Market Your Content - Good Blogs Often Go Unread
March 4, 2007
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Web content is becoming a commodity; the old "build it and they will come" strategy never did work and as more content is put online at a faster rate, it becomes less effective by the day.
I often see purist statements in forums and blogs that express the ideology that good content will win out over good marketing, but it simply isn’t true. Like the purists, I believe truly exceptional or remarkable content will spread without extensive marketing, but how many websites, how many articles, how many online businesses are remarkable? The answer is not very many; by definition the majority can only be good, fair, or at worst, below average. How many blogs are out there? How many get read? Do the ones being read have truly exceptional posts or are they just "good at being found" and delivering a specific message to their target audience.
I like to represent businesses in the good range (and potentially exceptional), which is a large percentage of the companies in the world. By definition not everyone can be remarkable unless you go SUPER niche.
With companies in the "good" range, I believe it’s going to be the marketing that makes the difference between their success or failure, not the copy, not the website (although you should start here) it’s the marketing! A good company, like most companies in the world, is faced with tons of other competition that is also good or fair. How do you differentiate? The differentiation comes in how the message is delivered and marketed online.
I know what some of you are saying, what about social media, what about the possibility of cutting through the marketing and getting right to the meat. While social media gives a user controlled experience, it’s still marketed, it’s still gamed; in essence, it’s still completely reliant on how the message is marketed.
For example, you can take 3 articles that contain the same content and put them on Digg or any of the other social media news sites. The article with the most sensational title and the first power user affirmation will make it to the top while the others are buried in obscurity. So what makes the one article better then the other two? That’s right, marketing.
Now the harder question is how to market your website’s content, but that’s a subject for another article.
[tagsBlog content, blog marketing, blog search engine marketing[/tags
Can’t wait to see what you have in store for this article!
[...] is the first in a follow up series on a popular article I wrote last week making the case for the need to market your blog’s content and how I believe the reason good blogs often go unread is do to poor [...]
I definitely agree that marketing your content is a challenging task, there are so many things to do and not enough time, that’s why people need us (as in search marketing professionals).
The one thing though that goes deeper then long tail is figuring out who to target and what content to produce in the first place. I think too many blogs are being thrown up with not enough thought going into the strategy of how to approach the market and brand a blog to stand out from competitors and succeed in its niche. Put your blog and content in the wrong proverbial “box” and everything is soooooo much harder.
After you’ve got a good strategy, a plan to attack the market, and are on your way executing it, that’s when it becomes of paramount importance to pay close attention to what keywords are working for you, and which ones need a little push.
I’m glad you commented on this post and joined the conversation. I was a bit harsh in my posts regarding your response to my Seth Godin post, but this is a blog and I think it’s good to post with passion even at the expense of sometimes going overboard.
Nice to see you commenting and still here. It seems people have been enjoying the exchange, but the blogosphere did have some entries critical of me for not encouraging more conversation, so welcome to the conversation Mike glad to have you commenting. I’ve got some cool stuff planed for future posts and an original video blog section that I’ll be adding soon.
Thanks for reading.
After you’ve got a good strategy [...] that’s when it becomes of paramount importance to pay close attention to what keywords are working for you, and which ones need a little push.
Closely monitoring your keywords and analytics plays an extremely important factor of generating new business. What my Denver SEO company has found is that we will obtain inquiries months in advance; some of those inquiries converting into clients, but some will continue to closely monitor your competition.
I also like what Israeli said above: True human innovation and vision are where the real money is made
You can go the digg and social media way. Which, like you said, is highly dependent on your headline. And you can go the SEO way which is extremely time consuming, especially if first have to learn what to do.