Today I was reading through my RSS feeds and a post by Darren Rowse of ProBlogger caught my attention. In it Darren asks What is compelling content to you? As I was answering the question I realized that to a large extent my answer would most accurately be in the form of a question – What’s in it for me?

How am I going to benefit from your content?

We have a finite time in our days no matter who we are or what we do. Because of this we expect to benefit for our time and effort of looking at your content. It could be learning something new, being entertained, reexamining our position on and issue, or something else entirely. But the common denominator is that there needs to be something in it for me.

Why should I choose your content over the competition?

If you were to hand 10 people a one page “fact sheet” and then ask them to write a blog post on the contents of the fact sheet you’d get 10 very widely differing articles. Even with that fact there’s going to be one, or two that really stand out. That you just read and understand. A couple of the posts are going to resonate with you. The same is true with blogs. There are a lot of blogs out there that give the same information, but a few stand out head and shoulders above the rest.

Did you make an effort?

Anyone can go out concoct a blog post out of existing information. A dab of this, a pinch of that. Copy and paste, edit some words, move sentences around. But did you really take the time to understand what you are passing along to me? Because if you don’t how can you expect me to get any thing from your post? You don’t need to be the premier expert at what you write about, but you need to be educated.