Chris Abraham

Chris Abraham is a pioneer in online social networks and publishing with a natural facility for anticipating the next big thing.
August 29

Content Is King

So today an email got passed around our group that linked to a nicely written article by Brian Enns of Enmark Performance Development, which provides, “Sales Guidance for Marketing Agencies”.

The article is titled, Googles Impact on Business Development was published in the monthly Win Without Pitching Newsletter.

What Brian gets right is his focus on content. Brian’s general argument is that in order to build a reputation via Google you need to have thick content - lots of writing. You need to write about your expertise and publish articles, white papers etc on your site. Show your knowledge and expertise upfront!

Brian argues that this is something new, in previous era’s it was much harder for individuals or businesses that were thinking about using your services to verify your knowledge. Now, well, they go online, they dig around, read your site and figure out what this person does or doesn’t know. And, they are not limited by geographic location, now I can compete with dudes in London who compete with dudes in South Africa.

“In a Google world there is no more misrepresenting expertise or focus in private conversation. The truth is out there and can be had in less than a minute”

Once this truth is out, you gotta refine and rework it, write about your specilization, focus on what your business does best, creating more and more depth to your site - then Google goes Yahoo, and pushes you up the ranking!! (well maybe it is more a “Yahoo goes Google”) For Brian this increased content helps you get better and better rankings and bring in increasing business.

For Brian business is driven towards specialization, no longer generalizations, this is increasingly viable as the net breaks down so many geographic boundaries that previously limited companies available markets.

Heck, AHLLC is a good example of this power - we are all over the place geographically, but extremely focused market wise.

The one part of the article that I have a bigger problem with is the assumption Brian makes in terms of the “authenticity” of businesses online. What a business can do is build a site, with all kinds of content that leads people to believe that they “know what they are doing”. It can get the nice ranking and still be, well not completely authentic. In other words, the web can be used to sell fact as well as fiction. This issue of authenticity continues to exist.

However, the power is in the community, the feedback mechanism! What have others had to say about you and your business. It is this factor that makes Ebay work, and it is something that will continue to hold relevance and grow in importance as the web gets more and more crowded. So, in my opinion, not only are you talking about rich content on your site, but also getting feedback. I think it is important to get others talking about you, reviews, links, comments etc. This is what gives a potential client a lot of information. Word of mouth is always king - “who you know, not what you know” still matters!!

In the end having a nice slick site, with lots of content and high rankings is all good. But, what are clients saying about you, what hits do I get when I am looking at reviews and experiences utilizing your company. In this way, perhaps, it drives home the point that Brian makes about truth and authenticity.

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