The Skyscraper technique works as follows:

You start by researching popular trends, topics, and other substantially shared pieces of existing content around the themes that you’re typically covering. You can use BuzzSumo for this, for example. After you identified these pieces of content, you’re going to look for a new and unique way to create content that talks communicate a similar message… only with a twist.

That twist is to take what’s out there and blow it out of the water.

You can do this by making it longer, more up-to-date, better designed, more thorough. But whatever you do, it needs to tower above the competition.

After you had created your new and improved piece of content, you reach out to everyone that shared the original article (again BuzzSumo is perfect for this) to put your piece of content on their radar… and hopefully earn a link back to your content.

It consists of three steps.

1. Find top performing content.
2. Create better content than the current top performers.
3. Try to get a bunch on people to link to your new content.

Before you jump in, it is important to understand what this technique is not:

1. An exclusive SEO thing meant for nerds.
2. Permission or license to steal someone else’s work or content.
3. Permission to claim an entire idea, without building on it, as your own.