I love the smell of content in the morning.
Fresh, handcrafted, thoughtfully curated, intriguing, inviting, informative and eye-opening.
I could give coffee the credit for being the best part of waking up but in all honesty, I’ve got to give credit where credit is due: I love nothing more than opening my laptop and finding a Feedly full of unread items, a Reddit homepage with a sea of unclicked links, and a Twitter feed full of early risers rushing to share with me the cool stuff they’ve found online already that morning.
I know, it’s a serious problem. But for a lot of us, this is thew new fact of life: we’re content junkies in a world that is increasingly feeding our habit.Though lately I’ve noticed a glut of stuff that just isn’t giving me the fix I’m going for. It looks like content. It quacks like content. But something’s not quite right. It seems so thin.
So regurgitated. So uninspired. It feels like a copy of a copy of a copy.
And then my content buzz is gone.
Let’s be honest. Any time there’s a “next big thing” there’s a gold rush of people trying to mine the opportunity associated with that thing.
It happened with search engines. (Until black hat SEO came along: and then we had SEO spam).
It happened with email. (Until our inboxes were full of offers for”rep1ica watches”)
Now, it’s happening in the world of content creation. Enter: content spam.
Overzealous, shortcut-taking marketers crash the party and cause us to wonder why we ever showed up in the first place. This is why we can’t have nice things.
As content marketing catches on (and the data says that it definitely has), we’ll see more and more content spam. So how do we make sure we’re creating signal and not more noise?
1. Put the work in. It’s difficult to develop valuable content. It takes time, thought, anguish at times. It’s worth it.
2. Know the gaps. They still exist, even with more content creation. Your audience wishes there was good content somewhere. Make it.
3. Watch the signals. Good content is shared. Bad content isn’t.
4. Don’t sell yourself, it’s unbecoming. Let your expertise do that.
5. And finally, be useful, be interesting or be ignored. Every piece of content is at least one of those things, for better or worse.
Image: epsos.de
This post originally appeared on Brain On Digital.
