Page 26 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com

burner stove in his kitchen that could only handle soup! And would the
escalation stop there? Was this a sustainable strategy?

The content arms race and the unsaturated niche

In this little parable, you can begin to see parallels to a saturated content
environment. Attempting to be epic enough to succeed in a highly competitive
environment comes at a cost. Similarly, as the content arms race heats up in a
particular niche, it may not be a sustainable strategy for all businesses …
although customers certainly LOVE all the free stuff coming their way!

By the way, Robert the soup maker isn’t out of the game. He can find new
markets for his soup. He can look for new ways to deliver his soup. He can
repackage his soup so people can consume it in new places. But one thing is
clear: Whatever the strategy, in a highly competitive environment, the status quo
is not good enough. If you’re facing a possibility of content saturation in your
market, you need to be thinking of ways to change the game.

Although the world is facing an incredible content glut, this doesn’t
necessarily mean doom and gloom for everyone. In many industries, there’s no
glut at all. Consumers are still starving for helpful new content to serve them. If
you’re in one of these niches, you probably don’t have to worry about Content
Shock for some time. In fact, your job is to create it!

Without the Content Code, the only sustainable content strategy has been to
find an unsaturated niche and overwhelm the web with so much quality content
that search engines discover only you. Effectively, you’re creating Content
Shock by crowding out your competitors. The strategy is this simple:

1. Find an unsaturated niche.
2. Consistently produce a volume of quality, helpful material aimed at a

relevant audience (or persona).
3. Never stop producing content.

Dominating a niche early has extremely important long-term value because
the search engines will continue to recognize and reward the authority your
website accrues for a long time. One pioneering blogger told me that after
dominating his niche with content for so long, he could probably remain at the
top of most search engines for years … even if he never wrote another blog post
again.