POWER OF FREE! #9: The Currency of Attention in Intelligent Content Marketing: Relax – You’re A Publisher Now

The one thing I didn’t understand when I started out was, when I took these chain of decisions, they led to this obvious conclusion that I will end up becoming a publisher. When I started, I didn’t really anticipate that I’ve become a publisher in the way that I am. But I’ve understood the mechanics of it all now.

And so the bad news is, unless you are going to be a publisher, selling some stuff on the back end of your publishing, which you should be giving away for free, you shouldn’t really be thinking about starting a business, in my view. Because as you are as time goes on, and people begin to understand the dynamics of publishing and the attention economy and selling things, as a result of having created relationships, these niches are going to be filled by people who get there first. And that ultimately, is your opportunity. Because if you’re brave enough to grasp the nettle to become a publisher, and you identify a niche, a niche that is is one that you can go out there and on. And you can be very successful, but it makes you a publisher.

And that’s the bad news. Now, the really bad news is that you can’t be a mediocre publisher, unless there’s absolutely nobody whatsoever in the niche that you’ve chosen. And you’ve got nobody to compete against. In that case, you do exactly what I did, which is start really, really cheap and really, really basic. And that potentially could force the choice of which niche you think that you should be going for. I think that’s a very healthy state of affairs. So if you do not have the luxury of being the first in the space, then you are going to have to produce content that is 10 times better than anything else that your competition is publishing. And the reason for that is very simple. As you can see here, this is the quality scale. And this is the effort. Now, this came from moz.com. And I’m grateful for and Fishkin for doing this on a Whiteboard Friday, and I grabbed this graphic from from the site. But it just explains beautifully, how you have to think about the quality of your content and why you should be producing high quality content.

Because at this sort of baseline, this is where the the Google animals came in and kind of cleared out all the bad guys and all the kind of rubbish. And from this point on, you could no longer really just use pure technical SEO, to achieve your objectives, you actually had to think about the quality of your content. So this is the baseline. And then essentially, this is the minimum bar that you have to reach for modern SEO when you’re producing your content. So basically, as you move up towards this level, where you’re just getting into the first page of Google, you then have to look at the amount of time that you have to invest and achieving those outcomes.

So this is where you, for example, get your content produced on fiverr.com. And this is where you have your intern produce it. And this is gonna take you the whole weekend to achieve. And this is so commanding that there’s no way it’s going to scale. But you’ve got to go past that. Understanding that if your content isn’t 10 times as good as anybody else’s, you’re never going to get to the first slot on Google, right. And that’s what you’ve got to be aiming for. You’ve got nine other things below you which will be competing against you. And then you may as well not exist, right for all practical purposes. So your content has to be 10 times better than anything that’s out there in that space right now.

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