Rand Fishkin: “Crappy content often outperforms amazing content when…”

I was reading “11 Tips I Gave to Marketers this Morning” by SEOMoz founder Rand Fishkin and this one jumped out at me:

#6 – Crappy content often outperforms amazing content when the publisher/brand/site has a powerful community.

Community is one of the most ignored/under-appreciated channels of an inbound marketing strategy, yet it makes every other channel – social, search, email, content, viral, etc. – more effective

I’ve been saying for years now Content is NOT King, relationships are.

Obviously none of us is out to create crappy content, but the point is, if you’re spending a lot of time writing, blogging, tweeting, sending out newsletters and you’re not getting the kind of response you’d like, perhaps you need to invest more in people and less in content.

• Who is your target audience?
• What are they like demographically? Psychographically?
• Where are they?
• Are they already congregating in online groups? Which ones?
• Are you engaged in those groups?  Not just sharing your own content but meeting people, listening to them, getting to know them, interacting with them?
• If your target audience is not congregating in an online group is this an opportunity for you to create and lead a new community?

Think who before what.

You can tweet me on that. 😉

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See 11 Tips I Gave to Marketers this Morning for Rand’s other 10 tips.

How do you prioritize your time, strategic thinking and energy between content and community?