I believe you are confused. Marketing is important for any business but if you have nothing to market it will not do you much good. Content is still the most importnat factor to getting people to visit your site and return again. It is like making a product that does not work and spending millions to market it. You will get the quick buck but soon people will realize your product is crap and your business will be tanked. So you need to ask yourself, as a webmaster, do you want a short term quick buck or build a quality long term site?
Content tends to recycle again and again as most of us are not so good to produce content. But if you are good to write content, then your unique content will definitely prove to be generating traffic. Most people are buying contents that may have already recycled a few times.
You could market DP to death, but if it wasn't for DP's content, none of us would have ever come back a second time. Much less hundreds and thousands of times.
Unique relevant content is very important but know one will no it exists without marketing it properly
Here is a graph showing my RSS feed subscribers over the past year. Guess at which point I started to market my site? http://img329.imageshack.us/my.php?image=picture1fp5.png
I've always said that unique content + quality backlinks are king. You cant get great results with just content alone.
I don't agree with you. Yes, marketing is important but poor content won't keep people coming back to your sites. In the end we all want visitors coming to us regurlaly. To get that we need to provide them with all the stuff they want/like/care. "Content Isn't King Anymore"... that's just absurd.
content IS the king but the king needs a kingdom to operate. so you still need SEO, onpage optimization, marketing, and all the good stuffs. you might have a site with good content but if you never promote it, no one will ever know about your site.
The post was meant to be controversial more than anything - which seems to have worked I think it's more of a chicken and egg argument: Without marketing or SEO, no one is going to find your content. Without content, no one is going to stay on your site and you won't get repeat visitors. What I meant was that those first visitors that come to your website are more important than the repeat visitors.
At the end of the day they both go hand in hand. I ahve great website with fresh content that i wrote myself, tht's updated everyday. But i don't market my site much and thus i get 10 unique vistotrs a day, it's amazing
Content IS King. Marketing just exposes your content. Write a whole load of content and do no marketing then your site will get very few hits. Write no content and do a whole load of marketing then your site will get traffic but the traffic will be useless and will stay for roughly 2 seconds. They're mutualistic, one does not benefit without the other. However content on its own will rise up the search rankings and will bring you small amounts of targetted traffic.
keyword research is king, my legal sites don't get much traffic for one reason and one reason only: there's not a big market for legal articles... I market, I have content, but theres not much demand. in contrary, sites relating to myspace, popular teen idols, porn, games etc., get traffic easily. research your audience, MAKE SURE THERE IS AN AUDIENCE for what your site will provide! kids will always love games teens will always love their pop idols and everyone will always love porn then again, small markets like legal, medical and business sites do get a higher CPM there's no right answer on which path to go down, just do something that interests you
I think content is extremely important, but I personally think backlinks are king in the world of SEO.
well content is still the king and marketing helps people see the content and let the site and a person's business grow. Marketing alone is nothing, if you don't agree, try marketing to a blank site, parked godaddy page or page not found or just a plain domain with no nameservers. also crappy content = more ad clicks and somewhat conversions. Why? people want to leave ASAP, and easy way out before cramming themselves with ideas on which site to type in browser and go, they either click ads or affiliate ads, thus income to you
Content can be Queen now hehe you hit the spot right here. Marketing owns all. It seems correct to say, that .. Oh, well if you have good content, slowly but surely people will come. That's true, people will come, but not even a fraction of the visitors that will come with good SEO, promotion, and connections. Next time you write a quality article or even a website, that isn't successful. Take your time to find one of those many similar websites that get a surge or traffic with content that doesn't even compare in quality to yours. They marketed the site, well. Of course, developing a very large site, or online database or content, or something similar that is extremely useful and unique and not getting any traffic to it would take skill But were talking about content that the average webmaster can produce. That type of useful content needs a marketing boost if it wants to survive in these deep seas
If content isn't king, what is? Just because other factors like marketing and SEO are somewhere close to as important as Content, doesn't make content any less important. Getting visitors to the website is still the easy part compared to keeping them coming back for months and years. It is quite a tough job, and hence I'd still stick to the side that says,"CONTENT IS KING"
It is a balancing act really. Write good content and others will link to it. Do good seo and people will come through search. You need a little of both.
I agree with the marketing point but still the content that keeps them there is the best thing. After putting so much efforts in the marketing and getting the traffic which does not stays is nothing. Blogs are the biggest example, not much marketing is done for the blogs still they get lots of traffic.