The day I realised every piece of content on the internet is trying to sell me something
A couple of months ago, a client asked me to write a blog post for their company. It was nothing unusual — the typical 2,000 word blog post that focuses on the right keywords.
This particular article was about listing the best podcasts on a specific topic. I wish I could tell you what the topic was, but I can’t because of contractual reasons.
I explained to my client it would take me a while to write, as I’d have to listen to the podcasts, read about the hosts, and so on. He replied:
“You don’t have to do all that, just rewrite what’s already written about it online.”
Considering my pay wasn’t linked to the amount of time I spent writing the blog post, that was, of course, the best way to go. So, I started writing the article, but gave up after half an hour.
I had to give my opinion on these podcasts and hosts, plus their topic that I have never heard before in my life. Everything I came up with was dull and vague, and seemed so fake. I hated it.
It was a lot harder than I thought to simply reprise others’ content.
I emailed my client and explained I couldn’t do it unless I spent several hours doing research, listening to the podcasts, and reading more about the hosts. But since this client didn’t want to pay me more for this specific article (with the reasoning: “It’s just another article, why would this one be five times more expensive?”), I decided not to do it.
A few weeks later, the article on this topic finally came out on my client’s blog. I clicked on it and saw a mirror image of the very article I had tried to write weeks earlier.
Whoever wrote it was just like me; they obviously knew nothing about the topic, and it showed.
Look, I get it. The author probably needed the money and didn’t think it was that big a deal to write a piece he didn’t know anything about. It doesn’t seem to harm anyone, and it’s a great promotion for the podcasts, as readers can become listeners with just the click of a link.
If you only examine it that way, then indeed, everything is alright. When you think about your audience, though, things start to get more complicated.
How many times have fake content and fake reviews fooled you?
The number one rule of content marketing is that quantity is more important than quality.
For content marketing to be efficient, you have to publish tons of content. Quality still matters, but it doesn’t matter as much, since it’s far harder to measure. While it’s quite easy to make sure your brand is producing 100 pieces of content per day, how can you quantify the quality of what you put out?
As a general rule, content marketers focus on quantity while making sure the quality is acceptable, which means that the content shouldn’t be incorrect. While quantity and correctness seem to be the only two variables regarding content creation, there is actually a third one, which is the degree of precision.
To keep it simple: your degree of precision is what’s going to determine both the correctness of your article and the quantity of content you can put out. If you choose to be precise while creating a correct piece of content, you need to do some research, which slows down the publishing process. Choosing high precision isn’t wise for content creation, as it prevents you from being highly efficient as a marketer. If you choose to be precise and efficient, chances are you won’t be able to spend time on gathering information which may lead to publishing incorrect content. This is no better a scenario, since your goal as a marketer is to publish correct content, and lots of it. èThat means the only viable option you have is to publish correct content quickly, which can be achieved by skipping the research aspect of your work. This does result in omitting precision. However, imprecision does not mean inaccuracy.
By being vague, you are both efficient and correct.
If you want to write a review about a podcast that you have never heard of before, you can say something like:
“Mr. X is doing a great job on his show. He’s really going deep into the specifics of insert whatever topic, with such a unique tone and approach. It’s very informative, and the longer format of the show really helps us dig with him into the very important and fascinating details of his topic.”
This paragraph is so vague that it could apply to any show, host, or topic. It’s so vague that it cannot be incorrect. Therefore, this paragraph has an acceptable quality and can be published.
As a content marketer, I was aware these kinds of practices happen all the time. Yet, I somehow never imagined that I could be exposed to them as a content consumer. Being asked to write a blog post about some podcasts I’ve never heard before definitely helped me realise how blindly I’ve been trusting what I’ve been reading online.
I began to look at content online through this vagueness prism (see diagram above).
I discovered that most of the reviews I had read in the past few months, while deciding whether or not to make a purchase, use the same strategy: they remain vague, while still telling you the product is excellent and that you should buy it through an affiliate link.
Not only are these reviews vague, but they’re biased. How can they really be objective when their goal is to make you purchase something through an affiliate link?
When I bring this up with friends, virtually all of them reply something like: “That’s why I only stick to YouTube for reviews, because you see people actually using the product and it’s easy to tell if they know what they’re talking about.”
After watching a few review videos and giving it some thought, I’ve realised it isn’t really that different on YouTube. You tend to find an affiliate link in the description of these videos, and the review itself is usually good; the major difference is the format. You have to deal with a long video (more than ten minutes means more money for the creator), and a hyper-optimised storyline designed to make sure you watch the entire thing (watchtime has a big impact on the ‘discoverability’ of a video). I’m not even going to mention the annoying clickbait thumbnails and titles.
It’s a never-ending problem. We are surrounded by information, and none of that information is there for the sake of informing. Information is made available to us for the sake of business, branding, or both.
But what about real content?
Fake content and fake reviews are one thing, but what about the real stuff? Like the content written by experts, journalists, and researchers?
It isn’t likely that the authors who spend time writing the information you find online do it without any sort of profit intention.
In 2019, I went through the process of immigrating to the United States (my wife is American). Like anyone wanting to learn more about a topic, we googled how to do it.
Most of the information we found was scary, and informed us that a single mistake could easily put both of us in jail. We saw statistics about how most cases are denied and how the process could take decades.
Naturally, we became quite nervous about navigating the process alone. We discussed getting an immigration lawyer to sort it all through.
That’s when it hit me: most of the resources we’d been reading were published on immigration lawyers’ websites. Of course, if you’re an immigration lawyer, you want to tell your average client that the process is long and hard, and a single mistake could ruin their life. Once a potential client is fearful enough, paying a couple thousand dollars for peace of mind doesn’t seem that big of a financial sacrifice. “It’s not paying, it’s an investment…”
Fast forward a year later: I’ve got my green card and we never hired a lawyer.
The profit doesn’t have to be money. It can be branding, education on a particular topic, conditioning an audience…
You can learn from what you read and consume online, but how reliable is it? Can you trust me if I tell you that managing social media is too complicated and technical and that you need to hire someone to do it? Or am I tricking you into thinking that you need to pay for someone like me to do the job? What if I tell you that you can manage your social media yourself? And that others claiming you need to hire professionals are just trying to sell you their services? And I could teach you how to do it, step by step, through an online course for $49.99? Am I being honest? Or am I just trying to sell you a course?
Everything online serves a business goal, and next to nothing is published solely for informational purposes anymore.
This content may exist, but good luck finding it.
Content marketing is an acquisition technique so powerful that fortunes are spent by hyper-optimised brands hyper-optimising their SEO to make sure their hyper-optimised content shows up first on Google. If you are running an informative blog without any sort of business intention, you just cannot compete with them.
The ‘Information’ Age
They say we live in an era of information. This phrase is used to describe the shift from industrial production to one based on information and computerisation. Information is now widely available, either for free or at a low price because of computers and the negligible costs of hosting files, duplicating them, and everything else that computerisation is able to do. Yes, we have increased access, but is information what we really have access to?
We do not live in an era of information, we live in an era of marketing disguised as information.
Online reviews are published by affiliate marketers. YouTubers optimise their videos to generate more ad revenue and increase their watch time. Experts pretend to educate their audience on a topic, when they’re really justifying their prices and practices. Blogs are hyper-optimised and are only designed to generate traffic to a website.
Marketers spread knowledge to get your attention, condition your thinking, and control your decisions.
When you go online to research a topic, you don’t enter into a sea of neutral information. Instead, you enter a fictional world created by a marketer, in which your problems become unbearable and the solution becomes easy, affordable, and ideal. You are not gathering knowledge about a topic, you are allowing a marketer to sell you a solution to a problem.
Diets are a great example. If you ask people what’s healthy to eat, they’ll probably answer something like “A little bit of everything, as long as it’s in moderation.” They’ll probably also tell you that fruits and vegetables are great and that meat shouldn’t be eaten that often.
Then if you start listening to diet gurus, they’ll tell you straight away that fruits and vegetables are incredibly inflammatory and that inflammation is responsible for lots of issues including digestive discomfort and even depression. Remember how sad and depressed you were when you were eating only salads for a week? That’s why!
You thought you were doing the right thing, but now, you don’t even know what the right thing is. Not knowing is uncomfortable, so now you need to know what the solution is. Receiving that solution usually entails making a purchase.
It would take a separate article to dive into the details of how marketing continually tries to make you feel bad for being ignorant about a topic; that alone is one of the most efficient marketing techniques.
To put it in a nutshell, marketers provide controversial information, explain that you just learned about “confidential” knowledge and that you are now more educated and intelligent than the others. Going back to the example from earlier: did you know that salads were not healthy?
Now you can brag about knowing to that friend that keeps ordering sad kale salads at restaurants. When your friend asks why, just throw out a bunch of unclear concepts such as depression, inflammation, toxins, and insulin response. (That’ll do the trick.)
The internet has been so full of marketing for years, that we are now confused about what marketing is. We associate marketing with information. It’s silly to refer to this period of time as the Information Age, as most of the information you can find has been written or published (and sometimes both) by marketers.
We think of parts of sales funnels as useful information.
We can see online content as the top part of the funnel. Content drives traffic to a site that has a goal: selling you something. If the bottom of the funnel is the purchase, the top of the funnel is acquired traffic.
When we share content we read on a blog, or a YouTube video, or any other form of online content, we are basically acting as a PR agent, working for free, exposing all of our friends and network to a product they might need (and might not know that they need yet). How many times have you posted about a problem on social media only for your friends to bombard you with “solutions” all of which have to be purchased?
The fact that we share so much content either on social media or in person shows how easy it can be to mis-characterise the content we find online. We may think we are being discerning about what we’re sharing, but some of the best marketing doesn’t look like marketing at all. We may think we are sharing useful information, but it’s really a sales pitch.
So what am I selling with this article?
I’m hoping, as you might expect, that some of you will end up subscribing to my mailing list because I might sell stuff on there later, and obviously, that would be a source of profit for me. I might also benefit from the traffic and the exposure this article just gave me. Who knows, maybe you’ll need a content marketer in the future?
But I’m not the only one selling something here, because professional marketers aren’t the only ones who create content.
User-generated content is a huge part of marketing. Every time you share something on social media, every time you comment on a post, and every time you react to a piece of information; you are a content creator and, whether you like it or not, you are selling something.
So, what are you selling?
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