I am done. I can no longer bear with this pressure of churning out more content, more status updates and more guest posts for the brand I am promoting. However, I am definitely not the only person in this entire universe facing this. In fact, the whole industry seems like going crazy with the idea of producing more content, as they strongly believe that it is going to do good to their marketing strategy.
Age of Half-backed content
What is even more frustrating is the fact that marketing gurus are even openly rooting for this ridiculous practice. Now, if this insane practice continues, we are certainly going to see the death of great bloggers and passionate writers, as we know it. When you are crushing them under the sheer volume of work and not letting them any room to breathe, they will slowly start feeling suffocated and eventually, creative and original research work will be going to take a back seat. As a result, mediocre and half-baked content will start ruling the world of online marketing. I hope nobody wants this to happen to our beautiful world of online marketing. So, please for God’s sake end this mad rush for More.
Image Credit – http://www.flickr.com/photos/notionscapital/2493066577
Why Less is More
However, please do not get me wrong. I am not saying that you should be not focusing on increasing productivity at the workplace. Rather what I am suggesting is that you should try to strike a perfect balance between being more productive and creative.
However, just a few years ago things were not that bad. In those bygone days [just kidding], people used to love and appreciate anything that offer ‘more’. Then YouTube, Mashable, Facebook and their likes came into being and started us to show that ‘more’ can be ‘beautiful’. Then things turned for the worse. People in an attempt to imitate their success, started going overboard with the concept of producing ‘more’.
So, finally we have come to this. More and more worthless articles are being added to the web, more pathetic quality videos are being uploaded, more run of the mills ebook are being produced and shared on SlideShare and on and on. The problem is everybody around is aware of this but nobody dares to accept this. A classic elephant in the room problem!
Do Not Produce Garbage
I have seen people creating a long list of keywords for say 250 keywords and they just mail that list to their content marketing department so that they can produce 250 articles within the next few days. Sounds awesome? Of course it sounds. But in the mad rush to secure higher rankings in a set of new keywords and getting the bigger marketing pie, we often tend to ignore something very important.
The purpose of writing content is not to fill out a page with keywords included in it rather; writers have a bigger role to play. They have to write something that should educate the readers, make them feel that they have learnt something new and interesting. So, when you are churning out content mechanically, you are simply going to defeat the purpose.
The only way you can increase the brand value of the organization you are working with is by publishing great quality work. You should not take the shortest route to success by rephrasing existing articles. Rather you should do some research and then come up with something brilliant and thought provoking. And there is no need to expand the article just for the sake for meeting word count. If it is short, be it. No need to stretch it.
The Future of Content Marketing
The future of content marketing is without an iota of doubt is very promising. People have already started realizing the fact that producing junk content just for the sake of meeting target is not going to get their online business anywhere. We, content marketers have to change our marketing strategy from ‘more’ to ‘less’, from ‘doing more’ to ‘doing great’.
The responsibility is ours. We have to make everyone aware of the immense flip side of producing ‘more’ and this is the only way we can put an end to this vicious circle.
This article is contributed by Michael Evans who is managing all the promotional activities of WDR, a retford based web design agency.
It won’t be long before junk content will be penalized completely by Google update in the future and all that work and effort will be wasted, Panda/Penguin already negated a lot of advertiser work where they had the same keywords linking back to the same site, guest posting and links in author bio’s will be the next thing diminished in my opinion.
I do think Social media promotion/marketing of products will continue to gain ground particularly on Google+ but the old days of build 10,000 links and gain better SERP will become less and less likely.
Quite right .. but I have a feeling that Google is pushing all of us to be a content mill.
You are right. The author does need a pause time to keep content fresh and of high quality. Thanks for the tips.
Yeah I feel that it is totally unnecessary to spend money and time on wring an article or whatsoever that does not read good. Every write-up should serve a purpose otherwise, it is self-defeating