It’s a gloomy, rainy Tuesday in Seattle, and the weather is making me rather philosophical. So, rather than sharing my own tips and experience, I’m going to share my reactions to a recent blog post entitled “A Challenge: Content or Die“. Sounds pretty dire, doesn’t it? The author’s point isn’t quite as extreme as the title suggests. I invite you to read it, but let me summarize it quickly: if you don’t keep creating new content, your web presence will stagnate, your search ranking will suffer, your revenues will drop. It may not mean death, but clearly it’s not good.
The author’s point is valid. I’ve been in marketing for a long time. Before the days of social media, marketing consisted largely of advertising, public relations, events and sponsorships. They were all ways of communicating your brand to your public. And they were all big, costly undertakings. Because they were big and costly, each campaign had to last a long time, so marketers got used to communications with a long lifespan. In advertising, you would pay big money to develop an ad campaign, and it would run for months. In PR, you’d need “big news” to compete for limited print stories, and big stories don’t happen very often. And sponsorships or events, well, they only happen a few times a year.
Now, we’re talking about search engines that come looking for new information multiple times a day. They’re hungry and they need to be fed. If you don’t feed them fresh, new food (content), they won’t regard you as highly as sites that do. And they may not come to visit that often, if they don’t expect to get fed. Online marketing, therefore, requires a major change in mindset.
If you want to keep the search engine spiders happy and well-fed, you need to change the way you think about the lifespan of your information. You need to deliver good content on a regular basis and you need to keep it coming. I don’t mean to suggest that content becomes obsolete as soon as it’s published; in fact, if it’s good, it may get shared, bookmarked, retweeted, and linked-to — and in the process get noticed by a far larger audience than you anticipated. But the more frequently you add fresh content to your website or new posts to your blog, the better your chances of ranking well, being found, and building your brand.
The Bottom Line: if you want to market your brand on the web, you need to adopt a new marketing rhythm. Think short and compelling content, frequent publishing schedules, and active online engagement if you want to do effective branding in the virtual world. And measure your results so you can continually revise and improve as you move along.
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Blogging. Twitter. LinkedIn. YouTube. Facebook. Are you doing all of these? Some of these? Wondering how to pull it all together into a cohesive package and customer experience? You’re not alone. The brave new world of Internet Marketing has created lots of self-appointed experts who are happy to publish and share their advice, experience, and even training — much of it for free. Indeed, there’s a wealth of expertise available for anyone willing to put in the time to learn, experiment and launch all these new approaches.
In the middle years of this decade, I taught a Marketing course for a few years at the University of Washington 
