We’ve all heard the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. She sneaks into the house of three bears and tries their porridge, chairs, and beds only finding one of the three in each instance to be “just right”. The options that were “just wrong” were the extremes. The hot and cold porridge. The small and large chairs. The hard and soft beds. When it comes to content creation we recommend that website owners find the amount that’s “just right”. Unfortunately, it’s easier said than done.
Website owners should understand the importance of content to an online marketing program by now. Online marketing basically is content marketing today. If you aren’t creating a steady stream of content, what exactly are you doing to promote your business on the web today?
Content establishes a business as a trusted source of information. It generates natural inbound links from relevant websites to drive traffic and improve SEO signals. It gets shared in social media, keeping social accounts active and social connections engaged.
Even though there’s so much evidence that content is essential, there are so many businesses that just aren’t doing enough of it. They don’t invest in the resources necessary to create this content or they keep it on the backburner, on that never ending list of items that they’ll “get to later”. Maybe they just struggle with the concept in general and aren’t sure how to approach it. They’re not sure what topics to write about or who should be doing the writing. They think it’s easier to just avoid the whole thing.
Then you’ve got the companies on the other end of the spectrum. They definitely understand the importance of content which is why they’ve taken it too far. They want to obtain as much of that SEO and social power that they can get so they have become a content churn factory. Every day they have multiple new pieces of content getting published, to the point where it becomes overwhelming (and annoying) to social connections, email subscribers, etc.
It’s one thing to opt in to communication a few times a week. Multiple times a day is another thing. Unless it’s a huge company that has the clout to get away with it, smaller companies should be realistic with the amount of content that they publish. If people know you are a small company, they’ll question how you are able to produce that much content and they’ll question its quality.
Online marketers need to find that “just right” amount of content to publish on a regular basis. Of course, this may differ from company to company but a general rule is that you need to be consistent. Determine how often your clients/customers/prospects want to receive communication from you. Focus on quality instead of quantity. One great blog post published a week is going to get you more attention than 10 not so great blog posts a week.
