5 Reasons No-one’s Paying Attention To Your Content
For far too long, many digital industry experts were peddling the myth that creating content was the key to many companies’ online struggles. And that was it — just make it, whether it’s blog posts, infographics, press releases, or whatever else, and everything else will fall into place.
In a way, they were right. For a bit. Back in the day you could write a bunch of blog posts that don’t really say an awful lot or offer any real value, fill them full of keywords, a bit of internal linking, and you’re away.
However, we all know that’s not how things work anymore. Or most of us do anyway. You’ll still find people on Fiverr selling “high DA backlinks that will help your SEO” or words to that effect, and the fact they’re still there suggests people still use them, but most of us are past that now.
We know that creating content should always have the user in mind, whether that’s to teach them, make them laugh, shock them, etc. Yet still so much content simply goes unloved. Literally millions of pieces of content are posted online every day, and a significant proportion of it is never seen by anyone, which can leave you feeling a bit like this:
An analysis by Moz and BuzzSumo found that, from a random sample of 100,000 articles, over 50% had two or fewer Facebook interactions, and over 75% had no external links. Now, social shares and links shouldn’t be the sole focus of your content strategy, but it gives a decent snapshot into how much content isn’t reaching its audience.
Is this happening to you? If so, here are some reasons why that might be the case…
You’re making the wrong kind of content
To paraphrase a famous book, all content is equal, but some content is more equal than others.
While I’m not really sure what this means, what I’d like it to mean is that you need to be creating the content that’s right for your audience. You might enjoy swanky HTML5 games and quizzes about which Stranger Things character you are, but if you’re trying to sell fridges, those might not be the most appropriate forms of content.
Conversely, you might not think an ebook or a series of buying guides is particularly sexy, but if done properly, with appropriate keyword research, design and promotion, then they could be incredibly lucrative.
If you already have some content on your site, then a quick dig into Google Analytics should show you what’s working and what’s not, informing your future content strategy. BuzzSumo, again, is also handy — simply enter in a search query and it’ll show you the most shared content relating to it.
Spying on your competitors is also useful for working out what content you should and shouldn’t create. Ahrefs is useful for this, especially with its ‘top content’, ‘best by links’, and ‘content gap’ features, all of which will show you what’s working for them — and then you can better it.
So whether it’s blog posts, video, infographics, ebooks, etc, it’s important to work out what content is right for your audience. Some content is expensive, but it’d be better to pay for one piece of content that’s likely to work than several pieces that aren’t.
It offers nothing new
With the amount of content now being produced every day reaching astronomical proportions, it’s becoming harder and harder to stand out. That becomes abundantly clear when you see half-hearted blogs churned out with little thought as to why they’ve been written or who they’re for.
One of the biggest content marketing mistakes too many people make is not offering anything new with their content. This is particularly important for smaller businesses who have to try that bit harder to make their voices heard. Why would anyone care about your content when someone else has already done the same thing, but better?
Now, not all content has to offer something totally new, but if you really want to grab people’s attention, then you need to make them sit up and take notice, and show them why the content they’re currently consuming isn’t as good as yours.
This can be done in two primary ways:
- You make something brand new that no-one has done before. This is often the hardest way to make content as it’s not always easy to come up with something unique when there’s already so much out there. NOTE: Ask yourself why it hasn’t been done before — perhaps there’s a good reason for it.
- Improve on something that already exists. Most content can be improved in some way — could a buying guide be better with video? Can that dry and confusing data be interpreted as an infographic? This is what some people refer to as the Skyscraper Technique, with the aim of contacting people linking to the original content and asking them to link to yours instead because it’s better.
You’re making it at the wrong time
While the ‘what?’ and ‘why?’ of producing content are incredibly important, don’t overlook the ‘when?’.
Creating content to coincide with specific events throughout the year is a very effective method of getting it noticed. This could be an event specific to your industry, a national event or awareness day, or a seasonal event (Christmas, etc). Content that relates to such an event can have a much better pickup rate by newspapers, magazines and bloggers than if that content was released at another time of the year. Events calendars such as Year Ahead can help you build out a detailed plan of all the events that pertain to your industry, helping you schedule in relevant content throughout the year.
Giving yourself enough time to make that content is also very important. Rushing something out the day before a big event is of no use to anyone, so plan well in advance so you can get your content live in plenty of time so you can tell people about it — which brings us nicely onto…
You’re not telling anyone about it
This is arguably the biggest reason your content isn’t getting noticed. Unless you’re a big publisher with an audience who seek out your content, most of what your produce isn’t going to be seen without some form of promotion. Hopefully over time your articles perform well organically because they’re optimised correctly, but this “build it and they will come” approach is very risky and will fail more times than not.
That’s why you need to shout about your content from the digital rooftops, and you can do this in several ways.
Are you active on social media? Utilise all your social profiles and tell your followers about what you’ve produced. Pay attention to the best times to post across each platform, and post about it frequently — not everyone’s going to see it the first time.
If you have an email list, then let them know about it too; after all, these are people who have likely bought with you before or have shown an interest in what you do.
You may also want to consider paid advertising if you don’t mind putting a little bit of budget behind it. This can take many forms, whether that’s regular paid search, paid social media campaigns, or content distribution platforms like Outbrain or Taboola. You might scoff at spending money to promote your content, but paid advertising lets you be so granular about who to target, that you’ll have a decent chance of the right people seeing it.
If you’ve produced a flashy piece of content marketing that you’d like to get featured on other websites to build links and earn brand mentions, then you’ll need to also do some manual outreach. This isn’t the most glamorous part of the process, but it’s one of the most important.
First of all, you need to build a list of relevant people or publications who you think might like to cover your content, and then contact them to pitch your story. We won’t go into the ins and outs of how to outreach content — that’s for another time — but by rolling your sleeves up and putting your content in front of people, you’re much more likely to see results from it.
It’s untrustworthy
Now this doesn’t mean that your content isn’t thoroughly researched and 100% accurate. It just means that unless you’re an industry leader (and if you are, then your content should be getting noticed by now anyway), then people might not pay much attention to what you have to say.
That’s when you need to draft in the big boys and girls, ie. organisations and experts whose voice carries a bit of heft, to lend some extra credibility to your story.
This isn’t always possible, and it very much depends on what it is you’re creating, but if you have an industry expert commenting on what you’ve produced, questioning what someone else has done, or just offering to be associated with you, then it makes people and publications sit up and take notice.
Charities are excellent for this, and those who are slightly smaller will more than likely help out in exchange for the exposure — and if you want to donate a little something as a thank-you, that wouldn’t go amiss either. Historians, journalists, high-level bloggers, company spokespeople, and anyone with a real passion for their chosen field can all be called upon if you ask nicely enough and credit them appropriately.
