Publish Authoritative Content That Adds Value, Or No One Will Care

No. You’re not imagining things. Content fatigue is real.

According to a new study from BuzzSumo that looked at 100 million posts published in 2017, social sharing of content has been cut in half since 2015.

That’s a steep decline in a short period of time. We can blame poor quality and an increase in noise for this. For a more nuanced take, click through the following slides from BuzzSumo:

Whatever and whoever is at fault, what, if anything, can anyone do about it? The noise being made online today has no volume controls. There are no standards and people don’t know who or what to trust.

BuzzSumo goes on to show that the majority of content in their study received zero backlinks, but authoritative research and reference content continued to gain links. In particular, authoritative evergreen content consistently gains shares and links over time.

The above line of reasoning sounds good on digital paper, but it also rings a bit hollow for me. How many of you are right now reading “authoritative research and reference content”? Does this article qualify? Do the other 10,000 articles in Adpulp’s archive qualify?

Reading “authoritative research and reference content” sounds like heavy lifting to me, when we all know that reading content of any sort on the web is actually a clickfest. Now you’re here, now you’re not…