5 things I got wrong about Content Marketing in my 2015 Book Content Machine

By dan - On

This week I had the pleasure of sitting on a panel at the Content Marketing Summit in Brisbane. It was the first live event I’ve done for a very long time, so I was pretty nervous but it was fun and it gave me a chance to re-examine my thoughts on Content Marketing, 7 years after writing my second book Content Machine. And let me tell you some things in that book have no aged very well!

Monetisation logic

I believed that it wasn’t enough to get attention, you had to have a business that was very logically linked to your content. These days it doesn’t seem to matter. Get enough attention, and you can sell anything to anyone.

70/30 Rule

I believed it made sense to do 70% of your content on your own website and 30% on other platforms. The explosion in social media has blown this idea out of the water. Creators these days do 99% of their content on other social networks – lots don’t even have a site.

Written content rules

I was a huge fan of written content and I saw the opportunity available to people coming via blog posts, SEO, communities and books etc. Video has now taken most of the attention and written content is dying. I wish it wasn’t but video is where it’s at! Reid Hoffman just released a book yesterday about AI, written by AI FFS!

Focus on shares

I thought the best way to measure your content was ignore likes and views and just look at shares. Algorithms have killed this idea. People don’t’ share stuff much anymore, algorithms are smart enough to put it in front of people anyway. Views are king.

It’s not all free

I saw the beauty in content marketing being that it was free and organic and represented a great alternative to paid marketing efforts. These days they are pretty much blended together. Lots of people are charging for podcasts, weekly emails and content these days. It’s not just something people do for free to build an audience to sell to. It’s become the business itself.

Even organic content is often paid promotion, social networks want you to pay now for reach, and a lot of the principles of content marketing have paid their way into paid marketing.

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