‘Never argue with a fool because…’… and you know the rest. You’ll find fools online and offline. Quality, informed content, whether written by someone like me or whether you do it yourself, puts you on a different level to the guy who wandered down to the content farm and bought an SEO pig-in-a-poke. While the search engines’ appetite for original content continues to grow, the cheap stuff, fattened on keywords and cliché still roam the web. Using content farms will often prove to be a foolish idea and if you don’t value the content you put on your site, you can be pretty sure that soon, no-one else will eithe
Are you saying something useful? This particular point has been ‘made-to-death’ by every copy and web content writer around but you do need to focus on providing useful, usable content that is valuable to existing customers or prospective ones.
Will it be ‘liked’ or tweeted? This is similar but has become a metric for content marketing. Make your content good enough to share and this will act as your own QC method.
Have you done the ‘copy and paste’ and changed a few words to make it sound like your own? If so, it probably doesn’t sound like you even if you think it does. Forgetting the morality for a moment, consistency is an issue here and it’s only a matter of time before your editing becomes sloppy or more likely, the reader just doesn’t ‘buy’ that it’s you.
Reputation – the great immeasurable…. Everything you put on your blog or site brings with it your reputation. And in a smaller market like Ireland, that means online and offline. Value your content if only to maintain your good rep.
Everyone else is doing it – and that’s where the fool comes in. “Never argue with a fool because they’ll drag you down to their level and beat you on experience”. The fool is happy to populate his site with rubbish. The fool doesn’t care too much about quality products, services or expertise. The fool is convinced if enough people are dragged to his site, eventually one of them will buy. ‘It’s a numbers game’, he’ll chirp with an imbecilic grin…‘Content is king’, he’ll advise.
Bad content is no more a king than the Queen of Sheba. And if you think you’re adding value to your site by churning out large volumes of boring, out-of-context content farm articles and blogs, you should think again. Quality content is not only more likely to be read but it also carries a larger number of consequences that numbers alone simply cannot measure.