An interesting topic came up in Mack Collier’s twitter based#BlogChat last night. It surrounded the notion that “Content is King” and why some blogs that have great content still don’t attract much attention, while others that have only mediocre content get a lot of visitors. The observation of this phenomenon led some to doubt that Content really is King.
Personally I believe that Content is King, but only if that content is marketed properly. Bloggers who produce posts and then don’t promote those posts are following the Field of Dreams approach – Build It and They Will Come. Which, while it might be true for baseball fields is certainly not true for content. If no one knows your content is there, trust me no one is going to come looking for it. So perhaps the correct phrase is Correctly Marketed Content is King – not as catchy but a lot more realistic.
I market this blog in a lot of different ways, I tweet each post four times on the day that it posts, usually at 2 hour intervals. I make sure that I promote it via my email signature as well. I use Wise Stamp which is a browser plugin to show the latest post:
The posts are also distributed to Facebook, LinkedIn and FriendFeed all of which drive traffic to the blog. There are plenty of services that will do this automatically for you like NetworkedBlogs, Dlvr.it and others.
Does all of this activity mean that my content is better than other peoples? In some cases yes, in others no but if I get more traffic than they do it is much more likely to be a function of how I market the content rather than necessarily how the content is written. As I said in the BlogChat conversation last night when comparing the Top 40 music charts to blog content – “The top 40 reflects the quality of what is being marketed well not the quality of the content.” I really believe that to be true. While we talk about content marketing as a method to attract people to our product, service or website sometimes we forget that the content itself has to be marketed as well. It is important to remember that blogging, as is true with any other form of published writing, is more than just the act of writing, it involves the marketing of that writing as well.
How are you marketing your content?
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