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Gut Check Time: The “Are You Sure You Want Organic Traffic” Checklist

(Editorial note: I originally wrote this post over on the Hit Subscribe blog.)

Today I’m going to dive into a topic and a situation that comes up constantly among clients and prospects.  It’s the “You say you want organic traffic, but do you really?” conversation.

Historically, I’ve tended to have this conversation live.  But it comes up so often that I’m going to immortalize it here, in written form, and hope that it’s broadly helpful.

The lede here is that only maybe half of the businesses that come to us asking about organic traffic are actually prepared to make it a reality.  Thus if you’re reading this, there’s a coin-flip chance that you’ve said you want it but you’re actually going to beg off when the rubber meets the road.  It’s probably even more of a coin-flip if someone linked you here.

So let’s walk through a list of questions to ask yourself.  You should come away with a sense that, yes, you’re all in, or no, it’s not the distribution channel for you.  Either outcome is good since it points you in the direction of what to do next.

Of Course You Want Organic Traffic

I’d like to start out with a brief clarification.  Of course you want search engine traffic, in a vacuum.  Who wouldn’t?

After all, framed this way, your choice is “Would you like a search engine to deposit people on your site or not?”

Who would say no to that?

Sadly, though, whatever anyone may have told you, that’s the wrong question.  Or at least it’s not a refined enough question.

A better version reads as follows.

Are you prepared to turn a decent portion of your site into a somewhat basic form of Q&A, writ large?

Not quite as clear-cut now, is it?  I can psychically hear the doubt creeping in:

  • But we have original ideas we should talk about!
  • Why would we write about something other people have already written about on the internet?
  • Our users will think we don’t know what we’re talking about if we cover basic subjects.

If you’re having thoughts like these, you’re going to either need to change your mental model of using your blog and your site or else think of a different content distribution paradigm than search traffic.

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The Agency Client Bill of Rights

(Editorial note: I originally wrote this post over on the Hit Subscribe blog)

Lately, within the account management function of Hit Subscribe, we’ve been swatting around a philosophical question.

Rather than having disparate sales and account management departments, could a unified customer success group serve both functions for our business?

We currently, tentatively believe that the answer is “yes,” and we’re proceeding accordingly.  But to make this work, we realized that we’d need to provide collateral about how we work with clients prior to when we’ve historically done this: during kickoff and onboarding.

This realization dovetailed nicely with the fact that a lot of the reader/viewer questions I answer in my freelancer Q&A video series are essentially about how to conduct yourself as the owner of a practice.  So I figured I’d write it up, get buy-in from Hit Subscribe’s account managers, and publish the results.

And that’s what this post is.

Scroll with your rights written on it

I’m framing this as a list of rights (with a table of contents for navigability), and I intend our clients and prospects to be the primary audience, with newly hired account managers as a secondary audience.  If any other readers enjoy this or get some use out of it, hey, it’s always nice to put a little collateral good into the world when you can.

What follows is what you can expect from Hit Subscribe—and what we hope you’ll hold us to account on.  We also have a PDF, cheat sheet version you can download, if you like.

  1. The Right to Freedom from Gimmicks
  2. The Right to Minimize Your Risk
  3. The Right to the Best Deal
  4. The Right to Non-Commitment
  5. The Right to Refunds
  6. The Right to Know Prices Up Front
  7. The Right to Labor Transparency
  8. The Right to Unconflicted Advice
  9. The Right to Easily Understood Deliverables
  10. The Right to Vendor Accountability
  11. The Right Not to Play Referee
  12. The Right to Fast, Predictable Responses

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My Experience at DevOps World, 2023: Empowering Enterprise Engineers

Editorial note: This post originally appeared on the DevOps World blog, arising from me attending that event as “press.”  I’m going to be at the next one, this Thursday, in Silicon Valley.  If you’re in the area and able to make it, let me know and we can have lunch.)

I have a renewed sense of hope for the condition of the enterprise software developer.

For anyone familiar with me or my career, this is quite a statement. For the rest of you, to whom I’m some internet rando, I won’t bore you with more details about me than are absolutely necessary to understand my take. Suffice it to say that in 2017, I wrote a book whose central thesis was that software developers should initiate an exodus from the enterprise.

Fast forward 6 years to now, when I just spent the day as “press” at DevOps World, listening to a series of talks and interacting with participants and sponsors. Based on what I’ve seen here, my outlook for the future of enterprise developers is far less bleak than it was back then.

I’ll dive into the specifics of why, but the overarching theme is that it seems organizational change in the enterprise has evolved from a long history of something being done to software developers into something being done for them.

At this conference, I heard and saw a lot of innovation aimed at earning developer buy-in, relieving their toil, and sending them back to their various enterprises with pragmatic, actionable ways to improve their situations.

Where It Started: The Endless Agile Transformation

One more biographical detail, and then I’m done. I promise.

In the mid-aughts, starting about 10 years ago and running up until I wrote my book, I earned my living as a management consultant in software, almost exclusively in the enterprise. I specialized in static code analysis for strategic decisions, but often found myself in enterprises, helping them answer the basic question, “why is our agile transformation not working?”

Back then, DevOps was scarcely on the radar for enterprises. Instead, everyone was doing a so-called “agile transformation,” which generally meant having a different, Scrum-flavored series of meetings and changing very little else. These firms were usually in year 6 of a 2 year transformation, and were still working on the “define what agile means” OKR.

The Bad Old Days of Shifting Burdens to the Left

If that sounds cynical, fair enough. But ask anyone in those orgs at the time, and they’ll almost certainly laugh ruefully and call it accurate.

One of the day’s speakers, Thomas Haver, referred to these sorts of institutions as “technology museums,” and I can’t think of a better turn of phrase. When you’re gluing Perl scripts to mainframes as part of some internal line of business initiative, you’re not using the latest and greatest, and you’re probably not knocking out that agile transformation any time soon.

But I think the central problem that engineering groups in these organizations encountered back then was neither the comically old technology nor the glacial pace of organizational change, per se. Rather, developers found themselves buried under the crushing weight of endless todo lists, as their employers heaped an ever-growing mountain of burdens on them.

Organizational Change Done To Developers

I can remember some interesting characters that I met during my consulting travels:

  • The “schema specialist,” who did nothing but review developer-proposed changes to any database, anywhere, and give them notes on what to do instead.
  • The “environment administrator,” who did nothing but review (and usually reject) requests to move JARs from one non-prod environment to another, and make sure the proper digital paperwork had been submitted.
  • The “integration architect,” whose contributions I never managed to figure out, but could reject seemingly anything that created an interface between two dev teams.
  • The “demo guy,” who engineers would have to work with to create power points for their sprint demos (instead of the customary “working software”).

I could go on, but I’m trying to make a point, not supply fodder for xkcd. And my point is that everything these organizations did heaped work on the engineers, including the creation of roles that seem like they should theoretically specialize work away from those same engineers.

To earn a living as an enterprise developer in the age of the agile transformation was to be an endless collector of bureaucratic toil. Write your software, submit compliant schema requests, fill out the JAR movement form in triplicate, please the integration architect, and make sure the power point guy knows that you’ve been delivering enough story points.

By the end of my consulting years, I hit peak cynicism. I thought developers should leave and not tolerate this situation, and I thought enterprises should give up on creating software and delegate that activity to vendors and future acquisition targets.

I’m pleased to see that things look different than when I left consulting 6 years ago.

Moving to Organizational Change For Developers

DevOps World had a common, refreshing theme. Tracy Bannon captured it well during a discussion panel: “The idea of shift left is not ‘dump it on the development team’.”

In opening remarks for the event, CloudBees CEO Anuj Kapur pointed out that a poll of CloudBees customers found that developers only spend 30% of their time, well, developing. The rest is lost in some flavor of dark work or another.

Everyone at the event seemed to agree that this is a wholly unacceptable state of affairs, and that the path forward is one that involves a rethinking of what is asked of developers and what is done for them.

Removal of Toil

The first main event theme that I observed centered around eliminating toil. Rather than schema and integration specialists forcing checklists on the developers, conference participants explored the use of tooling and organizational tactics to eliminate as much toil as possible from the world of enterprise engineers.

In the conference keynote, “Go Big, Say Yes,” CloudBees announced product changes with a direct impact. They made CloudBeesCI highly available and highly scalable, meaning that organizations have immediate relief from problems such as bottlenecked jobs, needless time waiting for workspace downloads, and infrastructure-related build failures. All of this rolls up to a very simple value proposition: developers using their time instead of killing it, waiting for infrastructure.

When the engineers present saw the new Pipeline Explorer feature demonstrated, they burst into spontaneous applause, even though there was no break in the presentation. And the reason is obvious: they could see an end to loading some gigantic text file into an IDE so that they could search awkwardly for the reason a build bombed out. Pipeline Explorer lets them get there immediately, without the pain.

This idea wasn’t limited, either, to product announcements or even the talks. I watched the folks at Gradle, one of the sponsors, demonstrate a way to identify and troubleshoot flaky unit tests and the ability to use machine learning to prioritize executed tests based on changes to the codebase.

And Redgate did a demo of an offering that allowed source controlling database schema changes and keeping them consistent, in sync, and drift-free across environments. And all of this without a “schema specialist” in sight to scold them – just engineers safely changing the schema as needed.

Developer Buy-In

The engineer enablement theme wasn’t limited to tooling, either. One of the main takeaways that a recovering management consultant like myself couldn’t help but notice was the theme of getting buy-in to broader goals from the folks tasked with delivering them.

For instance, Katie Norton explained the concept of a software bill of materials (SBOM) and the broader concept of a software supply chain. Rather than a checklist of context-free “best practices,” this talk, aimed at an engineering audience, used practical analogies and diagrams to illustrate the challenges around and the gravity of managing the risk presented by using open source components.

This seems a lot better to me than how this risk was typically managed 10 years ago in enterprises: “don’t use open source.”

There was a talk that explained the idea of attestation and why it matters, encouraging teams to move compliance from a rote series of tasks to an objective, auditable and, most importantly, automated set of data. The mission was to avoid what presenter John Willis referred to as “governance theater,” wherein engineers would rename incidents to “cases” because of the reduced scrutiny that invited, or simply upload the same screenshot of a test run for 2 years to demonstrate that they had achieved code coverage.

Instead of tsk-tsking, this deceit was recounted with understanding. Of course teams did this when they were trying to ship features on time – it was the only way to get their work done. The developers here don’t need to change; the organization does.

Practical, Actionable Advice

Perhaps the most powerful motif of the event was that it distilled advanced practices and industry insights into easily actionable takeaways for participants.

For instance, speaker Julia Furst talked about the impact of generative AI on DevOps practices and suggested a series of tools that attendees could go and investigate. Ali Ravji and Mihir Vora from Capital One distilled hard-won experience building scalable CI/CD pipelines into concrete suggestions: focus on reusability, parallelization, and failure planning.

And, how’s this for practical and actionable? “Contribute to open source and adopt a plugin.”

Mark Waite, Senior Engineering Manager at CloudBees gave a really cool talk about how contributing to open source goes well beyond putting collateral good into the world and is actually good business. He relayed his experience building a CI solution for his XP team back in 2003, before Jenkins existed, and how that required a dedicated team member to maintain.

A much better solution, had it existed, would have been to contribute to Jenkins and use it. So he encouraged attendees to go contribute to open source to improve it, fix defects, and patch vulnerabilities that can help their organizations upstream, before things become expensive.

The Joy of Being Less Cynical

While I certainly enjoy a good, cathartic rant from time to time, it’s not exactly fun being cynical. Usually, it’s a sign that you need to take a vacation or start a different job.

So it was nice to circle back to the world of enterprise software development, after years away from it, and find it far more promising than I remember. It was nice to see an enterprise less focused on crushing engineers under the weight of endless compliance tasks and more focused on helping them ease that burden.

If schema specialists and build administrators must exist, at least they can do so in supporting roles and with powerful tools, instead of the promise of toil for their colleagues. DevOps World was a fun event, sure, but it was also a philosophical palette cleanser for me.

Incidentally, the next stop on the tour is in Silicon Valley October 18th and 19th, and I’m planning to attend that event as well. If you’re in the neighborhood and so inclined, grab yourself a pass and we can have lunch or a beer at the happy hour.

 

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Failing Without Knowing Why: The Tragedy Of Performative Content

(Editorial note: I originally wrote this post over on the Hit Subscribe blog.  I’ll be cross-posting anything I think the DaedTech audience might find interesting and also started a SubStack to which I’ll syndicate marketing-related content.)

I’m going to dive into something today that I consider nuanced but profound.  And I’m going to attempt to do this with some modicum of decorum, since most of the (non-freelancer) content I create for Hit Subscribe I intend specifically for clients and prospects.

It’s a risky “call your baby ugly but do it gently” kind of moment.

So let me inoculate a bit against the fallout by assuring you that I have, in fact, created performative content.  I should banish this blog post from 5 years ago back to the performative ether from which it lumbered.  But if I do that, the healing cannot truly begin.

In all seriousness, though, that post is garbage, and I probably knew it as I was creating it. I mean, come on, past Erik.  Is it really necessary to explain to an audience of content marketers that tutorials are a kind of blog post?

But the insipid nature of that premise didn’t stop me, and it probably won’t stop you, from creating performative content—at least not until you understand the true, subtle problem with it.

Performative content is a recipe for slowly failing at content marketing, and more broadly at business, in a non-obvious way and without ever understanding why.

Defining Performative Content

Let me start with a heuristic, rather than a formal definition, to further your understanding of performative content.

  • Non-performative (let’s call it “useful”) content casts the reader as the most important party to the content.
  • Performative content casts the creator as the most important.

If you look back at my “here are some kinds of blog posts,” uh, blog post, who is this content for, exactly?  Who is both a member of Hit Subscribe’s potential lead pool and also unaware that different content themes and the marketing funnel exist?  Absolutely nobody.

But that’s not the point of the post.

The point of that post was, “Hey, look at us, we’ve written for different blogs!  Also we know a thing or two about blog posts and even the marketing funnel!”  The reader wasn’t the hero of that story.  I was.

And that is the essence of performative content.

The Ostensible Reader Journey Here

Let’s walk, in detail, through the sequence of events that would make this approach work.  But let’s do it from the reader’s perspective.

  1. A reader comes to the site and consumes the performative content.
  2. The reader thinks, “Gosh, what kind of grade would I give this content?”
  3. “Why I’d give it an A+ since this person clearly understands the thing they do for a living.  Just top-notch stuff here!  A person that understands the thing they do is probably good at the thing they do!”
  4. Finally, the reader then thinks, “My God, where’s my wallet? I should give money to the business whose site I’m on—right now!”

I’m exaggerating here for effect, but the sequence, is, at its core:

  1. Reader consumes content
  2. Reader gives creator a (hopefully good) grade.
  3. Reader hires content creator.

Does This Work?  Let’s Hire a Plumber

To understand where, if anywhere, this fits into marketing to potential buyers, let’s reverse the roles here.  Imagine that you’re not considering what content to create but rather that you’re hiring a plumber to fix a leaky faucet.

Dripping faucet

Courtesy of https://unsplash.com/@zhenhappy

You probably start by googling “plumbers in my area” and seeing what comes up.  And let’s put a pin in the subject of the undifferentiated commodity offering, since that’s the bucket that performative content puts you in.  We’ll get to that a little later.

You’ve got a few plumbers in mind, with slightly different rates, and now you need to decide what to do next.  Do you:

  1. Go to their blogs and see who has written the most compelling articles about the chemical composition of plumber’s putty and choose the most eloquent and knowledgeable plumbers?  Or…
  2. Hire whichever one is relatively cheap and can come out quickly.

Or maybe you don’t do any of that, because you remember that your brother-in-law has a friend that’s a plumber, and that friend once gave you great advice that you didn’t need a new water heater but rather just a new part.  Maybe you’d strongly favor the partner that had actually helped you with a problem over the one with all of the plumbing certs and pipe putty blog posts.

Resumes Are the Platonic Ideal of Performative Content

In the plumbers’ world, performative content seems absurd.  And, I’d argue that it’s generally absurd, but it doesn’t seem that way since it’s baked into everything we do professionally and everything we did growing up.

To illustrate what I mean, let’s consider another instance of

  1. Create content as performance.
  2. Receive grade on content.
  3. Profit.

I’m talking about the ultimate piece of performative content, the essence of performative content: the resume.  The resume is based on earlier pieces of performative content found in the scholastic world, such as tests, essays, and college applications, and it is the most word-dense imaginable piece of performative content:

  1. Pack as much vacuous, self-congratulatory content as possible into an 8.5 x 11 space.
  2. Send it out into the world for grading.
  3. Get a job and receive money.

This is, quite literally, how we learn from almost birth to secure advancement and money.  Perform, earn grade, profit.

Performative Content Requires a Captive and Superior Audience

If you blast out of the employed world and start a business, you will learn, sometimes brutally, that winning business does not work this way.  I hadn’t really learned that five years ago, but I understand it now.  Most humans won’t bother to grade your performative content because it is profoundly uninteresting. (I once wrote an entire post about new business owners getting this wrong, if you’re interested).

Have you ever poured yourself a cup of coffee on a Saturday morning, kicked back, and read a few dozen resumes for fun?

Of course not.  Resumes are the most boring imaginable content.

Personally, I am constitutionally incapable of reading resumes. When people send them to me, my eyes cross.  And that happens when I’m actually hiring people.

But those with better attention spans than me for vacuous content may, in fact, actually read them in a very, very specific situation.  Like when they’re forced to.  When they’re trying to make a decision among otherwise undifferentiated options, they will, grudgingly, read your performative content, grade you, and pick you.

But for this to work, they must already have committed to considering you for whatever role or partnership is on the table.  That means whatever else performative content may be (e.g., weak and obsequious sales enablement), it isn’t content marketing.

So, In the End, What Is It?

Because I am brevity-resistant, I’ve surrounded the idea without defining it.  Let me close the section with a proposed definition.

Performative content is content that exists primarily to showcase its creator in a favorable light.

Mirror

Courtesy of https://unsplash.com/@steffen_l

I would argue that content marketing that is fit-for-purpose comes with compelling answers to three core questions:

  1. Who is this content for? (The reader or “persona”)
  2. How will it help them?
  3. What do we want them to do next?

Performative content has comically self-serving and mendicant answers to these questions:

  1. Who is this content for? Anyone willing to give me money.
  2. How will it help them? It won’t.
  3. What do I want them to do next? Give me money.

Why Is This a Failure Pattern?  Let’s Count the Ways

In defining the term, I’ve already alluded to some of the problems with the approach, but I want to get specific in terms of laying out content campaigns.  Let’s go through that in bullet fashion.

1. It’s Profoundly Uninteresting, Meaning People Probably Won’t Read or Care

I suppose you could create performative content that was interesting, if pressed.   I imagine that in the entire history of the resume, one or two people had enough creativity to elicit a laugh or inform in some way.

But this will really be the exception.

Content marketing requires helping, entertaining, inspiring trust, and other audience-centric goals.  Talking about how great you are (or explicitly flexing toward that purpose) does none of that.

You’ll find it a real slog to get readership, let alone conversions. And when those conversions come, it’s likely they already had started considering working with you.

2. It Positions You as a Subordinate to Your Buyers

If you think about entrance exams, resumes, and grades for money, what does all of that share?  Basically, it queues up this conversation:

You: I’m ever-so-smart, grade me and you’ll see.

Your customer: I’ll be the judge of that, junior.

Is this really the energy you want in your buying process and customer relationships?

It’s ironic, because performative content is meant as a flex and a demonstration of superiority.  But for it to actually serve that purpose and help you convert, your buyers have to allow it by patting you on the head and throwing you an “atta boy.”

(I’ll talk about the fine line between thought leadership and performative content a little later.)

Appealing for grades in this fashion also strongly indicates that you have a commodity offering.  After all, if you had some kind of USP or truly game-changing value proposition, why would you be acting like you were trying to get into Harvard alongside 10,000 other, similar people?  Why wouldn’t you just lead with what you can do for your buyers?

3. Fear and Fretting Make You Inefficient and Indecisive

When you’re creating performative content, you’re mainly preoccupied with how you look.  And performers are far more risk-averse than opportunity-seeking.

In other words, performative content creators are most concerned with avoiding bad grades from readers.  This tends to lead to extremely banal, inoffensive content (“Dear Hiring Authority, my communication skills are excellent!”), but that’s not the biggest issue.

The biggest issue is that this fear makes performative creators optimize for (low-stakes) risk minimization.  They’ll procrastinate, fret, obsess, and get genuinely and sadly worked up over trivial things.  “We absolutely cannot post this content until we straighten out our stance on Oxford commas!”

And there is almost no content creation play that, from a business perspective, benefits from excessive fretting.  Everything gets slower, more expensive, more painful, and generally more miserable when you think of publishing a blog post the way you think of defending a PhD thesis in front a panel of professors.

In fact, if this describes your content, consider it a total.  If you truly want to minimize mistakes, you should minimize public content and find other ways to generate leads.  Your entire content marketing spend is probably a waste.

4. Fear and Fretting Also Make You Insufferable and Create Morale Problems

The damage isn’t limited to the subordinate relationship with customers or limited, banal content that nobody reads, either.  It also infects your org chart (particularly if the performative charter is coming from a founder).

Imagine a founder obsessed with how the brand reflects on them.  Everything must be just so, or people will think the company (the founder) doesn’t know what they’re doing.

Now imagine that founder hires a content marketer with the orders to “go forth and bring me leads through content marketing.”

What do you think the turnover is going to be like in that role?  If your answer is “staggering,” then we should party because we’re on the same wavelength. And that lines up with my, at this point, somewhat extensive experience as an observer of this dynamic.

When performative-content advocates occupy leadership roles, they wind up giving people in their organization impossible goals.  “Bring me 100K visitors, but I want to go through every line of every piece of copy with a fine-toothed comb.”

If that subordinate is smart, they’ll reach out to an organization like Hit Subscribe and try to do what I think of as “outsourcing a miracle.”  Someone is going to fail, so you try to make a vendor do it, not you.  And while I appreciate the realpolitik savvy of this play, we’ve actually gotten pretty good at recognizing this from a pretty long way off and offering sympathy from afar instead of shared misery.

5. Performative Content Invites Dark, ROI-Resistant KPIs

Writing uninteresting filler content and doing it inefficiently is obviously…not great…for ROI.  But the reasons that performative content is bad business go deeper than just ineffectiveness and inefficiency.

In the first place, performative content heavily courts vanity metrics.  Content that exists just to exist begs you to consider “pieces of content produced” as an actual KPI, which evokes a tragicomic parallel to Dilbert’s boss considering “lines of code written” a good measure of software engineering performance.  (If you want a pithy analogy as to why that’s a bad idea, Bill Gates has you covered).

But even if you avoid that trap, you’ll have no trouble convincing yourself that visits and impressions alone are critical.  After all, the purpose of performative content is to demonstrate your awesomeness, so isn’t the ultimate KPI “number of people you’ve successfully bored impressions?”

Pieces of content written and the number of people who have viewed that content are, at best, highly variable leading indicators of business outcomes (like conversions and revenue), and they’re often completely orthogonal.  But if you don’t realize that because you’re in vanity-land, you can keep spending ROI-resistant money showing people that you know what a tutorial blog post is.

The second, more subtle issue is that the fear and vanity that drive performative content creates “dark KPIs.”  Adults in a business context tend not to say things like, “I’m doing this because I want to seem smart,” even when that motivation drives actual action.  So stated goals and KPIs (visits, conversions) become out of whack with the actual ones (absence of “you’re so dumb” in the comments section).

(An aside: as a long-time management consultant, I can tell you that dark KPIs in general are probably the biggest driver of business dysfunction there is.)

6. You Will Conclude That Marketing Doesn’t Work

Perhaps the saddest part of performative content as a failure pattern is the conclusion that performative content creators tend to draw.  They wind up believing that content marketing doesn’t work.

Man face down with white flag

Courtesy of https://unsplash.com/@steffen_l

By far the most common outcome for an organization with performative ethos is to stop producing anything other than changelogs and funding announcements.

In an earlier lifetime within my career, I used to help organizations fix legacy code situations, and doing that often required unit tests.  Every company without the infrastructure for unit tests would say, “We can’t do unit testing here because we’re unique in ______ way.”

None of them were ever unique in any way.

It’s the same with performative content creators.  When the performative content fails to attract readers and, eventually, even make it live, the performer will conclude that content marketing and all of the incompetents around them are broken.

“We can’t do content marketing here because we have _____ unique positioning.”

No you don’t.  There’s nothing unique about being afraid of looking bad.  Everyone feels that.

Signs That You or People in Your Org Are Doing It

So with all that in the books, how do you know when you’re in the middle of a command performance of content marketing faceplant?  After all, it’s unlikely that anyone in an editorial calendar ideation meeting is saying, “Hey, you know what won’t work is content that really focuses on me, so let’s do a bunch of that.”

This is pretty heuristic in nature, but I’ll offer some signs that you should do a frank assessment.  And what you’re looking for can run the gamut in terms of creator attitude.

After all, when creating that “look, blog posts” blog post, I wasn’t choking the life out of our content program or obsessing over my image.  I was just in “hey, look at us” mode, which doesn’t demoralize anyone…but also doesn’t, you know, work.  (Believe it or not, we have yet to hear a single lead say, “I was just wondering if I could write a discussion-starting blog post when I noticed your blog and decided to give you money.”)

1. People Creating Content Can’t Articulate Who Would Read the Content or Why

Remember these answers to “Who would read this, how will it help them, and what do you want them to do?”

  1. Anyone willing to give me money.
  2. It won’t.
  3. Give me money.

Those shouldn’t be the answers, but neither should “I don’t know.”

If you’re focused on the reader of the content, you’ll find that performative content simply drops out of the mix, almost like magic.  After all, performative content is never useful to anyone, so focusing on a reader more or less precludes generating it.

2. “If You Like This, Let’s Schedule a Call” as a Pretty Smooth Call to Action

I want to be somewhat careful here because there are non-performative use cases for this type of call to action.  But if you’re creating performative content, it’s going to feel like the most natural thing in the world to suggest at the bottom of every post or page that people give you a call.

After all, that’s the only thing you have in mind when conceiving of the content.  What else would they possibly do after reading it?

Here’s my blog post about blog posts.  I know a ton about blog posts, so if you want some blog posts, give me a call!

Genuine content marketing, meant to inform or entertain, rarely has buy-segues that are this car-salesman-slick.  After all, your readers aren’t in a buying (or calling you, or thinking about you) mindset when they’re reading an entertaining rant or googling an error message.  In those situations, calls to action will involve newsletters, further reading, joining communities, etc.

That should be most of your CTAs.

3. “Thought Leadership” Without Thoughts or Leading

Performative content will, almost invariably, masquerade as “thought leadership”—at least in the minds of performers.  After all, isn’t the essence of thought leadership, “we’re smart and just over here doing smart stuff, so check us out”?

I find the concept of thought leadership (though I hate the term itself) extremely interesting and could probably rant for 3K words about it, but I’m going to reign in that unhelpful impulse and make it more bite-sized.

  • True thought leadership will likely result in both “ah-has” and angry comments, turning some people off.  It’s the equivalent of ignoring your teacher’s essay prompt, writing about something random, and hoping it’s so dazzling that you get a decent grade anyway.
  • Performative content is nothing like that.  You’re diligently pleasing your professor (who is literally anyone reading) in the hopes of a non-controversial A+.

Here’s a grenade of an example.  I think the entire job interview process is something we should all stop doing immediately, and we have grown Hit Subscribe to its current size without ever conducting a single job interview.

A decent cross-section of you right now are reading this and thinking that I’m a liar, idiot, or lunatic, and that reaction is a hallmark of thought leadership (such as it is), rather than performative content.  Thought leadership courts controversy and makes novel revelations.

4. A Formidable Inability to Create Engagement

Here’s a marketing trade secret for you.  There are actual sites and venues with lots of readers that will accept your money to show their readers your content.

If you’re having trouble getting anyone to your site to listen to the deafening sound of your own awesomeness, you can pay to force people in other places to listen.  But you can’t force them to engage.

Take the plumber example from earlier in the post.  He could pay the local town newspaper to run a full page spread containing his article about putty chemical composition.  But somehow I doubt it would lead to joy—or dollars.

If you find yourself talking a lot about your brand and yourself and you’re met with collective yawns, that’s not just “how it works.”  It’s a sign you’re performing, rather than marketing.  Content should have engagement.

5. Turning Critics Into Reviewers

From an organizational perspective, one definite tell of performative content and operating from fear is deputizing armchair editors as reviewers.

For instance, say you’re running an editorial calendar wherein people at the company can contribute content to the blog.  One day, a member of the C-suite comes in and reads you the riot act about publishing Bill’s post since it completely doesn’t take into account the messaging around the upcoming feature release and it makes you look stupid.

If you have a brainstorm and that brainstorm is to have that C-suite person review every post, you’re in performative mode.  C-suite is worried about looking bad. He’s made you worried about looking bad. And now you’ve immortalized fear of looking bad as a permanent feature of your workflow.

6. Inappropriate Org Chart Involvement

Speaking of C-suite blog critics, is this a good use of an executive’s time?  Reading every single blog post?

Whatever mistakes (or genius gambles) Mark Zuckerburg is making with Facebook or Meta or whatever right now, one mistake I bet he isn’t making is reading every blog post any of his properties burps out.

At some point between your company’s valuation and Facebook’s market cap, “executive reading every blog post” won’t scale any further.

And really, it probably shouldn’t start.

If you find that members of the C-suite are taking a great deal of interest in the content profile you have, it tends to be a strong indicator of a bias toward performative content.  This is doubly the case because of the outsize influence someone like that, versus a content manager and the like, can have on culture.

Is it understandable that an early-stage founder is worried about the blog and how it makes the business look?  Sure.  Is it healthy?  Probably not.  Is it a magnet for performative content?  Most definitely.

Recovering Performers: What’s Next?

Having thoroughly defined and enumerated signs of the issue, I’ll conclude briefly with my take on what to do next, having recognized the problem.  And, interestingly, that’s pretty simple and straightforward and doesn’t require any lists to summarize.

First of all, stop it. Whatever you do next, stop making performative content.  There’s nothing but wasted money and failure down that path.

Next is a simple (but not easy) coming-to-Jesus moment about the nature of your business’s content.

Can you get over your collective fear of looking bad or not?  And do you want to?

Scuttle Content All Together?

It’s a serious question, and there is no right answer.  Some businesses, like boutique service firms, might reasonably decide that the only content to create is for RPFs and sales enablement, and then they’ll call it a day.

If you can’t let go of the fear, then you should produce as little content as possible and maximize its leverage when you do produce it.  Focus on landing pages and gated collateral, and make it count.  Then use other lead generation techniques to fill your funnel.

Or Grit Your Teeth and Make Some Money?

If you decide that the business upside of content marketing is too great to pass up, then you need to gut-check.  To do that, I’d suggest leaning into the inevitable hate and sharpshooting that your content will attract. (And all content will attract it, however carefully researched, grammatically flawless, and generally “right” it is.)

Make your first negative comment, your first rage tweet, your first aggregator downvote, and your first death threat (and yes, these will come too if you’re popular enough) each a milestone and celebrate it.  It takes about 100 views to get an engagement and probably 1,000 to get a comment.  By the time you’re basking in the death threats, troll hate, and people ridiculing your business’s existence, you’ve got enough readership and leads that you’ve got what Marlo Stanfield would consider “one of them good problems.”

And, in the end, that’s really the rub—and the thing to ask yourself.  Do you want one of them good problems?  Or do you want to bask in the complete admiration of your 0 readers as you respond to RFPs or buy mentions on lists of SaaSes?

Personally, in almost every case, I’d recommend the “grit your teeth and make some money” option.  You don’t build, run, and exit a business by acting like a nervous job applicant.

Interested in More Content Like This?

I’m Erik, and I approved this rant.  Which was easy to do, since I wrote it.  If you happened to enjoy this, I’ve recently created a Substack where I curate all of the marketing related content I create on different sites.

Totally free, permanently non-monetized, and you’re welcome to sign up.

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Link Building for Non-Scumbags: Build Authority Without Being Awful

(Editorial note: I originally published this on Hit Subscribe, and am going to gradually 301 the rest of the SEO/digital marketing content over there, where it makes more editorial sense.  But I’ll keep cross-posting it here, if it seems like might be relevant to this audience.  I’ll also keep posting miscellaneous rants and thoughts for indies and techies here.)

If the title here seems aggressive, my hope is that you’ll empathize with me by the time you’re done reading.

Throughout this post, I’m going to post screenshots of link building outreach I’ve received over the years.  They’re not going to be relevant to the flow of the post, per se.  Instead, I’m going to invite you on a walk with me through a digital garden of spam while I explain how to earn yourself backlinks without being terrible or hiring someone else to be terrible on your behalf.

You see, these screenshots represent how most link building outfits operate.  And they’re just the tip of the iceberg of what I receive—just the ones funny enough to save.

Link Building: What It Is, Briefly

If you don’t know what I’m talking about when I say link building, let’s start simply.  What is link building?

Well, for SEO purposes, the more links you have from other sites to yours, the more search engines like your site, and they’ll rank your content accordingly.  So link building is an activity wherein you specifically “encourage” the world to link to your site, through a variety of tactics.  These tactics run the gamut from “create interesting content that people want to link” to “hack into some poor blogger’s WordPress instance and insert 40 million links before someone kicks you out and has you arrested.”

The Link Building State of the Art

Sadly, the state of the art in link building looks a lot more like the latter than the former.

Aw, you don’t have to visit if you don’t want to, Tony Montana, but if you do, please say hello to my little friend.

If you go out and google link building, I’m sure you’ll hear from the world’s top SEO tool vendors.  And I’m also sure that—caveated with appropriate cautions not to leverage underhanded, “black hat SEO” tactics and that the best approach is earning links via “good” content—they’ll encourage you to undertake an extremely outreach- (read: spam-) heavy approach, such as:

  1. Create a throwaway gmail address because boy are people going to report what you’re doing as spam.
  2. Create an email template wherein you beg for links or else mendaciously tell recipients that it’s in their best interest to link to you.
  3. Unleash that email template onto the blogosphere, like a firehose taking out a few butterflies on some flowers.
  4. If that doesn’t work, just try to bribe people.
  5. In parallel to all of that, offer filler content with links to your site as a guest post for other sites.
  6. If that doesn’t work, try to sneak content with links onto various sites.
  7. As a last resort, also bribe them to publish the filler content.

As you might imagine, these tactics yield a low success rate.  And that means the only way to make them succeed is to execute them at incredibly high volume and low cost.

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