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5 Surprising Ways to Create Shareable Content

Right Source | December 7, 2011

Many content marketers don’t think beyond the corporate blog, or perhaps the occasional webinar or eBook. Yet if you look hard enough, you’ll find surprising ways to create effective, shareable content hiding right under your nose.

Here’s my quick list:

1. Job Posts—Especially with the difficult economy, people love job matchmaking, and are quick to sharejob posts. The funny thing is most job posts are awful: they’re poorly written, poorly formatted, and just plain boring.

This job post from a local company is a breath of fresh air. It combines videos, well designed text, and a lot of personality to clearly address the details, but also show why the job would be exciting. Unfortunately for anyone seeking, the job has been filled—but take a look at this post, enjoy, and be inspired for when you create your next job post (or go take it to your HR department).

Whether or not they show your company in the best light, people will share your job posts. You should be proud of them.

2. Unsubscription Confirmation Pages—A while back, Groupon’s unsubscription confirmation page made the viral rounds. Normally, these pages are boring and blank—if you’ve made it to the unsubscribe page, it’s clear that you’ve left the fold of treasured customers. Yet there’s value in creating an unsubscription page that leaves a smile on a former subscriber’s face. It’s likely that unsubscribers don’t hate your company, but just want off your email list. So it’s still in your best interest to make them happy.

3. Business CardsSally Hogshead gave me her card when I met her at Content Marketing World. It’s interactive and shareable—I showed that business card to several people both at and after the event, and I’m writing about it now. If you can turn a business card into something people want to show off to others, not just file away, that’s a brilliant content marketing move in my book.

4. 404 Pages—Sure, you don’t want people to end up with a “page not found” message if you can help it, but why not give folks something to share if they do end up lost on your domain name? I landed on this 404 page a few weeks ago, and I’ve shared it several times since. A simple sense of humor in unexpected places goes a long way.

5. It’s up to you! Where have you been surprised by effective content marketing? Let me know in the comments, so we can create a much longer list than 5.

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About Right Source:

The Marketing Trenches blog provides thought leadership from actual marketing practitioners, not from professional thought leaders. Designed to help business leaders make more educated marketing decisions, our insights come directly from our experience in the trenches. You can find more from Right Source on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and LinkedIn.