Set your timer for 60 seconds.
How much content do you think is produced in that amount of time across the internet?
156 million emails sent. 452,000 Tweets. And that doesn’t even include blog posts!
If we take the counter from Worldometers as fact, more than 4 million blog posts are published every day, which comes out to nearly 2,800 posts per minute.
*Ding!*
We’ve officially reached peak content.
What is peak content?
Peak content is just a fancy term I made up to describe the state of our content marketing world today, and I use it to mean that we have far surpassed the maximum amount of content any single human could consume on any given topic in a day.
The numbers above are impressive, but they’re for the entire interwebs; yet even if we narrowed our field of vision down to a single niche, there’s more content out there than anyone could possibly consume each and every day.
I talked to a woman recently who has a wrapping paper blog, and I thought, that’s a super specific niche! So I googled it.
Google returned 55 million results. For wrapping paper blog. And that doesn’t even include Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc.
The point is, no matter what your industry, no matter what you write about, you are competing for your customer’s attention with more content than ever before.
You are shouting into a crowded room in which everyone else is talking, and no one is listening.
The answer is not more, but different
A few years ago, the answer to this problem was more: more blog posts, more tweets, more Facebook posts, more channels, more video, MORE.
Which may have contributed to the problem just a teensy bit.
More isn’t going to get you anywhere today, especially as a one-person shop or a very small business. You can’t possibly create enough content to drown out your competition for your audience’s attention.
The other problem is that you’re not only competing with other companies vying for their attention, you’re also competing with their friends and family, people they actually like and love, not to mention celebrities, TV shows, news (real and fake), memes, and maybe even the occasional book.
You cannot out-shout all of it.
So you must innovate.
Innovating in content marketing is like giving yourself a microphone or shining a spotlight on yourself in that crowded room; it’s more likely to get you noticed.
MORE content isn’t the answer; DIFFERENT content is.
And the good news is that different can actually be a lot less work than more.
I’m gearing up to release a series of interviews with online marketers with many different kinds of businesses in many different industries who are all doing something innovative with their content. The idea is to help you understand how to frame your content marketing so you can learn from what’s working for them, and start to see how to innovate with your own content marketing.
As someone who has pivoted from a photography website into a blog that inspires, I am very interested in reading all about this.
Particularly since I have not really started yet. If I could figure out how to be different out of the gate that could be a real good advantage.
Absolutely, Gigi! I’ll be talking about some specific ideas for how to figure that out for yourself in the next few weeks.
This is very interesting. Some teachers advocate posting a lot of content, some say not so much. It is hard to know what is best. But it is harder to keep up with all that content. Pretty soon you start looking like everyone else. I look forward t see what you have found.
Of course, it’s hard to make generalizations without knowing your business and your customers, Carolyn, but I pretty much stand by my less is more philosophy. 😉