Cre­at­ing con­tent is a mas­sive under­tak­ing. When you cre­ate con­tent, you’re com­pet­ing not only with com­mer­cial com­peti­tors who are also cre­at­ing con­tent, but also with pub­lish­ers whose sole focus is cre­at­ing con­tent. Then there’s the con­tent indi­vid­u­als cre­ate. Con­sumers are con­stant­ly being bom­bard­ed with con­tent – news, music, TV, film, video, social updates from friends and fam­i­ly. Shar­ing con­tent isn’t actu­al­ly the core focus for most peo­ple – they have jobs, fam­i­lies, respon­si­bil­i­ties – and there aren’t enough hours in the day as it is.

Cre­at­ing con­tent that peo­ple will care about, peo­ple will share with their friends, and will attract links from oth­er web­sites is hard­er than it looks.

Many brands and busi­ness­es fail to grasp how tough it is to stand out, but even those that do rec­og­nize the dif­fi­cul­ty still strug­gle to suc­ceed. Where are they going wrong? Why are they strug­gling?

What fol­lows is by no means an exhaus­tive list, but these three of the most com­mon rea­sons why con­tent goes unno­ticed, unshared, and unloved.

Creating Content That Only Directly Relates To Products Or Services Offered

Just because you sell soft drinks doesn’t mean that the sole focus of your con­tent needs to be soft drinks. Your con­tent doesn’t have to be just about what you sell.

Brands and busi­ness­es that are seri­ous about cre­at­ing con­tent need to take a step back from their prod­ucts and ser­vices and instead think more about what con­tent their tar­get audi­ences con­sume. How can you cre­ate things that your audi­ence will care about?

Your brand is not what you sell. It’s how you sell it.

The most obvi­ous exam­ple of this is Red Bull. They sell soft drinks, but their con­tent is about extreme sports, music, and gam­ing. Why? Because that’s the sort of con­tent that res­onates with their tar­get audi­ence.

Yes, Red Bull is a big bud­get exam­ple. Many brands and busi­ness­es don’t have enough cash to cre­ate and run their own media house, spon­sor a huge num­ber of teams and events, or send a guy into space.

Nev­er­the­less, even those with mod­est bud­gets can still exe­cute a sim­i­lar strat­e­gy. Con­cert Hotels are a hotel affil­i­ate set up specif­i­cal­ly to cater to those seek­ing a hotel near con­cert venues. Rather than cre­at­ing con­tent about trav­el or hotels, they instead focus on cre­at­ing con­tent about music – because that’s what their audi­ence is pas­sion­ate about.

The piece above received 2.1 mil­lion pageviews, was shared more than 105,000 times on Face­book, attract­ed cov­er­age from more than 1,000 sites includ­ing The Huff­in­g­ton Post, Time, and NBC, and the man him­self, Axl Rose com­ment­ed.

Focusing On Formats Rather Than Ideas

All too often, I hear pearls of “wis­dom” like: “info­graph­ics get links.”

For every info­graph­ic that’s attract­ed links from 1,000+ sites, I could show you 1,000 that have attract­ed no links at all.

The same holds true for every oth­er for­mat – videos, quizzes, com­pe­ti­tions, long-form arti­cles, short-form arti­cles, lis­ti­cles, guides, slide decks, and inter­ac­tive pieces. Peo­ple don’t link to info­graph­ics because they are info­graph­ics, they link to them only if they are valu­able in some way. That val­ue might be humor, insight­ful infor­ma­tion, some­thing of edu­ca­tion­al val­ue, or some­thing which res­onat­ed with them emo­tion­al­ly, for exam­ple.

In short: Peo­ple don’t share for­mats. They share ideas.

An info­graph­ic isn’t an idea, it’s a for­mat. Sim­i­lar­ly, videos, quizzes, com­pe­ti­tions, long-form arti­cles, short-form arti­cles, lis­ti­cles, guides, slide decks, and inter­ac­tive pieces are not ideas. They are for­mats.

Focus on com­ing up with a real­ly good idea (more on this here), the for­mat can come lat­er.

Failing To Consider Whether People Will ‘Look Good’ Sharing The Content

Most of us don’t think too deeply about why we share things on social media, but The New York Times did a study on the psy­chol­o­gy of shar­ing. It found that 68 per­cent of peo­ple share things to give oth­ers a bet­ter sense of who they are and what they care about.

Know­ing­ly or oth­er­wise, when peo­ple share things via social media, they do so to shape oth­er people’s impres­sions of them. As such, if you’re cre­at­ing con­tent that’s designed to be shared, you need to think about whether some­one would “look good” shar­ing the con­tent.

For exam­ple, while an inter­ac­tive guide on cur­ing fun­gal nail infec­tion might well be use­ful, no one is going to look good shar­ing that. If they do share it, they’ll just be telling the world that they have nasty look­ing toe­nails, and most peo­ple (quite under­stand­ably) pre­fer to keep that sort of thing to them­selves.

Why else do you think con­tent fails to gain atten­tion?