Welcome to the antithesis.
Recently I jumped on a webinar with Maneesh Sethi and Derek Halpern, popular bloggers in the marketing / consumer psych space.
During the presentation they made a great point about where most bloggers “go wrong” in their attempts to grow a following or monetize their content.
The problem?
“We spend 80% of our time creating content, and only 20% of our time promoting it” says Derek. “We should do the opposite — 80% promotion, 20% creation.”
Since that webinar I’ve started two blogs and as I monitor my Google Analytics dashboard I’ve realized Derek nailed it.
It doesn’t matter if I cure cancer.
What matters is distributing the cure and healing people.
Another angle.
Robert Kiyosaki’s personal finance book “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” shook the world. His simple advice changed how millions of people feel about money, and more importantly how to make it.
In one section of Rich Dad, he talks about an interview he had with a journalist in Singapore. She is intelligent, beautiful, and articulate. She writes for a local publication to pay the bills, but dreams of becoming an author. She’s even been writing a novel.
She asks Robert his advice for becoming famous and successful like him. As the story goes, he pulls out a copy of his book and notes the “best-selling author” credential on the bottom of the front cover. She looks back at him, puzzled. He then reminds her that he is a best selling author, not the best writing. Confused and upset, she ends the interview.
Personal experience.
I’m a Redditor. Sometimes after blogging I post the permalink on Reddit. As a result I’ve received thousands of extra unique visitors, garnered hundreds of comment discussions, and even seen a boost in book sales. Heck, I even sold a business on Reddit thanks to the viral exposure its user base provides.
But guess what? It wasn’t just my content that reeled in those visitors.
If anything my content was the least important aspect of the traffic and sales success. Ranking higher on the list were promotional tactics such as what time of day I posted each link, the wittiness of the headline (IE: Stop Calling Yourself a CEO, and my Reddit account’s built-in influence (based on both internal algorithms and also community familiarity with my user handle). Seems complicated, right? Wrong.
We are all salesmen. We all promote different things relentlessly for a myriad of reasons. We sell ourselves at interviews, sell our children to day cares, and sell our sweaters to best friends. The new book by Dan Pink, To Sell is Human, details this sentiment in-depth.
But we are not all content curators. Curating great content will forever be a specialized skill shared by the few and the proud. And these curators will have to relentlessly innovate new ways to provide content visibility.
So no, content isn’t king. Promotion is.
Build it, and they might come.