Although you’ll hear over and over again that content is king nowadays, there’s one thing more primary than just content, it’s called quality.
Content that sucks just won’t cut it. The content has to be professional and entertaining, and for social media, engaging. Websites and blogs are indexed per page so your content has to be brilliant on each and every page. This especially goes for copy, video, graphics, photos. If you display a web page or blog with rotten content, you’ll get a reputation as a sloppy, halfwit, producer and who wants to buy products from a person who puts out substandard content?
Webmasters and marketers who are in the game just to boost traffic using links and volumes of articles and images actually hire dozens of people to make that content. These people usually come from a cheap site like Fiverr where they’ll work for a bowl of rice. Why? Because far too many marketers are greedy idiots who don’t know the value of quality. They think numbers and number crunching will dominate the search engine pages, but Google and the other search engines are beating these sites up and they’re dropping in rank into the abyss. Why? Because Google wants quality content for its surfers, not spam or hack content.
It’s hard to convince marketers and marketing agencies to change their game plan because they’re so stupid and greedy. You’ve got companies that will spend more on lunch and drinks at the bar than they’ll spend on their own content. Then when their stats drop through the floor, they’ll blame everyone other than executive decision because of course, the ego tripping boss can’t make a mistake. This then brings the whole company down and it’s next to impossible to recover from such a bad reputation. If that happens you’ll have to spend a ton of money in negative SEO Remediation.
The bottom line is to take the time, invest the money in hiring the best you can. If you have skills then participate in the process thus reducing costs overall.
Try an experiment. Go to the webmaster forums and ask around about content and what they pay for it. You’ll get most of the marketers bragging about how they got 400 articles for pennies or how some kid in Nigeria who rides an ox wrote the content. It’s exploitation plain and simple and they then shove off this rotten content to you the surfer and expect you to fall for it. It’s not happening. From now on marketers are going to have to put their big boy pants on and step up to the plate.
If you buy content, be very careful. There is an entire industry of crooks who dish out fake content and will charge you for it. You may think you’re getting as much quality content as you see advertised on their sites, but as soon as you pay for a big package and open it up, you find out it’s hacked work, spun articles, grammatically incorrect and everything rotten you can think of. That and a dozen other scams. These content companies, again, hire people in poor countries, sometimes at gunpoint or threaten their village or any bizarre combination you can think of.
American and UK writers are the most sought after. Videos and photography are global. Graphics you had better get from a highly qualified studio and cartoons you’ll have to sell your firstborn child for. Cartoons are the most expensive but they’ve become the most viral of content. If you can cartoon, do a lot of them and tag them appropriately and include them in every email and social media post. Hiring a professional cartoonist will cost you a small fortune so look around for friends and family members who can work with you and you can tap into this valuable resource.
In the short and long term, quality, not quantity will see you through. Google’s algorithms like RankBrain knows who has been naughty or nice so get to work and rise.
