Weird Al Yankovic is admittedly an acquired taste. The comic singer has poked fun at everyone from Michael Jackson to Bruce Springsteen with his parodies of their songs. Some people think he’s hilarious. Others just think he’s, well, weird!
What most folks don’t realize is that he’s a content marketing spokesperson. While that last statement may be stretching the truth just a bit, Weird Al actually did have something rather significant to say about content that nobody wants.
Al wrote a sweetly blistering little ditty entitled Stop Forwarding That Crap to Me that you can hear and see here. The video has been viewed more than 900,000 times on YouTube, so obviously he struck some kind of nerve with the public.
Why does this matter to marketing people? Over the past couple of years you’ve been hearing (on this blog and in plenty of other places) that “content is king.” You know that Google rates high-content websites more highly than sites that never have anything new to say. Unfortunately, all of that has led some businesses into a “bigger-is-better” mentality with regard to their web content. They think that the more stuff they put out, the better their chances are of being found online. The problem is that one person’s “stuff” is another person’s “crap” (to use Weird Al’s word).
Here are a couple of key things to remember.
1. Content isn’t king. Good content is. It’s not a game in which the company with the most words wins. People are looking for useful, helpful, good content. Getting found on the Internet isn’t the goal. If people find you and then walk away because you don’t have something that helps them, you haven’t accomplished anything.
2. Google is smarter than you think. The folks at Google are well aware that some businesses are trying to game the system—and they’re one step ahead of the folks who flood the Web with crummy content. Content that is fresh and helpful gets rated higher. As a matter of fact, Google “punishes” sites that try to artificially inflate their content with re-posted material or posts that are overly “key-word-laden.”
Should you post new content regularly? Absolutely! But make sure there’s substance to what you say. Make sure the content you create helps readers answer the questions they have or find the information they’re really looking for.
Otherwise, someone will surely paraphrase Weird Al’s words and tell you: “Stop posting that crap for me!”
