Importance of Creating Content by Always Keeping Users in Mind

There are two major ways to drive traffic to your web contents on the internet. Either you can drive them organically, by creating good content and letting people come to you, or you can drive them inorganically by paying for online advertising and getting traffic from different sources.  I use both of them together. People visit my website through search engines and social media without any cost incurred, and also I pay for traffic on platforms like Google Ads and Facebook Ads.

Why is Content Creation Important?

Paying for content and paying for paid advertising is similar to the difference between buying a home and renting a home. If you do not have ample money with you, you won’t be able to have your own home. However, you can stay in a rented home by paying rents monthly. Apparently, you will find that renting a home is a cheaper option. However, if you continue to stay in the rented home for more than ten years, the rent would cost you more than the buying price of the house. Home is an asset that gives returns over a period of time, not immediately. Creating content that attracts traffic over a certain period is just similar to investing in an asset such as home.

Content is what attracts the attention of the audience. The higher the quality of the content you create the higher attention you will receive from the traffic. The more the volume of content, the more will be the chance for you to attract a large number of people in search for different types of content. When you create on your own, you are attracting people by yourself. When you advertise through various mediums to fetch traffic, you are actually renting out the attention from other content creators. By using paid advertising, you are interrupting those who are paying attention to other websites who have the content.

All of us think of Google as a search engine and Facebook as a social media. But what actually they have is content. Google organises the information of the whole world using a sophisticated algorithm, which gives you results based on your search. Facebook collects and organises content from our friends, colleagues and family and delivers it on our news feed. YouTube provides a platform for content creators, and people visit YouTube for the content it delivers. So never make the mistake of thinking content marketing and paid advertising as two different things. In reality, both depend on content for the attention of internet users.

Content Marketing or Paid Advertising- which survives in the long run?

In content marketing, we draw traffic through content creation on our own website platforms. In paid advertising, we try to fetch the attention of those people who are attracted to content created by other content creators. The sole reason why paid advertising still exists is because not everyone wants to create content all the time. Some people want traffic in the short term. They do not have enough time to wait and watch. If used properly, paid advertising can be a great source to earn traffic in the short term. If we know how to convert the traffic we pay for into profits, we can scale paid advertising easily. Those who are interested to build wealth on the internet for the long term, they should build their own content assets and continue creating new assets. This would help in increasing the overall value of their content over time.

In paid advertising, traffic comes to the website, a few of them come into our marketing funnel and the remaining people bounce off. A small number of people in the funnel will buy our products and services, and the rest are going to exit the funnel. The profits from this funnel might pay for the advertising traffic now, but with time, the cost of paid advertising keeps growing due to increased competition from various companies to attract the same target audience over the web. However, content marketing has the capability to fetch new visitors to our website even after ten years. Only thing that you have to keep in mind is that your website should be healthy and accessible by internet users.

Conclusion

Thus, focus more on content marketing. Learn to create and distribute content efficiently. Learn to create content that your target audience wants to read. Do market research, keyword research. Ask your users directly what they want to learn about from you. Distribute the content over email marketing, social media channels and re-marketing. If your content is really good, people will like it, share it, get linked to it from their websites and subscribe to you to get more content from you. That will be the best way to grow your brand’s presence throughout the web.