The Most Misunderstood Aspect of Content Creation

It took a lot of courage to write this article. It calls to question some of my own past actions as I have benefited from the loop hole in the system I am about to criticize.

Perhaps, I should begin first by saying the title of this article is an understatement of what I intended to say. I would think we "knowingly" ignore the demands of content creation, rather than it being a product of our misunderstanding.?

We know it, but we ignore it for reasons pertinent to our private benefits. This reminds me of a political saying in my local language:

Your mouth has eaten something sweet, and you cannot speak the truth again.

—Yòrùbá Political Saying

Now, to clear away misconceptions, my usage of the term "content creation" refers to content forms that are largely thought leadership in nature. Thought leadership content is any content that attempts to lead people in a new direction of thinking about a phenomenon, an event, a culture, a practice or a system. A good example is this very article.

Most content aligned with careers and industries are thought leadership. Most Google search results in fact are thought leadership, which could range from a simple "What" question:

To complex topics, like:

Most people think "complex topics" is the "only" thought leadership content, but that's not true. In as much as you are trying to make someone think in a way about something, then that's thought leadership content.?

Excluded from this definition of content creation are content forms about a product, like technical writing content (product & API documentation).

That said, let me state my conclusion on what I believe content creation is all about: content creation is "purely" a byproduct of a person's experience/practical knowledge.

Perhaps, a good analogy for illustration would be content creation as it exists in the academic world.?

In the academic world, scholars need to have passed through their bachelors, masters and even their Ph.D. degrees before they are deemed knowledgeable enough to contribute to the discipline’s body of knowledge in the form of new research—and writing research papers (the academic form of content writing/creation). This process takes years.

You can't publish content that you expect to receive wide acclaim in the academic world without having spent years of study in a particular discipline.

Can there be an economics content writer who hasn’t studied Economics?

Can there be a chemistry content writer who hasn’t studied Chemistry?

The reverse of this is what we have in the business world: "Blockchain content writers" with little to no expertise/experience in the Blockchain technology.

It still baffles me a lot: why do we expect people branded "content writers" to create top notch content in a career/niche/industry they have no study/experience/practical knowledge whatsoever in, and have only taught themselves on the fly to write articles on these subjects?

I know a strand of thought this could trigger is that this process is faster paced in the business world than the academic world, and you might not need years of experience/practical knowledge before you are ripe enough to create content, which I agree with.

But the point is, the? faster paced nature of process in the business world doesn't eliminate this process.?

What we are practicing in the business world is that we have eliminated this process—and we need to bring it back.

No, blockchain content writers need not have ten years of experience in blockchain technology to create content. But yes, they must have enough experience to create the content they create. The level of topic complexity they can reasonably handle must be directly proportional to their level of expertise.

I conclude content creation is a byproduct of expertise for a good reason. Have you ever read content written by a professional who has years of experience under his belt??

Can you feel the level of confidence of the author jumping off the page? Can you spot those nuances and snippets of real events from the years of experience of the author that speaks volumes of the author's deep expertise? Can you see the obvious "tightness" of the prose as against content shroud in "filler words"?

Most of the time when content writers speak of doing research, they are just searching on google. Grow and Convert calls content produced through such a research process "Google research paper" or "Mirage content".

It is a practice I still find absurd.?

The product of this practice is littered all around us: "thin" quality courses, and? hundreds of thousands of derivative articles of little to no quality littered all around the web.?

A recent press release states that Google is getting more serious with ridding the web of low quality content.?

Hopefully, this would help speed up the process back to normal where high quality content is able to thrive more easily.

How do we reverse this trend?

I am quite aware that systems are extremely difficult to change, especially, when it involves big changes. It sometimes takes huge catastrophes to bring changes to systems, like Covid changed the business environment from offices to remote.

Content writers have settled into a comfortable living creating content in return for pay. It would be difficult to scrap this system.?

However, there can be an intervention to get the desired result we want: instead of content writers creating content with little guidance, relying on Google, they could use guidance from real experts with deep expertise in the topics they write about.

We could have content writers interview industry experts on their content topics. This way, we would have higher quality content on the web, and less lower quality ones.

Most times, experts have little to no time to create content. They usually have a lot of other stuff on their plates, which makes content writers perfect for the job to help us get their expertise into written content (or other content forms) for our consumption.?

This is a system already in practice by in-house technical writers, and I think it is worth emulating for a better web.

Hi, thanks for reading the article! Actually, I thought to add this since it is relevant. A friend of mine, John Davenport, has built SME interviews, a product which content writers can use to interview Subject matter experts for their content. You might want to check it out.