As he often does, Aaron Wall has posted something worth reading: Content Vs SEO: Business Profit Margins
In a nutshell, when running a business it isn’t enough to just publish good content and hope you will somehow profit. You need a business model, and you need marketing. Search marketing and content marketing are two of the four marketing groups that are so different online that they demand a new understanding and a new strategy (the others are email marketing and affiliate marketing).
Search engine optimization is widely misunderstood. It attracts criticism from two distinct groups: people who don’t understand it, and from people who do (and maybe know how to profit from getting attention). Criticising search engine optimization is like criticising press releases or advertisements – they are a part of marketing (and can be used well or poorly).
I still find it amazing that so many old school media organisations don’t make more money building on their offline assets.
Reminds me of the story of the ice cutters (see #8), as told by Guy Kawasaki.
Then again, maybe that is just the most efficient way to run out the profits from an existing investment. For News Corp, maybe the cost of transforming their existing assets is too high, so instead of wasting too much time or money trying they give money to Jeremy Phillips to invest in new stuff.
Overall, Guy’s advice is worth following: “Challenge the known and embrace the unknown.”
Or else.