Five Books to Read for Better Content

Content Marketing is now the name of the game. With the rise of social media and short attentions spans, one must be able to easily and consistently produce shareable content. Be it for social media, for blog, or for website, here are some of the best books to read to help make your content better.

1. Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook (Gary Vaynerchuk)

Vaynerchuck is the CEO and Co-founder of Vaynermedia, a social media brand consulting agency. In this book, he talks about how to utilize the different social media platforms of today. He ran through Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, and other rising platforms such as Snapchat to discuss what type of content works best. He also gives examples companies with the best and worst utilization of each platform.

Read to: develop campaigns, raise brand awareness, and engage customers using different social media platforms.

2. Epic Content Marketing (Joe Pulizzi)

The title says it all: this book provides a roadmap in developing content that engages customers and makes people seek it out. Joe Pulizzi talks about leveraging on social media to propagate your content, how to write content that drives behavior, and measuring the impact of your content marketing efforts.

Read to: use content marketing to affect consumer behavior and measure it’s impact.

3. Talk Like Ted (Carmine Gallo)

With a tagline of “ideas worth spreading,” TED talks conferences are not only greatly attended but also quickly shared. With speakers tackling different topics and featuring some of the best and most innovative thinkers and doers of different industries, TED talks are enjoying an increasing level of popularity. While the primary focus of this book is public speaking, there are many gems in it that can be applied to content marketing. It talks about the best practices of the most popular TED presentations, specifically how to present an idea as simply as possible to get the point across as quickly and clearly as possible.

Read to: develop easily communicated content

4. Youtility: Why Smart Marketing is About Help Not Hype (Jay Baer)

If you browse around online, it’s easy to notice that a large percentage of shared content are those that people find useful. Think: 10 Easy Ways to Flat Abs and other stuff like that. This book talks about the idea behind that. It discusses how companies can identify customers’ needs and shape their content to address those needs. It talks about how to meet the goal of being relevant and shareable based on today’s standards.

Read to: develop content that is hinged on customers’ needs

5. Superfreakonomics (Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner)

Levitt and Dubner are an Economist and a journalist, respectively, that teamed up and decided to use economics principles in explaining different things from how a street prostitute is like a department store Santa and whether or not people are predisposed to altruism or selfishness. This is not really a content marketing book but one can take a look at how the book was written. Levitt and Dubner were talking about statistics and mathematical regressions to explain how they were able to derive their conclusions in a way that laymen not only understand but also enjoy. It takes a lot of word skills to do that.

Read to: develop a voice that is credible, authoritative, yet relatable.

Just remember, if you want to make readers interested in what you write, your content should be amazing. And more tips to learn how to brighten your content can be found here. Hope that your content will get better with each day!