Before we settled into our main topic, Jonathan Denwood, John Locke, Adam Fout, Bridget Willard, and I spent yet more time talking about WordPress page-builders, this time in response to Pippin Williamson’s comprehensive review. Pippin was inspired first to a rant and then to a thorough investigation by the conflicts between certain page builders and some of his plugins, notably Restrict Content Pro. If you’re thinking about using a page builder, and especially if you’re thinking about using both a page builder and a membership/content restriction plugin, it’s a good idea to read Pippin’s article.
We were inspired to repeat our earlier assertion that if the core WordPress editor provided a better experience, most people would not bother with page builders–or not, at least, for laying out the internal content of a post or page, rather than a whole page template. Bridget and Adam both spoke up in defense of page builders as tools that both developers and end-users rely on to save time and reduce costs.
Can You Really Build Your Brand and Your Business through Content Marketing?
TL;DR: You can, but it’s hard work. If you jump on the content marketing bandwagon just to make money, you probably won’t. You need to produce content that helps people to solve problems and answer questions. This requires research, time, and effort, and might mean you need to produce content in multiple formats (written text, video, infographics, and audio.) If you’re bound to an aggressive publishing schedule, that can be exhausting, which is one reason to have (carefully-vetted, high-quality) guest writers. And you have to publish a lot of content, over a long period of time, for it to pay off.
As you’ll notice by looking over my 2016 posts for the blog, the most content I’ve been producing has been my contributions to the WP-Tonic podcast. The content people find most valuable is my tutorials, but while I enjoy writing them, they are time-consuming to produce and often get pushed aside in favor of doing client work. My own experience is that content marketing works if you work it, but it’s not easy to work it!
Adam and Bridget said some great things, but their suggestions won’t make you happy if you want a fast, easy, solution. There don’t seem to be any fast, easy solutions in marketing anymore…if there ever really were.
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