The Skyscraper Technique

What is Skyscraper Technique and How to execute it?

Wants to know how to execute skyscraper technique? Finding it frequently difficult to capture the attention of your target audience? Can’t seem to deliver on their expectations? In today’s marketing scene, the competition is heating up.

As a result, marketers are getting more inventive, experimenting with new content mediums, and varying their approaches to targeting new customers. From listicles to infographics to video content, those taking action to find out which type of content resonates best with their audience are coming out on top. What can you do to wait in the game? Try the Skyscraper Technique.

Designed to help you build content that drives traffic, this method has helped me earn over 70,000 page views from just one post. To help you get begun, I’ll walk you through the technique below, show you how I’ve used it, and provide a helpful checklist to ensure you don’t miss a beat.

Brian Dean Skyscraper Technique
Brian Dean Skyscraper Technique

What’s the Skyscraper Technique? (And Why Does It Work) 

Created by Backlinko, the Skyscraper Technique is a system for turning content into high-quality backlinks. You start by researching popular trends, topics, and previously well-received pieces of existing content across the topic areas your business typically covers. Then, you look for new and unique techniques to create content that communicates a similar message — with a twist. This might mean that you leverage a new, more appealing medium, update the statistics, or employ a better design.

Once you’ve built a new and improved piece of content, reach out to the folks that have already linked out to similar content to put your work on their radar and hopefully earn a link.

This technique works well for a few reasons:

  • There’s already demand. By discovering existing successful content, I’ve previously established that there’s proven demand in the marketplace for content around the topic I’m considering addressing. From here, it’s essential to consider why that individual piece of content was so successful. Did it solve a problem for the readers? Was it particularly entertaining?
  • You’re dealing with a primed audience. If you can create something even better than the original resource you come across, you’ll have the potential to excite the existing audience for that piece. If the topic you select is timely, I suggest simultaneously building out a target list of brands, publications, and influencers who either shared the last piece or linked to it so you can reach out right away.
  • There’s serious ranking potential. Google has likely previously indexed the existing resource well. In building something even better, you have the potential to topple that older piece of content, outrank them, and drive in more traffic — especially if you win those high-quality backlinks by reaching out.
Sudoku Skyscraper Technique
Sudoku Skyscraper Technique

Step Checklist for Using the Skyscraper Technique

Research and uncover opportunities 

Set up Google Alerts for keywords related to topics you need to cover, use BuzzSumo to research the pieces of content that have been most shared around specific keyword phrases, and analyze opportunities based on search volume with Keyword App or Google’s Keyword Planner.

Build a list of potential distribution partners

Start with who you know. Are there any brands, blogs, or influencers you know that would genuinely see this piece of content interesting? From there, jump back and add the other websites and people that have published or shared buy cheap ativan content like yours. Chances are, they have an audience that would love to hear about your great new piece of content.

Create better content

If you stumble upon a blog post from a competitor on a topic you’d love to cover, perhaps you could make an infographic, video, or even a more in-depth guide that could deliver more value. Consider which content medium your audience engages with most, and start by relying on the skills your organization is best at.

Promote your audience

Getting that initial buzz going with your audience is essential to showing social proof before reaching out to other brands and influencers. Share on all of your social channels, with your email list, and inside with your employees.

Reach out to the right people

Now that you have some momentum picking up with your fabulous new piece of content, it’s time to spread out and start sharing with your list of targeted influencers, brands, and bloggers who publish and share related content. In your reach-out message, be sure to show genuine interest in them, make your ask very clear, and provide them with a sample copy they’ll be able to copy/paste.

Stay current

Over time, the use of your fantastic piece of content will decline. Others will publish new content on the topic, the industry will change, and new alternatives will arise. Updating your content to stay relevant to your audience is crucial to maintaining the value you worked so hard to create.

Flipping the Technique on Its Head for New Opportunities

The Skyscraper Technique’s whole premise is that you find content that performs well and creates something even better. And there is a perfect chance that these assets you base your content upon have been well promoted.

But the unfortunate reality is that most marketers spend way more time creating content than they do promote it. And this means there is often content that could have performed well but didn’t because it wasn’t properly promoted.

You can flip the Skyscraper Technique’s process on its head and start by finding content that didn’t perform too well but should have.

In many ways, it is like going back to the start and using the same tools and processes that you used to find content that stood out as top-performing. But instead, you are looking for content that didn’t earn as many links or rank as prominently on Google.

Then you require to figure out why this is the case:

  • The content is good but not good enough to stand out and add value truly.
  • The content is excellent, but visually it is poorly presented.
  • It wasn’t promoted correctly (a tell-tale sign of this is that other content on a site has performed well, but some pieces have made no links and don’t rank very well – as long as the content is strong).

It could be called the Reverse Skyscraper Technique, given that you are looking for content that is the exact opposite of the usual approach.

And you must use both common sense and industry experience here, as it’s inherently more difficult to identify why a piece of content didn’t perform than one that did. It would be best if you were confident that the topic is something that other people would be interested in and has an audience of content creators willing to link.

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