3 Types of Content Marketing You Want to Avoid in 2018

Publishing content used to be simple. You’d write a piece, publish it, and the traffic would flow. It’s not that easy anymore, and you need to know which strategies don’t work.

The internet has come a long way in 20 years. Look back to the turn of the millennium. All you had to worry about back then was producing written content for desktop audiences. Mobile and YouTube didn’t even exist.

Today, your content marketing strategy must involve many types of content marketing.

You can’t get away with the strategies you used “back in the day”. Search engines don’t like them anymore, and visitors won’t read your content. You just waste time and money on churning out irrelevant pieces.

Frankly, your content marketing strategy needs an update. We’ve highlighted three outdated content marketing examples.

Strategy #1 – Creating Keyword Riddled Content

Every search engine optimization (SEO) article you read bashes you over the head with the importance of keywords. If you’ve kept track, you’ll notice how the advice has changed over the years.

Today, we use keywords sparingly. One or two usually serve the purpose of telling search engines and readers what your content is about.

So why do you still have content that’s laced with keywords?

In the “olden” days, writers created posts with keywords in mind. They forgot about the user in their chase for that all-important search engine spot. You can see the effects in lots of old pieces of content. Every forced sentence contains a keyword relevant to the site. But it’s irrelevant to the reader. The sentence offers nothing of value. It’s just fluff to fit in a keyword.

Remarkably, many content creators still use this strategy. Any site owner that churns out the same content for each location they serve is at fault. So, too, is any unoriginal piece crammed full of unneeded keywords.

There’s no perfect formula for figuring out how many keywords to use in a piece. Instead, create pieces with your audience in mind. If you offer valuable, relevant content, the keywords fall into place.

Strategy #2 – Only Creating One Type of Content

I bet, you have some favorite types of website content.

Perhaps you’re a writer. Or you love booting up Photoshop and creating images.

That’s great, but there’s no variety to it. Your website’s users expect more from you. Furthermore, you can’t expect all users to react in the same way to your content. Some enjoy sitting down to read a 2,000 word article. Others prefer a nice tutorial video, or a snappy infographic.

Here’s the point. Sticking to one content type creates a poor content marketing strategy. Share on X You may write great articles. The steak of articles even. But nobody wants to eat steak every day. There’s such a thing as too much. If you stick with one content type, you limit yourself.

Social media, YouTube, and repurposing offer you methods for varying your content strategy. Use them, or accept the fact that you’ll lose visitors to your competitors.

Strategy #3 – Article Spinning

Article spinning involves rewriting content to make it appear new.

Sounds like repurposing, right?

Wrong!

Article spinning focuses solely on search engines. The aim is to rewrite a piece just enough so that it doesn’t get flagged for duplication. The idea’s simple. Get it right, and you can get the same piece of content to rank several times for the same keyword.

Article spinners rewrite content hundreds of times, and post it on any website they can. The technique often involves guest blogging and article networks. But you don’t create interesting content as a gateway to your own. You just rehash what you’ve done already, so people bounce away from your original piece.

Guest blogging works. It gets your work in front of a new audience, which increases your content’s reach. Repurposing isn’t article spinning. When you repurpose old content, you find new ways to present it. Think turning a step-by-step article into a video, or an infographic.

Spinning is a low-effort way of making your old content new. Search engines can detect it. Readers can recognize it. You must avoid it.

Conclusion

The difficult thing about these strategies is that they’ve all worked at some point. Depending on your industry, they may still work for you. But they’re all outdated. Search engines punish those who use them, and your visitors have wizened up to them.

Focus your content marketing strategy on your visitors and customers. You can’t do that with these content types. They either try to manipulate search engines, or prevent you from reaching the widest audience.