Page 21 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com

At the same time that I was churning out these meaningful posts, Chris
Brogan, an extremely popular entrepreneur who blogs about marketing and
business issues, published a post that was exactly 37 words long. For your
edification and entertainment, here’s his entire post:

“If you’re going to speak to people, speak TO (or even better WITH)
them. Don’t look at your slides, read your slides, and tell me what’s on
your slides. I know how to read. Stop it. Okay?”

That’s the whole thing.
What made this post remarkable is that it received nearly 400 social shares, or
more than 10 shares per word. It received more than 50 unique reader comments
—more reactions than the total words in the post! The comments were uniformly
enthusiastic and even included descriptions like “brilliant!!!!” and “awesome.”
I’m going to go way out on a limb and say it was not an epic post. In fact, it’s
pretty standard presentation advice that has been delivered since the days of flip
charts and transparencies. If someone gave you this advice in a company training
program, you might roll your eyes and yawn. I’ll even hypothesize that Chris
would admit his post doesn’t teeter into a category of “brilliant” posts!
Years later Chris and I would become friends, but at that moment I felt
resentful and angry that a dull 37-word post received more web traffic than my
blog had received in an entire year.
What was going on here?
If the Internet is the great equalizer, a meritocracy where all good work is
rewarded, and if great content always rises to the top like the social media gurus
were telling me, why did this post ignite and mine didn’t? I hypothesized at the
time that if Chris wrote a post titled “I’m feeling a little gassy today” it would
have been tweeted 300 times. I actually encouraged him to do this as an
experiment but alas, he declined. The world is poorer for it.
How did Chris get to a place where just about any content he published lit up
the web like he’d struck a match in a fireworks store? Did content marketing
success have anything to do with his content … or did he possess some personal
magic that I didn’t understand? Was there a secret content launch code I was
missing?
I wanted to figure this out! And honestly, if I was going to succeed as a
marketing consultant and teacher, I had to figure this out.
One of my (few) blog readers reflected my own exasperation in a blog
comment at the time: “The people who claim great content always rises to the
top are already in a dominant market position. For those of us starting out, trying