The Constant Struggle for Quality Content
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Any time there’s something you need to tell your target audience, you automatically find yourself in competition with all the other content-creators out there vying for their attention. And to get it — to get their eye on you instead of anyone else — there are competing considerations:
- Being the first to get your story out there,
- Coming up with a message that will resonate with relevancy to your audience, and
- Writing the highest-quality, most intrinsically valuable piece that you can.
In a world already overloaded with content, the final consideration is by far the most important.
Think about the vast majority of the content that’s created: the republished press releases or AP/Reuters wire stories, the unoriginal churnalist pieces put out by content farms, and the run-of-the-mill clickbait you see practically everywhere you look.
Is that how you want to represent yourself to your target audience?
Of course not. Your goal should be relevance, not repetition. Your goal should be quality, not quantity. And if you’re going to put the effort into writing a high-quality piece, you should take the time to make sure it’s not only timely, but timeless as well.
Creating something timeless can be achieved in a number of ways, but there are two that stick out as sure-fire methods of ensuring your content is valuable to your audience. The first is creating content that solves a key problem that your readers encounter on a regular basis. What pains them? Can you create content that helps solve those pain-points for them? If you can, that content will have a positive and real impact on that audience.The second way is by giving your audience content that they can’t find anywhere else. Create content that is unique and provides a fresh perspective on an important issue, and your readers will consistently come back for more.
There’s an incredible value to creating a piece that information seekers will find valuable for months or even years to come, something that’s far more valuable than getting a few extra thousand passing pageviews from a user who’ll forget whose site they were on within minutes. If your goal is to build trust, establish yourself as a thought-leader, and to provide enduring value to your target audience, then quality is the one virtue on which you should never skimp.
It’s your name and your brand; what do you want it associated with? In our fast-paced world of information overload, quality is one thing you can count on to never go out-of-style. Let others vie for the gimmicky page views and visits; you’ll be too busy ensuring that the ones you get are the ones that count.
-Ethan