Page 15 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com

producers, video-makers, Pinterest pinners, Facebook posters, and Instagram
photographers.

The social media/content model for a personal or business brand was easy:
Create great content, spend a little effort on search engine optimization and
promotion, and build your business when people found your goods and services
through Google.

Those days are coming to an end, and as you’re about to see, it’s a pretty
predictable revolution.

The third digital revolution

So far, there have been three distinct phases of digital marketing. These
upheavals haven’t replaced each other, but rather have built upon progress and
moved us forward.

The first digital revolution occurred at the dawn of the web in the late 1990s
when companies like AOL, Netscape, and Prodigy shook up the nascent Internet.
Your business priority was simply getting out there and establishing a website.
So the dawn of the Internet created a business focus on PRESENCE.

Once you had a site, it needed to be found. Enabled by companies like Alta
Vista and ultimately Google, by the late 1990s your business priority turned to
search engine optimization (and a $30 billion industry was created!). An
emphasis on DISCOVERY was the priority for the second digital revolution.

Today, we’re firmly in the third digital revolution, which has been enabled by
social media and mobile technology. Your business goal in this phase is
UTILITY—to help and serve people at their point of need, whether they’re
looking for a movie review, the best price on a laptop, or product information at
the point of sale in a retail store. (And oh yes, there’s a fourth revolution in sight,
but you’ll have to wait for Chapter 11 for that!)

As each phase progressed into the next, life became more difficult for
marketers. If you were a pioneer and had an early website during the first
revolution, you had an advantage until your competitors caught on. Likewise, if
you were the first to crack the code on SEO in the second phase, Oh Happy Day!
You led the search results as long as your competitors lagged behind. If they
figured it out, once again it became more difficult, and expensive, to compete.

Today, the world has become more difficult for digital marketers because
your competitors have also figured out they need to be fueling their helpful
Internet presence with content. If you were first and dominant in your niche,
good news, good news, good news! But if the niche is filling up, you’re probably