Coming up with content ideas that will make anyone care enough to link is hard work.

When I first started NeoMam, every project we produced was a result of one of my ideas.

As the years went by, I got everyone involved in generating ideas but I was always the one deciding whether an idea had potential to attract big links.

If I wanted to scale the agency, it was very clear that I needed to let go so I trained up people who were dedicated to just this step in the process.

But last year everything changed when Mark Johnstone hosted a virtual workshop on idea generation for the team and I joined them. His course reignited my passion and I decided it was time to get involved in client work again.

Whilst it reduced my time available for marketing activities and other founder stuff, it’s been great to get back to doing something I love doing – similar to how Gisele feels about being back to promoting content.

I’ve always liked to use frameworks to avoid the time-wasting rabbit holes and all-too-common pitfalls of idea generation so as soon as I was back, the first order of business was to update them.

In our early days of infographics, I found that identifying different types helped me generate new ideas. Later on, I was certain that uncovering new formats was key to moving our agency towards ideas we have never thought of before.

It took me a few weeks to go through past campaigns and review content produced by other teams, but after all that, I was ready to update our framework.

Throughout the 4000 words that comprise this guide, you’ll learn the unspoken rules I follow at NeoMam to ensure every campaign has the very best chance to succeed.

I will share with you the NeoMam rules for idea generation and I know that you will not agree with all of them. 

That’s why I made sure to include real-world examples to accompany these do’s and don’ts and hopefully that will help you at least understand the reasons behind the rules.

If you have experience creating content for links, then you’ll find value in our experiences as this is not a newbie’s guide.

That being said, if you’re just getting started with link building with content, please read on; these rules will help you avoid some of the most costly ideation mistakes everyone makes at least once.

Let’s get to it.

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Happy new year to everyone.

Before the end of last year I reached out to a number of in-house SEO’s who I thought were doing some really interesting things with content during 2017.

At NeoMam, most of our clients are in-house SEO teams and I am always impressed with the work they do.

Unfortunately, you rarely read about them on industry sites.

It makes sense, though, as there is far less of an incentive to share this type of work when you are in-house because you don’t need to win clients like agencies do.

I hope that this post and future ones can help to highlight some of the great work being produced by in-house teams around the world and provide some inspiration for your content marketing plans this year.

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Some people in our industry really hate infographics.

I’ll be honest:

I never woke up one day and said “I want to create a couple thousand infographics.”

But I did like getting top tier links for our clients and at the time, infographics were the best tool to achieve this.

The reason was simple: Most publishers didn’t have the design capability in-house but they knew that readers love this type of content so the marketers could fill in the gap and in exchange get exposure for their clients.

And this was the reason why we chose to double down and only produce infographics for the last couple of years.

Fast forward to 2017 and visual content is no longer new.

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When it comes to writing successful pitches, everyone agrees:

1. You should never use templates
2. You’ve got to personalise every single email

But how long would it take to write unique pitches for every person that you’re targeting? A few days?

… And what if you’re contacting 100 people? Would that take a full week?

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Animated infographics are those that use the power of animation to explain something complicated.

A well made animated infographic provides more insight than what you can achieve using just a static format. 

If the animation is just used to “prettify” the infographic, then it’s probably not a great example.

Coupling animation with engaging ideas can send the infographic into the viral stratosphere – these awesome infographics have been featured on the biggest sites on the web and for good reason. 

Whilst the video format is used for many animated infographics, they should not be confused with video infographics (We got a list for that too!) as you can have some great animated infographics using GIF’s.

Enjoy the list of some of my favourite animated infographics [Taken from my personal swipefile.]

1. How to Build a Human

A designer who has really taken the gif-infographic format to new heights is Eleanor Lutz.

Credit

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This year we started working with an exciting new visual format: video.

From The Guardian to The Drum, many have said in the last year that video is the future of content marketing, and we agree. If you’re not convinced yet: According to Cisco, video will account for 80% of all consumer internet traffic by 2019.

That’s A LOT of people.

We have even updated our list of the best animated infographics out there – since we wrote it in 2016, there has been a ton of new additions.

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By 2022, online videos will make up more than 82% of all consumer internet traffic according to CISCO which is 15 times more than back in 2017

Using video infographics should be a key part of your content strategy in 2020.

It doesn’t mean that you should take all your static infographics and animate them to a cheap tune – we have seen plenty of that already and it just doesn’t work.

For best results, you will want want to use video infographics to share data and stories that just couldn’t be done with a plain old static infographic.

Over the last 7 years, I have kept a note of any video infographics that have caught my attention and have pulled out the very best 7 to share with you today.

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