I am closely following IntelligentContentConference2016 for some really out-of-the-box strategies and insights into content marketing. Check out: http://www.intelligentcontentconference.com/.

1. Brian Dean’s skyscraper technique. Although this was developed as a link building strategy, I think it has broader uses and benefits. The basic gist is to find content that’s already popular and then find a way build on it. For instance, if you see an article on 15 ways to create unique content, you could develop a list post covering 25 ways. Or you could provide more in-depth information on each.

2. Make it more relevant to your particular audience. I wanted to write about Robert Cialdini’s principles of influence for a guest post on inman.com, a popular site for real estate professionals. They been written about ad nauseam, but many of the examples were from other industries. So I focused on the audience and made it about how real estate agents can use them. People always want to know how people can apply strategies to their situation. You could also focus on skill level, location, etc.

3. Tell a personal story or case study. Everybody has unique experiences, so if all else fails, you can write about that. This blog is the perfect example. Other entrepreneurs face similar challenges and problems, and Alex could easily write about them in the way other sites do. Instead he adds unique value by putting it all in the context of his personal experience. Just look at the engagement those articles get because of that transparency.

A different question from my side related to initial customer development: I read your blog about spending a lot of time in customer development and I completely agree with that. However my challenge is that when I am working on a new idea and that idea is very niche idea in B2B space, how do I get in touch with many people related to that idea. For consumer products, I can easily find people to talk to but I am struggling to do that for my B2B product.

To give you more specifics- My B2B product is prodiving Video and other Media asset management and discovery solution to the businesses who want to drive greater employee engagement through better internal communication, remote team communication, elearning, mobile worker productivity etc by leveraging video and media assets. For customer development, I need to talk to many CEOs/ CTOs/CIOs who might be interested in this but getting access to them is very hard. I tried cold calling but even that has limited success for getting access to these audience. What’s your recommendation?

Sometimes the uniqueness is just that it’s being delivered by you, at the time you’re delivering it. Sure, 20 other people may have written almost the exact same blog post, but the people who follow you don’t know that. When you write it, it might be the first time they’ve ever read anything of the sort. To them, it’s unique.

I’ve also found that sometimes I assume too much when I think something has been covered to death before. Case in point, as a Forbes contributor I assumed someone would have written a post as basic as “What is Content Marketing?” before, but nobody had. There were 100 posts about more complex details of content marketing, but nobody had answered that basic question. So I answered it in a post, and it’s now the 3rd to 4th result in Google when you search “what is content marketing” there and has almost 76,000 views. The only things outranking it are pages from one site–the Content Marketing Institute. It would have been easy for me to think “Oh, this has already been done,” (which it had, elsewhere at least), or “This has probably been done on Forbes,” (it hadn’t), or “I’m not an expert at this like 100 other people who know more about it than I do.” (absolutely true). But I said “Aw, who care? I’m going to write it,” I did, and only good has come from it.