Content is disposable - all is lost

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That’s right. People keep on saying “Content is King”. Sure, Mac, sure. Content has a shelf life of 36 hours as news, and maybe even less in a search engine. Pundits will constantly tell you to produce more content, but that’s just not enough. You need to have a plan for your content.

A book is not just a collection of pages. A book is a lot more than just “pages of content”. It becomes more than the sum of the parts. Books can explain complex ideas, and the supporting pages are compiled in a format that’s both pleasing to the eye and to the sensibilities. The idea that you’ll sit down every day and compose one page of content and at the end of the year you’ll have a 365 page book is just crazy. But people adopt that approach all day in the SEO circles.

Check out this amazing statement in a recent post by David Sifry concerning the blogosphere for an idea of just what content means:

First off, the total posting volume of the blogosphere continues to rise, showing about 1.6 Million postings per day, or about 18.6 posts per second. This is about double the volume of about a year ago.

That’s right! Nearly 600 million blog posts will be made this year. That’s 600,000,000 posts in blogs alone. That isn’t even taking into account forum posts, static websites, auto-generated crapola and the like. Content has a very short lifespan indeed.

Knowing this, you need to consider what to do to get the most value out of content. You still need it, surely, but is content everything you think it is?

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