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“Content is King”
“Content is king.” Or at least it used to be. But things change quickly in the blogosphere. Today, you can have really bad content – poorly written, typos, punctuation gaffes – but if you flog your site or blog enough, you’ll still see traffic – even of you can’t write a lick and don’t know the difference between “your” and “you’re”.
On the web, perception is reality and marketing creates perception. So, if you look good, but your blog posts are just spun articles from other sites, who cares? As long as your content get on the 1st page of Digg/ went viral with countless of RT on Twitter, people will still think your blog is awesome.
Here’s the problem: if the content isn’t good enough you wouldn’t have visitors coming back no matter how many times you ping your new content during the day. Visitors who have been to your site won’t return and word of mouth spreads like wildfire.
On the other hand, if your prose reads like poetry, but you don’t market your site, that poetic prose goes unread. No one can find it in the smash-up that has become the world wide web. It’s a content-marketing conundrum.
This leads to…
“Marketing Makes the Sale”
So, you won’t find a lot of well-written copy on the internet. Most of it is written by site owners or another bloke on the street who blogs just for the sake of making money online.
Marketing a site or blog is something anyone can do, though few do it well. Good marketing intrigues visitors to stop by a site or blog, but if the visitor stumbles upon your text that reads poorly, is stuffed with keywords and reads like a long form sales letter, that visitor bounces.
Good marketing is also good content. Unfortunately, good marketing and good content are often viewed as mutually exclusively. If you flog the content enough, you’ll drive traffic. That’s good marketing. If the content is well-written and helpful (informational, not sales hype) it’s good content.
So, which do you think is more important? A strong sales pitch or well-written content?
