So SEO writing today, there are really only two that are not very fungible. Those are the title element and the body content. That's not to say that you can't rank without using the keyword in these two places, just that it would be inadvisable to do so. This is both because of search engines and also because of searchers. When you see the keyword that you search for in the title element of the page in the search results, you are more inclined to click on it than if you don't see it. So it's possible that some click-baity headline could outrank a keyword-rich headline. But the best SEO writers are mixing both of those. We have a Whiteboard Friday about headline writing on just that topic.

A few other ones, however, a few other tags are nice to have in 2018 still. Those include:

Headline tags (the H1, the H2),

URL field, so if you can make your URL include the words and phrases that people are searching for, that is mildly helpful. It's both helpful for searchers who see the URL and would think, "Oh, okay, that is referring to the thing that I want," as well as for people who copy and paste the URL and share it with each other, or people who link with the URL and, thus, the anchor text is carried across by that URL and those keywords in there.

The meta description, not used for rankings, but it is read by searchers. When they see a meta description that includes the words and phrases that they've queried, they are more likely to think this will be a relevant result and more likely to click it. More clicks, as long as the engagement is high, tends to mean better rankings.

The image alt attribute, which is helpful both for regular search results, but particularly helpful for Google Images, which, as you may know from watching Whiteboard Friday, Google Images gets a tremendous amount of search traffic even on its own.

IV. Employing words, phrases, and concepts that Google's identified as sort of commonly associated with the query

This can provide a significant boost. We've seen some really interesting experimentation on this front, where folks will essentially take a piece of content, add in missing words and phrases that other pages that are highly ranking in Google have associated with those correct words and phrases.

In our example, I frequently use "New York neighborhoods," and a page that's missing words like Brooklyn, Harlem, Manhattan, Staten Island, that's weird, right? Google is going to be much more likely to rank the page that includes these borough names than one that doesn't for that particular query, because they've learned to associate that text with relevance for the query "New York neighborhoods."

What I do want to make clear here is this does not mean LSI or some other particular tactic. LSI is an old-school, I think late '80s, early '90s computer tactic, software tactic for identifying words that are semantically connected to each other. There's no reason you have to use this old-school junk methodology that became like pseudoscience in the SEO world and had a recent revival. But you should be using words and phrases that Google has related to a particular keyword. Related topics is a great thing to do. You can find some via the Moz Bar. We did a Whiteboard Friday on related topics, so you can check that out.

V. The user experience of the writing and content matters more than ever, and that is due to engagement metrics

Essentially, Google is able to see that people who click on a particular result are less likely to click the back button and choose a different result or more likely to stay on that page or site and engage further with that content and solve their whole task. That is a good sign to Google, and they want to rank more of those.

A brief "SEO writing" process for 2018

So, pragmatically, what does this history and evolution mean? Well, I think we can craft a brief sort of SEO writing process for 2018 from this. This is what I recommend. If you can do nothing else, do these five steps when you are writing for SEO, and you will tend to have more success than most of your competition.

Step 1: Assemble all the keywords that a page is targeting

So there should be a list of them. They should all share the same intent. You get all those keywords listed out.

Step 2: You list what the searchers are actually trying to accomplish when they search those queries

So someone searched for blue watches. What do they want? Information about them, they want to see different models, they want to know who makes them, they want to buy them, they want to see what the costs are like, they want to see where they can get them online, probably all of those things. Those are the intents behind those queries.

Step 3: Create a visual layout

Here's going to be our headline. Here's our subheadline. We're going to put this important key concept up at the top in a callout box. We're going to have this crucial visual next up. This is how we're going to address all of those searcher intents on the page visually with content, written or otherwise.

Step 4: Write first and then go add the keywords and the crucial, related terms, phrases, top concepts, topics that you want into the page

The ones that will hopefully help boost your SEO, rather than writing first with the keywords and topics in mind. You can have a little bit of that, but this would be what I suggest.

Step 5: Craft the hook, the hook that will make influential people and publications in this space likely to amplify, likely to link

Because, in 2018, links still do matter, still are an important part of SEO.

If you follow this and learn from this history, I think you'll do a much better job, generally speaking, of writing for SEO than a lot of the common wisdom out there. All right, everyone. Look forward to your thoughts in the comments. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

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JavaScript, I love you, you’re perfect, now change

Those of us who celebrate Christmas or Hannukkah probably have strong memories of the excitement of December. Do you remember the months leading up to Christmas, when your imagination exploded with ideas, answers to the big question "What do you want for Christmas?" As a kid, because you aren't bogged down by adult responsibility and even the bounds of reality, the list could range anywhere from "legos" to "a trip to the moon" (which is seeming like will be more likely in years to come).

Thinking outside of an accepted base premise—the confines of what we know something to be—can be a useful mental exercise. I love JavaScript, for instance, but what if, like Christmas as a kid, I could just decide what it could be? There are small tweaks to the syntax that would not change my life, but make it just that much better. Let's take a look.

As my coworker and friend Brian Holt says,

Get out your paintbrushes! Today, we're bikeshedding!

Template Literals

First off, I should say, template literals were quite possibly my favorite thing about ES6. As someone who regularly manipulates SVG path strings, moving from string concatenation to template literals quite literally changed my damn life. Check out the return of this function:

function newWobble(rate, startX) {
  ...
  
  if (i % 2 === 0) {
    pathArr2[i] = pathArr2[i] + " Q " + in1 + " " + QRate;
  } else {
    pathArr2[i] = pathArr2[i] + " Q " + in2 + " " + QRate;
  }

  ...
  return "M" + pathArr2.join("") + " " + startX + " " + (inc * (rate*2) + rate);
}

Instead becomes

const newWobble = (rate, startX) => {
  ...
  
  if (i % 2 === 0) {
    pathArr2[i] = `${pathArr2[i]} Q ${in1} ${QRate}`;
  } else {
    pathArr2[i] = `${pathArr2[i]} Q ${in2} ${QRate}`;
  }

  ...
  return `M${pathArr2.join("")} ${startX} ${(inc * (rate*2) + rate)}`;
}

...which is much easier to read and work with. But could this be improved? Of course it can!

There is a small bit of cognitive load incurred when we have to parse ${x}, mostly due to the very nature of the characters themselves. So, what if template literals lost the dollar sign and moved to square brackets instead? Rather than:

return `M${pathArr2.join("")} ${startX} ${(inc * (rate*2) + rate)}`

...we can have something like:

return `M[pathArr2.join("")] [startX] [(inc * (rate*2) + rate)]`

...which is much more streamlined.

Ternary operators

Ternary operators are interesting because in recent years, they have not changed, but we did. A lot of modern JavaScript makes heavy use of ternaries, which causes me to revisit their syntax as it stands now.

For instance, a one-liner like:

const func = function( .. ) {
  return condition1 ? value1 : value2
}

...is not so hard to read and grok. But here’s what I’ve been reading a lot lately:

const func = function( .. ) {
  return condition1 ? value1
       : condition2 ? value2
       : condition3 ? value3
       :              value4
}

This is much harder to read, mostly because the colon : gets lost depending on your code editor and syntax highlighting settings. And, what if someone isn’t properly formatting that code? It can easily become:

const func = function( .. ) {
  return condition1 ? value1 : condition2 ? value2 : condition3 ? value3 : value4
}

...in which case the colons are extremely hard to see at a glance. So what if we used a visual indicator that was a little stronger?

const func = function( .. ) {
  return condition1 ? value1 | condition2 ? value2 | condition3 ? value3 | value4
}

A pipe doesn’t break up the flow, yet still separates in a way that is not as easy to get lost in the line.

Arrow Functions

I’m going to have a mob after me for this one because it’s everyone’s favorite, but arrow functions were always a miss for me. Not because they aren’t useful—quite the opposite. Arrow functions are wonderful! But there was always something about the legibility of that fat arrow that irked me. I am used to them now, but it troubled me that when I was first learning them, it took me an extra second or two to read them. Eventually this passed, but let’s pretend we can have our cake and eat it too.

I am definitely not suggesting that we still use the word function. In fact, I would love it if arrow functions weren’t anonymous by nature because:

const foo = (y) => { 
  const x
  return x + y
}

...is not quite as elegant as:

const foo(y) => {
  const x
  return x + y
}

In my perfect world, we would drop the function and the arrow so that we could have something that resembles more of a method:

foo(y) {
  const x
  return x + y
}

and an anonymous function could simply be:

(y) {
  const x
  return x + y
}

Or even a one liner:

(y) { y += 1 }

I know many people will bring up the fact that:

1. arrow functions have one-liners that do this, and
2. I disliked the curly brackets in the template literals above

The reason I like this is that:

1. some encapsulation can provide clarity, especially for logic, and
2. curly brackets are a stronger visual signal, because they're more visual noise. Functions are important enough to need that sort of high-level visual status, whereas template literals are not.

OK, now let’s go one step deeper. What if we always had an implicit return on the last line? So, now we could do:

foo(y) {
  const x
  x + y
}

Or...

(y) {
  const x
  x + y
}

If we didn’t want to return, we could still say:

foo(y) {
  const x
  x + y
  return
}

Or, better yet, use a special character:

foo(y) {
  const x
  x + y
  ^
}

This way, anytime you wanted to return a different line instead of the last, you could use return and it would work just as normal:

foo(y) {
  const x
  return x + y
  const z
}

What a world it could be, eh?

What Now?

People invent new languages and rewrite compilers for the very reason of having a strong opinion on how a language should pivot or even how it should be written at all. Some of my favorite examples of this include whitespace, which is a programming language created from all tabs and spaces, and Malbolge, which was specifically designed to be impossible to program with. (If you think I'm a troll for writing this article, I got nuthin' on the guy who wrote Malbolge.) From the article:

Indeed, the author himself has never written a single Malbolge program

For those more serious about wanting to develop their own programming language, there are resources available to you, and it's pretty interesting to learn.

I realize that there are reasons JavaScript can't make these changes. This article is not intended to be a TC39 proposal, it's merely a thought exercise. It's fun to reimagine the things you see as immovable to check your own assumptions about base premises. Necessity might be the mother of invention, but play is its father.

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Take a coding quiz, get offers from top tech companies

(This is a sponsored post.)

That's how TripleByte works. The companies that find hires from TripleByte (like Dropbox, Apple, Reddit, Twitch, etc) don't have as many underqualified applicants to sort through because they've come through a technical interview of sorts already.

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Aspect Ratios with SVG

I quite like this little trick from Noam Rosenthal:

<style>
.aspectRatioSizer {
  display: grid;
}
.aspectRatioSizer > * {
  grid-area: 1 / 1 / 2 / 2;
}
</style>

<div class="aspectRatioSizer">
  <svg viewBox="0 0 7 2"></svg>
  <div>
    Content goes here
  </div>
</div>

Two things going on there:

1. As soon as you give a <svg> a viewBox, it goes full-width, but only as tall as the implied aspect ratio in the viewBox value. The viewBox value is essentially "top, left, width, height" for the coordinate system interally to the SVG, but it has the side-effect of sizing the element itself when it has no height of its own. That's what is used to "push" the parent element into an apsect ratio as well. The parent will still stretch if it has to (e.g. more content than fits), which is good.
2. CSS Grid is used to place both elements on top of each other, and the source order keeps the content on top.

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How to Earn More Links and Social Shares: Insights From 759 Content Marketing Campaigns

Posted by kerryjones

Is there a formula for wildly successful content marketing campaigns? It’s a question we ponder a lot at the Fractl office.

We do have our own tried-and-true formula that we continually tweak based on our observations of what does and doesn’t succeed. To help us spot trends that shape this formula, we collect data about every content marketing campaign we create for our clients. But we don’t keep this data to ourselves – sharing our internal data with the marketing community helps others create better content based on what’s worked for us.

We did this a few years ago using a set of 345 campaigns, and now that we have double the number of our campaigns under our belt, we dug into our data again. This time, the sample size was 759 campaigns that launched between 2013 and 2017.

As part of our analysis, we looked at the relationship between campaign performance, measured by the number of placements and social shares a campaign earned, and the campaign’s attributes, including emotionality, the target audience size, and timeliness. "Placement" or “pickup” refers to any time a campaign received media coverage. In link building lingo, a placement may refer to a link that is dofollow, cocitation or nofollow; we also count client mentions without links as placements.

Campaign performance was grouped into three buckets:

• High success: more than 100 placements and/or 20,000 social shares
• Moderate success: Between 20–100 placements and/or between 1,000 and 20,000 social shares
• Low success: Fewer than 20 placements and/or fewer than 1,000 social shares

What sets apart our top performing campaigns

Our campaigns that were either emotionally resonant or surprising were significantly more likely to yield a high volume of media placements and social shares than content that does not include these elements.

The chart below shows the prevalence of three factors across the different campaign performance groups.

As you can see, emotions and an element of surprise were far more common in campaigns that performed extremely well.

• Seventy percent of high success campaigns had an emotional hook compared to 45% of moderate success and 25% of low success campaigns.
• Seventy-six percent of high success campaigns were surprising compared to 54% of moderate success and 47% of low success campaigns.

There wasn’t as great of a difference when it came to whether or not campaigns were broadly appealing. We believe on its own this isn’t enough to hit a home run, but it’s telling that this trait was nearly ubiquitous among the top performers:

• Almost all of our high success campaigns (96%) had broad appeal, compared to 81% of moderate success and 86% of low success campaigns.

Let’s take a closer look at how each of these three factors correlated to campaign performance.

An emotional hook

Campaigns with an emotional hook earned 70% more media pickups and 127% more social shares on average than campaigns that lacked emotional resonance.

Creating an emotional response in viewers is crucial for driving sharing and engagement. This is clearly demonstrated by our campaign data, with emotional resonance being a key factor in our top campaigns and emotional campaigns performing far better on average than non-emotional campaigns.

In our research on viral emotions, we found certain emotional reactions are best for getting content to spread:

• Keep it positive. Creating a purely positive emotional reaction works best for garnering attention and igniting shares. Why is this? People want to share things that make others feel good.
• Put the audience on an emotional rollercoaster. Complex emotional responses are also extremely effective for striking the right emotional chord. Consider pairing contrasting emotions, such as hope and despair or admiration and sadness, to pack the greatest emotional punch.
• Pair negative emotions with surprise. Avoid rousing strictly negative feelings. Surprise is crucial if you’re hitting the audience with a negative emotion, such as fear or anger.

An element of surprise

Surprising campaigns earned 39% more media pickups and 108% more social shares than campaigns that weren’t surprising.

Surprise doesn’t necessarily mean shocking. Novelty, or newness, can also elicit feelings of surprise; incorporating information that isn’t widely known or new data are effective ways to play into this because it triggers a feeling of “I didn’t already know this,” which draws interest and encourages sharing the new information with others.

Furthermore, surprise or novelty can greatly improve your outreach efforts. Since newness is a pillar of newsworthiness, publishers are eager to get their hands on exclusive stories. This is why offering the media something never published before is essential for effective PR outreach.

Broad appeal

As I mentioned previously, broad appeal on its own isn’t going to have a huge impact on campaign success. However, universal appeal still plays a role in getting a campaign in front of as many eyeballs as possible. Campaigns that appealed to a wide audience earned 38% more media pickups and 96% more social shares on average than campaigns created for a niche demographic.

Creating broadly appealing versus niche-focused content is a choice of fishing in a big pond or a little pond. You’ll have a larger volume of outreach targets and greater potential audience reach with a broadly appealing campaign. On the other hand, niche campaigns have limited reach because they’re much harder to get picked up by widely-read general news sites that want stories with mass appeal. Instead, you can only pitch the handful of publishers that cover the niche topic.

For this reason, we often create tangential content, or content about a popular topic related to a client’s vertical, for many of our clients whose goals include a high volume of links and media mentions. This being said, it’s possible to get a ton of media attention and engagement with niche-focused campaigns, which I explore later in this post.

When a combination of emotions, surprise, and broad appeal was present in a campaign, it supercharged the results.

So we know emotions and surprise work well on their own. However, when these factors were paired together with a broadly appealing topic, we saw even greater success.

Campaigns that were both emotional and surprising earned 199 pickups and 23,730 social shares on average. Incorporating all three made the biggest impact on the average results; campaigns that were emotional, surprising, and broadly appealing earned 207 pickups and 25,017 social shares on average.

We know audiences are drawn to emotionally resonant, universally appealing, and surprising content, but these traits play a big role in campaign success before the public even sees the content – they’re crucial for getting your outreach pitch read and acted upon.

Content with these three traits has strong headline potential, which publishers immediately pick up on when they read a pitch. In other words, it’s going to be easy for publishers to write an irresistible headline if they publish your campaign. Without a great headline, it’s much harder to draw clicks and views to a story, which are required initial steps for getting others to link to and share the content.

Can’t picture how a single headline can be emotional, surprising, and have mass appeal? Here are examples of headlines from our campaigns that hit all of these factors:

• Drinking from a refillable water bottle could be worse than licking a dog toy
• More American high school students smoke pot than binge drink, report says
• Here’s which states post the nastiest tweets [From this campaign]
• Online fast food calculator reveals how long you need to run or swim to be guilt-free (and it's more than you think)
• The surprising reason why most men cheat

If you were browsing your social feeds and came across any of those headlines, they’d be hard to resist clicking, right? Here’s a look at the campaign behind that last headline.

Campaign example: The surprising reason why most men cheat

Client vertical: Online pharmacy

The campaign

We went straight to the source to conduct a survey of people who have cheated on a significant other. This was clearly an emotionally charged subject that would intrigue a large segment of the population. Furthermore, the campaign offered a fresh take on a topic commonly discussed to the point of oversaturation by big publishers that cover relationships. By coming at it from from the angle of “from the mouth of a cheater,” which isn’t often covered and definitely not in a data-centered way, the campaign had a strong surprise and novelty factor that went over well with both publishers and audiences.

The results? 175 placements, including features on Fox News, The New York Post, Cosmopolitan, and Men’s Health, and nearly 40,000 social shares.

Pro Tip: When you pitch an idea to a publisher, they picture potential headlines. It shouldn’t be overly complicated to communicate that your idea is emotional, surprising, and broadly appealing. Try the headline test: Consider how all three factors would fit into a headline by writing a few mock headlines that concisely capture the selling points of the campaign. Does it make for the perfect eye-catching headline?

How you can still score big without emotions and surprise

Of course, there are exceptions to the rules. Here’s how you can still earn a lot of media pickups and social shares with content that’s neither emotional nor surprising.

Exception #1: Target one or more niche groups

Our high performing campaigns that appealed to a certain demographic or fan base were less likely to be emotionally resonant or surprising than those that appealed to a wide audience.

Successful niche campaigns were mostly educational and informative rather than purely entertaining, and many of these campaigns were data heavy. It’s no surprise that passionate niche groups are eager to learn more about the topics they care about.

Campaign example: The rise of the freelance worker

Client vertical: HR and payroll services

The campaign

We analyzed 400,000 freelancer resumes to uncover new insights about the freelancing economy. While this topic isn’t universally appealing, it did have overlapping appeal within several niche audiences, such as HR and recruitment, freelance employees, and the general business community, which led to 269 placements including Forbes, Entrepreneur, and Fox News, plus more than 20,000 social shares.

Pro Tip: If your campaign topic appeals to several niche groups, you can increase your chances for media coverage on a variety of niche publishers, thus expanding your potential reach.

Exception #2: Incorporate "geo-bait"

Based on our data, we found that campaigns that were absent of an emotional hook or element of surprise but did have a strong geographic angle still performed quite well.

Since our identities are closely tied to where we come from and where we live, campaigns based on geographical areas (countries, cities, states, regions) play into the audiences’ egos. In Fractl terms, we call this “geo-bait.”

Campaign example: Which states use the most solar power?

Client vertical: Home improvement

The campaign

Using data from the US Department of Energy, we looked at which states were producing the most solar energy and installing the most solar panels. There wasn’t much surprising data here, as environmentally progressive states topped the rankings (hello, California), but incorporating fresh data and featuring a ranking of solar-friendly states helped this campaign earn more than 200 placements. In addition to the geo-bait angle, this topic had strong appeal to the environmental niche, which helped it get picked up by green publishers.

Pro Tip: Geo-bait campaigns are especially appealing when they compare or rank multiple places.

Other key factors that affect campaign performance

Adding three magical elements into your content won’t automatically lead to success. A handful of other variables can make or break your campaign, some of which will be out of your control. So which variables in your control can increase your chances for success?

Exceptional outreach

Even the best content will fail to get any coverage if your outreach game is weak. This means absolutely no mass pitching your campaign to a long list of publishers. Not only do you need to choose the right targets for outreach (a.k.a. publishers that actually publish stories about your campaign topic), you need to choose the right person at that publication (a.k.a. the person who regularly writes about the topic). That way, you're not alienating writers with irrelevant pitches. You also need to send compelling, personalized outreach pitches to each target (don’t worry, we have a checklist for that). By sending solid pitches, they're more likely to open your emails in the future.

Credibility

You’ll quickly lose trust with publishers (and audiences) if your campaign includes questionable data and inaccuracies. Make credibility a top priority for your work and you’ll have an easier time becoming a trustworthy content creator and maintaining your trustworthiness in the long term.

First, you need to only use authoritative sources and data in your campaign.

What’s a good source?

• Government websites and databases
• Higher education sites
• Peer-reviewed journals
• Notable publishers with stringent editorial standards

What’s not a good source?

• Websites lacking editorial oversight (in other words, contributors can automatically publish content without an editor’s review)
• Branded websites
• User-generated content
• Studies backed by corporate

Second, your campaign won’t be trusted if it’s riddled with errors. Our editorial team ensures campaigns don’t get released into the wild with glaring grammatical and factual mistakes. Include editorial guidelines and a quality assurance check within your production process to keep campaigns error-free.

One final word of advice: evaluate whether a campaign concept will be emotionally resonant, surprising, and broadly appealing before you move it into production. Our ideation guide sheds light on how we do this by scoring our ideas based on a 5-point grading rubric.

What trends have you noticed about your most successful content marketing campaigns? I’d love to hear how your observations confirm or differ from what I’ve shared.

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