How to Create Valuable Content
— English adaptation of my original piece “Cómo crear contenido de valor” —
You’re likely tired of hearing from every corner that you must create valuable content to make your brand stand out on the internet. And you might react as I once did, asking myself, “Okay, but… what do they mean by “valuable”? What is this value? How do I create it? Can I use AI to create unique content in this style?”
Today, you will learn the answer to these questions and much more
Increasingly, I see more noise (pointless content) both on social networks and websites. We have more information than ever, yet the majority of what is shared is irrelevant, poorly developed, or has a weak focus. There is an attempt to cover all social networks and as many people as possible, and as the saying goes, jack of all trades, master of none couldn’t be more appropriate.
Efforts are dispersed to create “content” that doesn’t really go anywhere, only serving to fill a silence, a void where you could simply say “I sell my services/products, buy from me.” What I see in many marketing campaigns is wasted time and missed opportunities, simply due to an unwillingness to put in a bit more effort to create something truly meaningful that will genuinely connect with their audience.
Therein lies a great opportunity, my friend, because if you do it well, you won’t have any competition.
If there is one conclusion I have come to after my more than 15 years of writing on the internet, it’s that if you’re going to write trash, it’s better not to write at all because it will just become noise, chaff that no one will read. If you'll publish something, ensure that it has your soul or the essence of your brand, and that it genuinely seeks to help others. It doesn’t matter whether you’re going to sell a product or a service afterward: if you want people’s attention and trust, you must earn them.
I will show you how to win these people over, don’t worry
When I write, I always aim to add value. If not, I would be doing something else. So, let’s go on with the MEGA guide to valuable content.
What is valuable content?
We could say that “valuable content” is that which is useful to a group of people. It is interesting, relevant, and will mean a REAL benefit to them.
This type of content, due to its value, never goes unnoticed, and the result is that, with the right focus, you will gain a good reputation and people will talk about you or your brand, increasing your popularity and conversion rate.
It is an indirect way of getting certain people to believe in you.
A note:
I’ve read many times that “valuable content is the one that helps you attract your users,” but it is not an attraction tool, as the attraction is a consequence of its success, not a reason.
We could say that “all” content has some value in it, but only those that go that extra mile to help remain favorites and linger in people’s memories.
Those people who are interested in the content usually belong to a “target audience,” a specific group that you know how to help and want to reach. It takes a bit of strategy to achieve this, but if you’re clear about who you’re addressing, you know what kind of information might be useful or relevant to them.
If you help someone with your content, you’ll have their trust to sell them a product that is equally useful.
Content marketing, in part, is based on this utility to attract these people to your brand and help you gain a certain reputation. To some, this may seem like a waste of time, or they may fear sharing their “secrets”… but it won’t be when you discover that the internet is already full of content where everything is already explained (and yet, related courses and services are still being sold).
That said, it must be recognized that much of this content is hastily done: poorly explained, not well-researched, or written haphazardly to get by (and this will get worse with automatic content). All of this not only adds no value, but can also jeopardize the reputation of the brand it represents.
Your audience deserves much more, and they will appreciate it when you put in the effort.
Who Should Create Valuable Content?
I believe that almost any business can benefit from creating this type of content. I’ve had all sorts of clients who have seen increased conversion thanks to valuable content: from small local businesses catering to tourists to multinational B2B companies.
Doing the opposite (focusing only on your brand, your unique value, what interests you and not what interests others) is a VERY bad idea. A rookie mistake I’ve seen too many times.
Not sure if your content is valuable? Ask yourself if you would read it if you weren’t part of the company. Or, if you want to be more objective, ask someone you know (who might be interested) to read it and give you their honest opinion.
As I said at the beginning, there is already too much noise everywhere, and people are becoming selective, whether it’s to consume something useful or entertaining.
Today, we’re all quite tired of being bombarded with advertisements. Therefore, the best advertising today lies in earning the trust of your target audience.
When they need your product or service, you’ll see how they’ll think of you and reach out to you. Give them time. You’ll always have a better chance of appearing in their mind than your competition. And all of this without having to invest in advertising, which is becoming more and more expensive.
¿Want me to create valuable content for you? Contact me at hola@nicolasgutierrez.com
Although I specialize in value-adding blog content that ranks in Google, valuable content also exists in other formats such as videos, podcasts, newsletters, etc. To keep the focus of the article and explain everything as best as possible, I’ll focus on written content.
And, precisely on the topic of written content, before anything else, I want to address a very specific objection:
“But people no longer read”
Nowadays, another thing I hear a lot is that “people no longer read”, even from clients whom I met before sending them a quote, people who were supposedly interested in creating valuable written content with me.
If people “don’t read”, why do so many companies continue to create content? Have they entered some kind of autopilot and they enjoy wasting money? No…
Because valuable content WORKS
If your content is genuinely valuable, when someone with a real need comes to your blog, they will read it and devour it because they have no other choice to solve their problem.
Even if they start by scanning the article (that’s why it’s valuable to include an index and know where to put the bold text or how to structure it, especially in longer content), the point is they’ll end up consuming it, eagerly.
There are many cases where written content is necessary and more useful than consuming other seemingly lighter formats like video. In this world, there’s room for all types of content.
And in case people “don’t read as much as before”, it becomes even more important not to waste their time, don’t you think? Let’s create something practical and valuable!
How to Create Valuable Content? Preparing the Ground
Firstly, you have to focus on knowing what’s truly valuable, or you’ll be wasting time on your blog. Here are some indications to ensure that the content you’re about to create will be truly valuable:
Define your target audience
To know what to say, it’s important to know who you’re going to address, or you’ll be firing bullets without seeing the target and miss more often than not.
It’s not the same trying to help your neighbor Mary, the lovely elderly lady on the corner who gathers her friends on her terrace every Sunday to play cards, as it is to help Mike, a young student from London who has just finished his criminology studies and wants to pass the exams to become a police officer.
You have to define a single person to address, to stand out from the rest of the content, as you’ll be speaking directly to them.
Let’s say, for example, that you run an online academy for oppositions in Spain, which are competitive exams where the best candidates get hired by the government.
You’re interested in reaching Mike. He is likely to be interested in your academy, and you’ll know more or less how to address him.
Be careful. If you wanted, you could write to Mary, but that’s a poor target. Not only is it very indirect conversion (you depend on Mary recommending your academy to her friend Juanita’s grandson), but it’s highly unlikely that she would end up on your website (she barely browses the internet and doesn’t search for things about competitive exams…).
Once you have a rough idea of where your target is, you have to “focus” your vision to understand all the details. You have to find, within that target, where is best to shoot and how, where you’ll gain more “points”, so to speak.
So, follow these steps:
- Collect data: Observe people who already consume your product or your competition’s and notice what they are like. You will identify behavioral patterns and demographic data. Take note of how these “Mikes” are.
- Analyze: Based on these potential Mikes, find patterns and define in more detail what you see most commonly. Detail habits, interests, common problems and needs. There is a lot of data you can define:
Age
Location
Purchasing power
Language
Profession
Education (perhaps, you might discover that most people studying to be police officers don’t have a university degree. Here we would discard criminology as the common background)
Gender identity
Interests
Problem or need
- How can I help?: Find how your product or service can help these people. It’s important that it’s so valuable that these people are willing to pay for it. If not, you’ll have to change your target audience. Let’s face it, this will be the basis of your business.
- Test: Test your target audience or conduct surveys directed at these people to know if you are correct about their profile and what they may think of your product.
The process of finding and defining your target is much more complex, and it’s impossible to get it right the first time, but the point is that you have at least someone to direct yourself to and have it more or less clear. Once this is done, the next steps will be much easier.
Gather questions and ideas
When you have been researching to focus on a specific target, you have asked yourself how you are going to help them, but what doubts or questions does Mike usually have when he expresses them in these communities? What is he worried about? A good way to define it is to ask yourself what he usually searches for on Google or asks ChatGPT.
All this will help you know how to give him value, right when he needs it most.
The best way to know all this would be for the potential customer himself to tell you. For this, it would be very useful to have access to one or more communities where there are many candidates to police opposition like Mike.
Perhaps in a forum, a Discord chat, a Telegram or Facebook group, a Twitter thread (or X, as they now call it) … everything will depend on where you think you will find it. There, real doubts and questions usually arise that, in addition, colleagues usually solve quite well (although not always completely).
Keep all the doubts (and answers) you see, to know both what they don’t know and what they do. All this will serve as a basis for brainstorming to know what kind of deficiencies your target has, and it will save you hours of research.
Then, the time will come to convert these ideas into possible keywords that people really search for. This will be indispensable for people to get to your content.
Do a keyword study
Believe it or not, different profiles usually search for very specific keywords. This has to do with the niche and, of course, with the language associated with each target.
For example, if I told you “high school equivalencies” you would probably draw a blank, but let’s imagine that Mike has studied some vocational training course and wants to know, as a result of an announcement with the new bases of the last call to be a national police officer, if his title is valid to enter the opposition, where it is said to require a high school diploma or an equivalent qualification (or higher, of course).
Mike understands perfectly what “high school equivalencies” means. In fact, from the results that appear in SEO tools in volume and the like, we know that he is most likely to enter just that word in Google, which you probably didn’t even know existed.
Doing a good keyword study (I recommend Semrush), observing how your competition works them and selecting those that you see as more valuable or discovering some new ones yourself, will allow you to identify where those pearls that you should share are. After all, this way you will know what are the most popular searches within your niche, and you can prioritize on what is most asked.
It’s a way to make your content hit the nail on the head, knowing exactly what people need
There you will also discover what are frequent questions that you have not been able to detect in your communities. You will be amazed at some doubts, because many will be easy for you to answer. Who would have thought it would be so easy once you know where to aim?
At that moment, you will already know what needs you can meet with your content. You will be able to make yourself a small content calendar. However, now comes the moment of truth: creating that content. Which, it is easily said, but it is important to have a valuable content writer here.
How to Create GOOD Content?
As an SEO writer, there is one thing that I’ve consistently seen criticized:
“SEO is full of junk content”.
In my experience, this is not the case. Perhaps because I’ve spent years working to change it from within.
The problem I’ve seen is that many people either know how to rank content or only know how to write valuable content. They usually don’t know how to do both well at the same time.
But when you master SEO and know how to provide more value than anyone else, it’s much easier for you to rank at the top. After all, you’re giving Google exactly what it wants: an excellent user experience. That’s precisely what a good SEO writer does.
So, what exactly is high-quality content?
To provide good content and a good user experience, in addition to delivering content that is valuable and relevant to your audience (which we’ve already guaranteed by thoroughly researching the target and their questions), you also need to meet a series of criteria that you should demand in your content from now on, whether you write it yourself or your writers do. At least, if you want to stand out:
1. Authenticity
We’re pretty tired of smooth talkers and deified gurus, aren’t we? We’ve moved beyond that time when everyone was perfect.
That’s why I’m certain that it’s important to be authentic in your articles, being completely honest about what you’re sharing, without trying to cover up your shadows.
Transparency is something people can value a lot. Besides helping you connect more with your reader, it helps you convey the message with much more clarity, providing real examples that help to understand everything.
Share internal company experiences, or your personal ones. Let it show that behind that article or piece of content there’s a human being with experiences and feelings. All this will help you truly connect with your audience.
Also, whenever you can and it makes sense in the text, cite and link the scientific sources you’ve used. This way, people will know that you’re not making anything up and that you rely on reliable sources.
This, in turn, also reinforces a concept known as EAT, related to authority. I’ll talk about that another time so as not to extend this article further.
2. Practical
The content you share must be practical and actionable. The person who reads you, whom you’re addressing, must be able to apply what you’re explaining and that advice must be able to give them a result.
You can’t give generic advice or leave out the detail that ties all the pieces together. Otherwise, it wouldn’t make sense to read or share your article. Don’t think “the missing piece is me”, because they’ll end up finding the complete content somewhere else and yours won’t be successful. That’s the price to pay for stopping halfway.
That’s where the real value of a post shows. How many Instagram or TikTok reels could you say have changed your life? None for me. However, I could name quite a few articles and books that did.
3. Consistent
Whatever the principles of your company or personal brand are, it’s important that these are reflected in your post through the way you express yourself and the type of content you share.
Also, don’t scatter your topic. If what you know and want to gain authority on is about passing the national police exams, don’t start giving news, history lessons about the world of police or narrate crimes in Spain: focus on your young target and resolve their doubts. Nothing more.
This will allow you to gain truthfulness and consistency, as people will perceive your content as something coherent and focused right on their problem, something that will make you stand out as “the expert in X topic”.
If, on the other hand, you start shooting all kinds of content for all kinds of targets to see who you can catch off guard (a common strategy of the smooth talkers), people will see that you’re very scattered and won’t take you seriously.
Then, when you’re talking personally with a client, try to maintain that brand identity, that language, and that mindset directed towards your target’s problems. People will quickly get hooked on you if you do.
If at any point you feel the need to broaden your focus on topics or whatever, make sure it’s something natural and justifiable, and stay consistent all the time, don’t change constantly.
I tell you this from experience, as I’ve seen how the loss of consistency undermined the authority of some companies.
4. Give It the Right Format
There are many false myths both in SEO and in writing in general about what are the characteristics of a good article. The truth is, you have to follow these principles, which are much more important than it seems:
- Proper Length: Your content should never have filler or fluff. Therefore, it should be as short or as long as necessary to fulfill its purpose. Don’t leave anything out, especially if you have valuable things to share. That will help you rank.
- Logical Linkbuilding: Another important strategy when creating good content is to provide links that have natural relevance to the article you’re writing for Mike, helping to expand and complement the existing content.
Notice how I shared another article right in the previous point. Others would awkwardly cram any other link into the post without it making sense. I’m not saying you can’t do it, but respect your reader and do it carefully. - Short Paragraphs: Nowadays, people’s attention span is shorter and they’ll read, but they don’t like you throwing chunks of text in their face. Therefore, let your reader breathe and divide your text into paragraphs of a maximum of 3–5 lines whenever you can.
- Highlight What’s Important: If the focus of your article is a very specific question or a particular problem, invest all your resources there and expand as necessary. That’s exactly what I’m doing with this part of the article.
- Correct Language: You have to speak in the language of your target. If it’s Mikes or people from a certain locality, it will help a lot to use their same dialect or the idioms they use.
- Speak to them directly: Address your target face-to-face, not a crowd. Be personal. Think about who’s reading you and speak to them directly, just like I’m doing now with you. Forget about using formal terms like “you” or “we” or “you all”, which are much more indirect.
There are cases where you can make an exception, of course. For instance, I use “we” when I have to discuss something that might come across as harsh if I use a direct tone. - Spelling or grammatical errors: If you want to be taken seriously, your text should be impeccable on a formal level. Note, this doesn’t mean you can’t take some liberties now and then (I’m the first one to do so), but you have to be skilled enough in writing to know what you’re doing.
You can use a typical expression of your target that goes against these rules, but you get my point: take care of your content so that it shows that it is lovingly crafted.
5. Recyclable
Rather than a way to create valuable content, this would be a way to take advantage of the time or money investment in valuable content.
It’s great that you write a blog post about something relevant to your potential followers or customers, but something that American content creators do a lot (and that we should imitate) is recycling content.
Your valuable content could be easily reinterpreted and shortened or lengthened to become one or several social media posts or an infoproduct, for example. Don’t be afraid to redistribute your work across different channels where your target audience might be.
For instance, Mike might often be on Instagram looking at reels. Why not create one or several reels with that useful content you wrote on your blog months ago?
The same could be done if you’ve ever written an ebook for your project: you can subdivide it into small articles or posts, and you can even use them to promote the ebook with these contents, or whatever you want to do with it. You can also turn it into an infographic for Instagram or Pinterest, if you wish.
All of this will give you relevance and more reach, with barely any change to the original content.
I’ve done all this, and it’s a joy to leverage things you’ve already written to save work. Later on, I’ll tell you how you can use ChatGPT in a simple way to speed up these types of “recycling”.
6. Test and Correct
The beauty of this whole process is that your growth as a brand will never end. You don’t have to stick with the piece of content you’ve already created. Instead, you can review and rewrite it as many times as necessary until you really achieve all your goals, resonating with your ideal customer.
I love experimenting and not pigeonholing myself into just one system. This is how I learn faster and see what works and what doesn’t. Open your mind and try things, don’t be afraid.
Check your Google Analytics results, consider where your traffic is coming from and whether people are enjoying your content or if, upon reading it, they end up at your contact form. Whether you need to move forms around or change your approach, you’ll only know if you’re attentive and keep checking your results.
Sometimes, certain types of content may work better in a YouTube video, a course format, or a promotional email than a blog post. To find out, all you need to do is keep testing until you understand this nuance.
Can Valuable Content Be Created with ChatGPT?
Considering all that we’ve discussed, knowing that a good text needs to have authenticity, be practical, consistent, properly formatted, and reusable across different mediums…
Can you create valuable content solely with ChatGPT?
Well. Luckily for you, I’ve been tinkering with ChatGPT since the release of 3.5, and now I’ve spent a lot of time with GPT4 in GPTPlus (the paid version) and… the answer is a yes… but no. It has nuances.
Let me explain.
On one hand, ChatGPT can create technically correct texts that comply with the majority of spelling rules (yes, it makes mistakes), and it can even follow, to a limited extent, a specific style that you want to impart.
However, ChatGPT is still a text generator trained on a database whose content it doesn’t even know. That means it will generate a text based on what it “predicts” to be the most likely response to your request.
What’s more… it doesn’t even understand what it produces, it simply generates text without understanding the content. That’s why it’s so risky to pretend to be a writer with it: it provides false information, but it sounds very real.
ChatGPT has no criteria to know whether the text it generates will be of value to the user or target you want to reach. It simply sounds very similar to what already exists, and won’t produce something that really carries the essence of your brand, your spirit, or your unique experience in the field.
I encourage you to try it if you want, but you’ll be highly disappointed. Create a prompt where you clarify everything you want to convey in the message, who you’re addressing, what brand you have and what language you use, what questions you want to answer and what keywords you’re based on and… you’ll see that the result is quite flat.
Give those same instructions to a professional SEO writer and you’ll get something with a real soul, something unique that will make you stand out from the rest.
After all, with the mass usage of AI, when everyone uses ChatGPT, all the texts will start to look alike.
Don’t make the mistake of being just another one: STAND OUT.
Use ChatGPT to Recycle Content
Something I do recommend you to do with ChatGPT is to recycle content, as I was saying a while ago. You can ask it to read an article you wrote and convert it into the format you want.
The result will never be perfect or equal to what you could create, as you already know, but it will surely help you out if you’re short on time.
It can be something as simple as:
Read the following article and convert it into a script for creating a YouTube video on my channel
“text of your article”
or
Read the following script from this YouTube video I made and convert it into a script for a reel video on Instagram / Tik Tok.
“text of your YouTube script”
You can do the same with any type of format, in any order. I recommend using the most advanced model you have access to.
Always remember that valuable content will be what really helps you to stay forever in the mind of your potential buyer. To achieve this, you can hire me to manage both your strategy and the SEO contents of your blog.