For my army (ok…handful) of readers, you’ll know that I like watching stacks of films and referring back to them here. So, what’s one more film-based analogy?
Now, if a film is on at the cinema, I’ll be made aware of it (or it’ll be ‘visible’ to me) through TV ads and outdoor posters. That’s what will lead me to the cinema to go and see it.
Or, as an alternative – and far more direct route – it’ll be on DVD and a friend will hand it to me. So, that’s me brought to the film or vice versa, but…. if that film – its content – is rubbish, one (or more) of four things will happen;
*I’ll walk out / switch off halfway through.
*I’ll watch it, but be annoyed that I did.
*I certainly won’t recommend it to my friends (at worst I may ridicule it)
*I’m highly unlikely to watch any other films by the same director.
Now to give this analogy some relevance: exactly the same principles apply to writing content.
You can talk of SEO, keywords, rich media, PPC etc etc etc. These things will all drive traffic to its intended target, but …. if the content is unengaging, purely functional, or simply poor, no-one will hang around to read further or they’ll be annoyed if they do. They certainly won’t share the content with their friends/social networks, and they’re highly unlikely to read content from the same author/company.
The long and the short of it is: for all the technological advances we’ve made, and all the fancy ‘web 3.0’ talk, the basic principles that apply to offline copy still apply to online copy; it has to be interesting, it has to be relevant, it has to speak to a clearly defined audience, and it has to make people want to come back for more. Simple.