Content: The Once and Future King
Back in the days of the original Internet boom, right around the turn of the millennium, everyone was familiar with the expression Content is King. It seemed that the new medium literally gobbled up written content; it could hardly be produced fast enough to fill the need. In fact, that proved the perfect environment for YourWriters, which began life in 2000 and was the ideal ally for clients struggling to satisfy the Web’s insatiable appetite for the written word.
There are those who claim the Web no longer craves content as it did back in its infancy, that audio and video content have taken its place. That assertion then invariably leads to a discussion of the new consumers, non-reading young people who demand a constant feed of multi-media content and read only short bursts of information.
Apologies to Mark Twain, but reports of written content’s death have been greatly exaggerated. In fact, the Internet continues to suck up an unbelievable amount of content. Just look at some of these statistics:
According to the site www.worldwidewebsize.com, and based on the work of researcher Maurice De Kunder, there are now almost 5 billion web pages. Think about it: Each one of these has at least some written content.
According to site MarketingProfs, a total of 2 million blog posts are written every day. That’s a lot of content being pumped out on a daily basis. That translates to 60 million posts per month. I’d say “do the math,” to compute the amount of written content on the Web, but unless you’re a physicist it’s almost impossible. Suffice it to say that Internet content is now measured in exobytes. (An exobyte is a billion billion bytes.)
Despite the much touted “short attention span” of younger Web wanderers, statistics actually show that longer posts get considerably more attention than short blasts. A recent survey at Google showed that the top 10 posts on the search engine were all more than 3,000 words.
Dollars and Sense
Okay. So there’s a lot of content out there. But does it really convert to sales? Or, in corporate-speak, what’s the ROI of written content about your products and services? The site ConvertwithContent forcefully makes the case:
“If you want to attract more prospects to your website in the first place, you need CONTENT. (Blogging, for example, allows you to leverage ‘public content’ to attract more site visitors.)
If you want to turn more prospects into leads, you need CONTENT. (Offering a free report or e-course allows you to capture more email addresses with ‘exclusive content.’)
And if you want to turn more leads into customers, you need CONTENT. (Sending out periodic newsletters is a great way to build a stronger relationship with your customers.)
Content is so powerful that I much prefer the term Content Marketing over the term ‘Internet Marketing’. Great marketing has always been (and always will be) about CONTENT.”
And MarketingProfs.com cites research by MarketingExperiments that showed long-form pages (with more written content) converted (users to sales) 40.54 percent more often than short-form pages. Take that all you purveyors of content doom and gloom.
The Bottom Line: If you think you can’t afford to pay for well-written and persuasive content to promote your product s and services, think again! You can’t afford not to. Content continues to reign supreme on the Web and its power can only increase as time goes by.