Growing up, I was always afraid of accidentally eating food that had gone bad. My family would tease me
about this obsession, and my penchant for sniffing around the fridge and haranguing about purchase and expiration dates.
I thought about this recently, when I passed on reading a blog post that at first looked interesting for one very simple reason – it had no posting date. The post did not pass my “sniff test.”
It is silly to not show posting dates, and it seems the only reason they’d do this is to hide the fact that the blog may not be updated often. But they are not fooling anyone, and probably losing folks like me, who prefer up-to-date info and don’t like to play guessing games about content freshness. What many people don’t quite realize is that the key to content marketing is in the finer details. So let’s start thinking on how we can get our sites to pass the sniff test.
Avoid Errors, Give Your Content “Curb Appeal”
The competition for your customer’s attention can be fierce. More content from more sources means it is a buyer’s market for content (even though much is for free).
Could the answer really be no content? Spencer Critchley wrote in the Huffington Post: “Content marketing is already showing signs of becoming the victim of its own success. In logic and economics, there’s a principle known as the fallacy of composition… Put another way, an advantage is no longer an advantage when it’s available to everyone… So what’s next for content marketing? If people now want less, find a way to give it to them.”
It’s an interesting perspective.
This could mean that businesses have to now focus on providing only the content that customers will be interested in, or something that provides utmost value for them. When an Internet user finds a blog post that provides valuable information, then the likelihood of it being shared across the network increases, thereby improving the value of the content.
In a buyer’s market, the seller needs to get clever and use all means available to increase appeal for the product. E.g. in real estate this means upping “curb appeal.”
My monthly column on Maximize Social Business (posted today, and yes, with a date!) explores how to avoid common errors so that your content gets read by more people – or, how to give your content “curb appeal.”
