Unless you are consistently feeding your inbound marketing machine with good, creative content, chances are you've seen a slow-down in traffic, search engine results and leads. Why? Because getting found online is about competing for peoples' attention and consistently delivering the goods. There are very few one-hit wonders surviving on the Internet these days. Let's do a brief reality check, then work on our content creation strategy.
How many blog posts or videos can you remember within the past 30 days? A handful? Out of the hundreds you probably read or viewed, most of them have either disappeared into the ether or you've tucked them away in a bookmarking site, never to read them again. How many tweets grab your attention? Most of us probably ignore 99.9% and retweet the rest, never to be seen again. Why are we so fickle online? As Emily Yoffe writes in a Slate article,
"...we actually resemble nothing so much as those legendary lab rats that endlessly pressed a lever to give themselves a little electrical jolt to the brain. While we tap, tap away at our search engines, it appears we are stimulating the same system in our brains that scientists accidentally discovered more than 50 years ago when probing rat skulls."
So we're fighting this instinct we all have to just tap, tap, tap looking for visual or auditory stimulation. When we find something interesting, we usually scan it, then throw it away. How do we overcome these zombie-like impulses and grab someone's attention? Even if we get the hallowed click-through, how do we keep them in their seats? What about videos? Aren't they the key to viral marketing? According to TubeMogul, "ten seconds into a video clip a little over 10% of viewers have abandoned it, rising to over half at 60 seconds or more." So, content must not only attract your eye, it must also have the power to interrupt what you're doing and keep you transfixed. To most of us this is a huge challenge. Here's my content marketing strategy.
