Page 9 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com

Introduction

Each time I’ve written a book, I’ve tried to solve a problem and answer an
important and complex question on the mind of my customers, my students, and
my friends in the business world. My previous books have provided answers to
questions like …

Can you help me figure out Twitter?
Social media is overwhelming … where do I start?
How do I begin and sustain a blog that actually helps my organization?
How do I become significant—perhaps even powerful and successful—on the
web?

So far, so good. As long as I encounter big questions that require more than a
blog post to answer, I suppose I will keep writing books. Here’s the question at
the heart of The Content Code:

I’m a professional marketer working as hard as I can. I’m producing
content, engaging on social media, and spinning right along with the
revolving door of every digital marketing innovation and new
platform. Why is my business not getting anywhere?

Here’s the short answer: Because you’re living in yesterday’s world.
The persistent myth that surrounds much of marketing today is that content is
king. And if you can just produce enough of this scintillating, ripped-from-the-
headlines, epic and amazing stuff … dripping with keywords, stuffed to the
headlines with relevance, decorated with Pinterest-worthy graphics and videos,
and podcasts and listicles … you’ll win.
We’re stuck with a misconception that the most worthy content rises to the
top, scorching the search rankings, and becoming a dazzling beacon for eager
customers. And at one point, that was probably true. Early in the web’s history,
the balance between the content available online and our capacity to consume it
was grossly out of balance. We were insatiable consumers, spending hours
discovering the new information sources coming at us on the emerging World