There are a startling number of “marketing specialists” popping up on the internet these days. Many of them claim to bring you fame and fortune through the internet using a variety of techniques. Oh, that it were so simple.
In reality, even if we ignore bricks and mortar marketing for the moment, most online marketing techniques miss the point. They focus on driving “traffic” to your site, which seems like a great idea. So whats the problem? Content.
These marketing specialists may provide some advice on how to structure content, keywords and the like, however they certainly won’t create engaging content for you. Without that content, any readers driven to your site surely won’t hang around for long.
In some ways it feels like the MLM industry. People develop sites lacking in content, to drive people to other sites lacking in content. My thoughts are, in relation to “online” marketing, that if you worry about content first, the rest will take care of itself.
I think that for too long the Internet marketers thought that traditional marketing didn’t apply to them. Even though the Internet is certainly a different medium, it still takes some good old bricks-and-mortar work to use it effectively.
As online consumers become more savvy, they’ll see through the fake content and gravitate toward the real stuff. Unfortunately, good content alone isn’t a panacea. There are probably hundreds of thousands of blogs that have great content that nobody is reading.
Adam