Effort Isn't the Problem: Why Your Content Still Doesn't Matter
How hard work masks the real reason your content marketing isn’t working
The worst thing about building an online presence is the feeling of screaming into a void.
You can spend hours writing and perfecting.
You can include a level of detail unmatched by similar articles.
You can talk about things you know are popular.
Yet a day, a week, a month after yours has gone out, you haven’t heard anything. Hardly anyone’s reading or watching. No one’s messaged to point out that incredibly interesting tidbit it took hours to find. Google seems to want nothing to do with it.
And the traffic going to your business is at a standstill.
Meanwhile, someone else posts a much thinner article and suddenly their website is getting hits.
You did everything right. You’re making content on a topic you know people want. So why is it your content which is being lost among the noise?
Where “helpful” content goes wrong
Content that performs well tends to do at least one of two things:
Helps a consumer feel less stuck on something than they were 5 minutes ago
Or, makes them recognise or resonate with a problem they didn’t know they had
But it’s easy to get carried away.
We can mistake “helping the reader” with offering a 15,000-word epic that solves the problem in every which way.
We can mistake “resonate” with simply talking about something that is popular.
In the latter case, not understanding why a topic is attracting traffic is a death knell.
People make this mistake all the time in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). I made it myself for ages. We look at a keyword that’s getting traffic, then write content around it without actually realising what problem searchers are trying to solve.
Once we put something out into the world and it underperforms, the first temptation is to look inward.
Did I explain it clearly enough?
Why do people/Google hate my content?
It is…good enough?
You know what? I’ll go out on a limb and say: yes, the content is absolutely good enough!
So…why is it underperforming? Let’s explore why most “good content” doesn’t perform well.
What do we mean by “good content”?
I once gave a presentation with a simple topic: “What makes a great TV show?” (I worked in broadcasting, so don’t worry, promise it was productive…)
I delved into plot, settings, characters and the like. Pretty typical answers to the question. My conclusion? Shows like Breaking Bad, Friends and Person of Interest took the top spots.
The person following me took a different approach.
He argued: How are you assessing a “great” TV show? If it’s entertaining to watch, that’s great for the viewer. But if it makes decent money and costs barely anything to produce, it’s great for the broadcaster. That means, shows that fit this description are “great”, even if their stories suck.
Through this lens, soap operas are some of the greatest TV shows on the planet.
Bleak.
Anyway, we can see “content” in the same way.
When we aim to make our writing better, we add nuance to our stories. More context. We might worry our conclusion isn’t water-tight, so we add caveats. We might end up with the Breaking Bad of blog posts.
But maybe your audience doesn’t want a heavy crime drama.
They want something much easier to watch. They want a silly story set in a small town with tangled romances and bitter rivalries.
In this case, the “soap opera” blog post would be giving readers exactly what they want. It doesn’t matter if:
The story is terrible
The acting is horrendous
It was cheap and low effort to produce
If the work gives people exactly what they want, it’s aligned with their intent. And now, once you’ve written this piece, it gets clicks.
And ultimately, what makes a greater piece of content—one which tells an objectively excellent story, or one that gets clicks?
Why “high-effort” content loses
Heavily researched and detailed writing isn’t actually what people want most of the time. People won’t often spend 15 minutes just for “interesting” on the internet.
Think about the last time you landed on a site because of a guide which solved a problem you had. Did you sit and read all the context around it, or did you head directly for the actionable outcome?
Let’s say writing about “Lancashire Hotpot” suddenly became very popular.
We could play into the trend by writing a bunch of fluff about Lancashire Hotpots, as many recipe articles do. And yes, they get clicks, but the recipe is still the only part I’ve ever known anyone to care about.
If they changed their promise from “How to cook a Lancashire Hotpot” to “An extensive history of Lancashire Hotpots”, I reckon they’d be a lot less popular.
If we then played into the trend by writing about different kinds of potatoes we can use in a Lancashire Hotpot, we’d be spectacularly missing the point.
It doesn’t matter how “great” we make our content.
If we haven’t considered why people want to read about the topic, it’s going to flop.
The goal is not to “impress” your readers
People don’t read content to admire it.
They’re looking for things that will help them, even if they didn’t know they had the problem in the first place. Yes, it would be nice if people read educational pieces just to broaden their horizons. But it’s just not the way we are, especially online.
Pieces with more information are fine—if the extra effort to read it is worthwhile to the user.
But often, we aren’t adding the extra stuff for the reader’s benefit. Usually, a lot of the fluff we add to our own work is because:
We thought it was interesting
We wanted the reader to see how well we know the subject, or how much effort we put into writing
Or, worst of all, simply because we didn’t know how to make the same point more succinctly
But as much as it sucks, effort and value aren’t aligned. We don’t get extra points for more detail—unless the detail strictly helps the reader with the problem they set out to solve.
It’s why so much “great” content feels like you’re screaming into the abyss.
Not because it isn’t good. Because it never creates recognition. It’s because readers can’t see themselves in the writing.
If your content isn’t bringing traffic, its quality probably has nothing to do with it. The reason flimsy blog posts get clicks is because they’re answering a demand.
And that’s good news, because that’s the easy part to fix.
Once you align and publish content with real demand and clear intent, your content will stop feeling random, and will start working for your business.
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