There have been a few articles bouncing around the internet lately about how content marketing either never worked or about how it has ceased to work.
This has led many small businesses and SEO professional to downgrade the importance of blogging, social media posting, and other forms of content marketing, some to the point that they have abandoned these forms of marketing altogether.
For businesses that want to be successful, this can be a very dangerous practice.
Why? Because content marketing does not just work—it is one of the best ways to draw people to your brand.
It’s a dangerous myth that content marketing no longer works.
Here are seven more of the most dangerous content marketing myths that might be sabotaging your campaign:
1. Content marketing is expensive.
Yes, content marketing is a monetary and time investment.
All marketing requires time and money in order for it to work properly.
If your content marketing campaign isn’t working, it’s probably because you are not investing enough time or money in it.
That’s just the simple truth.
You can’t just pump out one short blog post a month, post it, and expect it to bring in the new site visitors in droves.
That would be like buying one dollar’s worth of stocks and expecting it to make a million dollars in a month.
Neither investing nor content marketing work that way.
You have to put time, effort, and money into the endeavor or you won’t see any significant returns.
That doesn’t mean that you have to divert your entire marketing budget to content marketing—it simply means that content marketing should get its fair share.
Quality content can be time-consuming or expensive (or both), but when it’s used correctly, it is more than worth it.
2. Anyone can create great content, or the lowest bidder is the best option.
There are people out there with lightning fast fingers that can write 4000 words in less than an hour.
Those 4000 words might even be great.
They can charge you next to nothing for those words because their time investment is tiny.
Those people are extremely few and far between.
Those bidding the lowest on your project are more likely to deliver low-quality content—that means content that is either not actually in the necessary language, content that has been scraped and spun from another website, or content that has been straight-up stolen from another source.
One writer might charge less than another, but great writers usually charge what they’re worth.
You don’t want sub-par content—you want great content that you can rely on.
3. Content marketing is disconnected from your other campaigns.
What makes content marketing great is how easily it integrates into almost all of your other marketing campaigns.
Not only can you use your social media pages to market your content and generate interest for both venues, you can use your content marketing to direct people back to your social media pages.
Content marketing feeds into and on just about every other endeavor—no marketing scheme has to be an island.
4. SEO and content marketing are the same.
SEO and content marketing are linked. They are not the same thing.
You probably won’t be doing content marketing without SEO and you probably also won’t be doing SEO without some content marketing.
That doesn’t mean, however, that they are the same thing.
You will want to use keywords in order to make your content easier to find and to help bring new people to your blog or website.
It should not be the extent of your search engine optimization, however.
Neither should content marketing exist only to feed the SEO machine.
There will be plenty of opportunities for content marketing that will have very little to do with keywords and link building.
5. Content marketing means you have to write endless blog posts.
This is what really turns some people off about content marketing.
Hearing that they will have to write or find someone to write endless blog posts about a very narrow niche can sound both daunting and extremely boring.
The truth is, however, that blog posts are only a part of all content marketing.
Images, infographics, and videos are all also content that can be effectively used to bring new people to your website and to engage with them.
If you’re having trouble coming up with something other than blog posts, check out my post on other types of content you can create instead of just blogs.
6. The goal of content marketing is create something viral.
In reality, the goal of content marketing is to create interesting, useful content that your target audience is likely to find, read, and engage with.
Making something go viral is a great way to reach out hundreds of millions of people, but it’s also impossible to predict what is going to go viral, how it will go viral, and when it will go viral.
If something is going to go viral, it either does it right after it is published or months or even years down the road.
7. Content marketing is dry and boring.
If you’re bored writing the content then yes, the content will be dry and boring.
If you’re interested in the content, then chances are your audience will be, too.
The written word isn’t dead, despite what modern philosophers might say, so don’t think of content like filler for your blog. It should always be valuable, interesting, and engaging.
Alright, it’s okay to phone in one post, once and a while if you’re having difficulty thinking of something just as fun, funny, or interesting as what was posted last week, but in general, your content marketing campaign should be exciting—not dry and boring.
