A Content Strategy that Defies Conventional Wisdom
"You need to build your content strategy on rented land. In fact, you have no choice."
This somewhat unconventional wisdom sparked some interesting thought and conversation between Jay Harrington and me on a recent episode of The Thought Leadership Project podcast.
At issue: Should you be putting your content on your website and placing it behind “gates,” or sharing it freely on social media and elsewhere? Read the post by Mark Schaefer that started it all here.
Whereas we used to advocate for a hub-and-wheel approach, designed to lure traffic back to our home base (website or blog), the new model is all about "setting your content free," or as Mark puts it:
"In essence, every social media policy, practice, and procedure enacted over the past 10 years has made it nearly impossible to drive people to your “owned” media presence. So why are we still obsessed with this idea?"
For one, the algorithms that drive search engine results, social media feeds, and content delivery more generally are working against you, when you employ the traditional methodology of publishing first to your owned content channels then posting links to that content on social media.
Secondly, not only do social media and Google not want to direct traffic to properties they don’t own and control (i.e., your website and blog), the people you want to reach don’t really want to go there. At least not by instinct. They are in scroll mode. Browsing. Digesting nibbles, and being cautiously judicious about the content meals they sit down to.
Instead, you have to serve up your content where people are spending their time, and where search engines and social networks have no bias against your content. This means posting directly on LinkedIn, or Facebook, or Twitter, etc. It means no links. It means no hub-and-spoke.
Read Mark’s brilliant article for an in-depth exploration on this methodology, or listen to the podcast episode linked above to hear debate about the approach, as well as specific illustrations of how this can be done successfully.