Why We Write Meaningless Content

Digital marketing professionals will tell you almost unanimously that when it comes to blogging, do it frequently. Your competition is putting out content weekly, daily, multiple times per day, so hurry up! The pressure to put out content is overwhelming and can often lead to poor decisions.

To be more specific, it often means the ol’ content mill is mostly spitting out filler content.

I define “filler” as content that serves no other purpose than to maintain a content stream. It is the byproduct of a digital marketing environment that values activity over meaning. Search engines demand that we at least say something; it does reward us for proving the value of our content with engagement, but one genius, life-changing post is no substitute for consistent, frequent blabber.

In a word: crap.

Is that the way we want to live our professional lives? Do we really want to put words out into the world that have little or no meaning to us just to stimulate search engines?

Let me clarify what I’m not saying. I don’t think everything you (or I) blog about has to be a perfect gem. Sometimes crap spills through despite our best intentions, and that is okay. What matters is that we at least make an attempt to articulate what we believe, from core values, from the heart, from a genuine desire to communicate something we think will create connection, solve problems, give life.

In a word: authenticity.

We’re all under a lot of pressure to shout louder and more consistently than our competition via platforms that make it easy for everyone to make noise. Let’s slow down – heck, let’s even miss a week of posting if necessary – and ask ourselves if we’re still putting something of value into the world.

We’re all going to fail and put filler out there from time to time. Let’s just make sure that more often than not, when we fail, it’s in pursuit of something more than website traffic.