So many companies think that they can pay pennies for content and end up surprised when their blogs remain unknown, their product doesn’t sell, their social media followers remain in the double digits and their online marketing strategy doesn’t get them anywhere.
It honestly blows my mind. Content is king and yet they don’t see the problem with putting him on a wooden horse and dressing him up in rags.
Most of the time when somebody comes at me with that perspective and offering me peanuts, I just say ‘thank you but no thank you.’ There are plenty of people out there who understand that good content costs good money.
Still, sometimes – perhaps it’s a slow week, perhaps they strike a chord in me, or perhaps I just feel like saying my piece – I feel the need to explain to a client that is offering me a paltry sum, why they’re going to have to seriously up their offer if they’re in any way serious about what they’re doing.
When that happens, this is what I tell them:
The halo effect
If your website has bad content people are going to think your product is bad. It’s as simple as that. You see, people don’t weigh up the pros and cons of your website, your product, your advertising and your color choices on different dimensions. Instead, they lump all of that on just one big dimension with on one end of it the word ‘good and on the other end the word ‘bad’.
It’s a well-known phenomenon in psychology, where they call it the halo effect. And it is why we think that people that are attractive are also more trustworthy and more intelligent than less attractive people.
[clickToTweet tweet=”Find out how the Halo Effect encourages social shares in this post on the 60 Second Marketer. ” quote=”The halo effect is a cognitive bias in which an observer’s overall impression of a person, company, brand, or product influences the observer’s feelings and thoughts about that entity’s character or properties. “]
What this means is that if you’ve got mediocre content people are going to think you have a mediocre product. Inversely, if you’ve got great content, well then people are going to think your product is fantastic as well. Now in which situation do you think they’re going to buy your product and in which situation do you think they’re going to go to your competitor’s website?
The internet is full of mediocre content
Heck, the halo effect only matters if people notice you and if you’ve got mediocre content, they won’t. The internet is one giant mountain of average content, which is poorly written and not very interesting.
Adding to that is a waste of your time. I’d love to say it’s also a waste of our time, but that’s not even true. You see, most people will have decided within 15 seconds whether your site is worth their energy.
Do you really think that your cheap writers are going to be able to win over your audience with their jagged word choices and run-on sentences in those few seconds? I didn’t think so. And so, people will simply go elsewhere, following their social networks and finding something that has more soul and more character. Yes, that probably means they’ll be looking at your competitor’s site, because they are paying for good content.
Mediocre content will not get linked to
If you spend money on advertising then once somebody has clicked through to your site and decided it’s not for them, that money is gone. That isn’t the case with great content. Great content will still be great tomorrow, next week and next year. That means that once it’s up it can have serious legs, pulling in readers and shoppers for a long time to come.
Great content has legs. Advertising never does.
Okay, fair enough, not every piece of great content will go the distance. But some will. And if they spread, there’s a good chance it will keep spreading – particularly if you don’t just have one piece of great content, but a great deal of it. That’s because they’ll end up reinforcing each other, with people coming in to see one of the articles you’ve, clicking on to other great content an then sharing that out across their social networks, their blogs or their work space.
In other words, lots of great content has a multiplication factor, with it feeding off each other and reinforcing each other.
Great content isn’t blatant
The problem with bad writers trying to push your product is that they don’t know when they’re being subtle and when they’re being ridiculously blatant. And if there is one thing that people hate, it is blatant attempts to push products on them, concealed in supposed ‘advice’ pieces. Doing that is a fantastic way to make certain people click away and never come back.
Good content producers won’t have that problem. They know how far they can push your product. They understand when they’re stepping over the line and they can tell you when you’re doing the same.
[clickToTweet tweet=”Learn how working with good content providers makes good business sense on 60 Second Marketer.” quote=”Good content providers can protect your reputation and make certain that you don’t destroy months of good marketing with one piece of bad marketing.”]
Great content gives your brand personality
Bad writing is just static words on a page. It doesn’t move you, it doesn’t affect you, it doesn’t engage you. In truth, it’s just wasted ink (or should I say pixels?). Good content, on the other hand, can do so much more. It creates a connection, it creates a personality, it creates a feeling.
It can sing to you.
And it won’t be the words that people remember when they leave a page, it’s the feeling that they got from them. So if you want your brand to be cool, or fresh, or young, then you need somebody who knows how understands content trends and can create that feeling for you.
Somebody who doesn’t understand the nuance of words and who doesn’t understand the soul of language will never be able to do that.
It establishes you as an authority
Great content that is well researched and written makes your look like an expert in the field. This will attract the most important visitors of all: influencers. And once these start reading your website, publishing your content and linking to what you’re doing, you know you’ve struck gold!
And if they keep it up for long enough, then this will become self-reinforcing, with the very fact that experts link to your stuff leading others to link to your stuff. That’s what they call social proof and it’s a position that’s hard to get to buy immensely valuable when you do.
Because once you’re in a position of authority you suddenly can start making claims that aren’t necessarily supported by research. In fact, numerous authorities are just quoted verbatim, with people saying ‘Bob said this, so it must be true.’ And so you can boost your brand, disparage the competition and position your brand, all because you chose to invest in making yourself an authority by having great content.
Poor content isn’t worth the money
Really, it comes down to this: If you’re going to pay poorly, then really, you shouldn’t pay at all. Poor content is not worth the money that you’re spending on it, as it won’t impress anybody and it will never really reach a large audience.
Only great content will do that.
[clickToTweet tweet=”Is it worth paying for great content? Absolutely. Find out why on the 60 Second Marketer. ” quote=”Poor content is not worth the money that you’re spending on it, as it won’t impress anybody and it will never really reach a large audience.”]
And yes, great content will cost you a great deal more than poor content. It can be somewhere in the range of ten to twenty times as much. The thing is, it will actually be worth a 100 times as much, because it has a chance to reach large audiences, position you as an authority, shape your brand, subtly influence your audience and create an identity for you and your brand.
And that’s why you should pay a great deal more than your offering. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.
About the Author: Michael Harred is a writer, who contributes to the national Florida Review and the university magazine Cypress Dome. He also writes for Lord of Papers. To find more about Michael – check his Twitter and Facebook.