If you continue editing, perfecting, and reworking your marketing content over and over and over, you’re doing yourself a disservice.
Don’t get me wrong, you need to edit your work, and maybe have a colleague review it too, but if you never work up the guts to just click publish, all you’ll have is a bunch of wasted time and effort.
I tell you this because I worry that you might be a little bit like me: hesitant to put anything out into the world until you feel that it’s perfect.
Especially anything that promotes your own services and products.
It’s Time to Get Vulnerable
There’s a level of vulnerability that comes with sharing our solutions and asking people to pay for them, and it can be very easy to feel like we are productively perfecting our message when really we’re just avoiding publishing.
So, I need you to agree with me now that you will launch your content as soon as it is complete.
You won’t go through dozens of rounds of revisions just to put off hitting the publish button. You won’t say no right before it’s time to publish just because it’s not exactly what you want it to be.
However, you can always, and should always, make adjustments and improvements after you’ve published. As you see how your content performs, you can edit it to make it perform better and better.
In fact, you should do this if you want Google to continue to rank your content highly.
Google Prefers Regularly Updated Content
What you might not know is that Google makes a big deal out of “freshness.” Content is considered “fresh” if it’s been updated “recently” (this definition changes, but around 6 months is a good definition for “recent” right now).
There are plenty of reasons why Google does this, but all you really need to know is that just publishing something these days isn’t enough — if you don’t update that content regularly, it will start to lose rankings.
Try to think of this as an opportunity. Since Google is going to expect you to update your content anyway, it doesn’t matter if it’s perfect or not.
In fact, you need it to not be perfect so that you have room to improve as the content becomes “stale.”
You Need to Be Putting Out Lots of Content… Not Just a Few Great Pieces
You know what else Google likes?
Websites that publish regularly.
Google likes to see that you put out content as often as possible. I say “as often as possible” because their actual expectations are ridiculous — they want you doing it 2 to 4 times a week.
Now obviously this is ridiculous, and in most cases, only big businesses can do this, but what you should take away from this is that Google doesn’t care about perfect as much as it cares about regularity.
Google likes your content to be good… but it doesn’t care about perfect. In fact, perfection can get right in the way of regularity. If you’re spending weeks and weeks on a single blog, you’re actually hurting your marketing efforts more than helping.
But it’s not just Google who likes all this…
People Like Regular Content Too
The thing is, people today see literally thousands of marketing messages every single day.
If you think they’re going to give your content more attention than everyone else’s, you’re wrong — they’ve got little attention as it is.
So how can you get into their heads? Putting out content regularly that’s not perfect but that’s good enough is the way.
Look, if someone only sees a marketing email from you once a year, and they happen to be busy when they get it, or they got too many emails that day, or they don’t recognize you because you rarely email them — or a million other things happen — then they’ll probably just delete your email unread.
Doesn’t matter how great it is if no one reads it, right?
But if you’re emailing them once a month, you have a better chance of at least one of your emails being read.
Same goes for blogs, for social media posts, and even for direct mail, radio ads, and other types of content.
A perfect message once a year probably gets ignored.
12 pretty good messages get heard.
Just Go for It
Published is better than perfect. You’ll never have the perfect emails, ads, landing page, or any other marketing content. So, please, don’t lose momentum by waiting. Just go ahead and push that publish button.
If you’re still struggling to get your content published, maybe it’s time to put together a content plan.
When you have your entire year’s worth of content mapped out in advance, you’re more likely to actually get the content created.Let’s talk about putting together a content plan for the next 12 months.