I recently met Jono Alderson, former Head of SEO at Yoast, at the Marketing Festival in Brno. He gave a fascinating talk on the state of content marketing.
Several of his observations resonated with me, including the insularity of using the same SEO checklists as everyone else as a starting point for building anything.
The result is a set of similar articles, written for search engines, not written for people. The actual writing is often treated as an afterthought.
As Jono said in a recent interview:
“You’re recursively optimizing a very small corpus until it’s all just word soup.”
Now that content marketing is turbocharged with AI, the word soup is endless. And because LLMs digest the existing word soup as source material, the future word soup is even more similar.
This reminds me of Ian Whitworth’s description of AI-generated content as “endless words no one wants.”
Jono also shared that the clock is ticking on this race to the end as search engines reinvent themselves with AI to provide people with answers, rather than endless search results. He urged people to remember who the real audience is and what problems you can help them solve.
I don’t know what the future of content marketing will look like (and I’ve actually never been that crazy about the term “content”). But I still think that the lost art of writing is important for communicating with others. It can be assisted by AI tools. But the path of least resistance is to turn everything over to the AI. And that seems like a race to the bottom.
Whenever I wonder about the state of writing, I turn to Ann Handley (who kindly wrote the foreword to my last book). It has an insightful and refreshing character newsletter on writing and marketing called “Total Anarchy.”
Ann has some suggestions on how to incorporate AI as a tool to help you write more efficiently, such as asking ChatGPT what’s missing from your piece. But ultimately, he recommends that AI be a tool, not a substitute, for great writing.
of Anna more recent The advice was refreshingly analog: “Start with Pen + Paper.”
As she explains:
“Don’t worry about “writing.” You’re welding the scaffolding for ideas that will become writing.
“Why this works:
“You type more slowly than you type. Working with analog tools slows you down. Your high-speed locomotive brain doesn’t scream ahead to get to Next Sentence Depot. It has to wait patiently for your hands to catch up, like a driver of a car at a railway crossing waiting for the train van.
“That slow pace ultimately yields better insights.”
And ultimately, writing without better knowledge really doesn’t make much sense.
Here are some related drawings I’ve drawn over the years:
“Working is more fun with markets framed on the wall”
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