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Before we discuss what content marketing may or may not be and who is winning or losing, let us take a look at what brought about this marketing strategies and how it works. It is not yet clear where this phenomenon may be heading, given that our own research shows that the content marketing fever that is throwing the internet into delirium is fairly new and started to take hold about a half a year ago. What is undoubtedly obvious is that content marketing has been a strategic response to Google’s algorithmic changes and updates on the part of bloggers, website owners, and marketing professionals. Each of these groups, although no in the same business, have teamed up around the all-important overall search engine optimization or SEO stratagem that The constant Google changes and updates have required of any internet business entrepreneurs who want to say in business and more consequentially, be successful. The ability of a business to remain relevant and viable is a critical in business development, planning, management, and marketing and advertising. However, notwithstanding the absolute necessity for businesses to retain and operate on the basic of ethical standards, legitimate business executive also understand the need to be pro-active in their approach to trend and changes in the market, rather than to be reactive, thus always shifting strategies to start heading in the whichever direction that the winds of the market may start blowing. In truth, unlike what many of those internet business appear to think, Google’s changes and updates have not been intended to target websites or blogs for penalties and punishments, rather Google’s primary objectives have been to integrate mathematical and scientific principles and models  into the search engine search results with the goal of improving the overall use and the functions of the internet and consequently making users’ searches and search results  more precise and thus more efficient. This process has been defined as search engine optimization of SEO. 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) 

 SEO is a user-oriented program that happens to benefit websites by forcing webmasters and website operators and bloggers to also optimize their webpages, blog posts, and publications. It is not know who first coined the term “content marketing.” However, it is reasonable to believe that the concept originated from internet marketers that saw an opportunity in the Google SEO changes and update, and marketed the concepts to websites as the new best SEO trend. Today on the internet, some publishers and internet marketing practitioners are pushing this trend as the new best business model for websites and bloggers. It is true that Google has drastically changed the internet, although not always for the better. Nonetheless, as far as standardizing, Google’s appearance on the worldwide web and the company’s role in research, development, and in planning and implementing big-picture visions has been impressive, remarkable, and valuable to raising standards globally and at all levels for users, websites, and merchants alike. This being said, those who get too carried away in this latest Google change-induced content marketing system should think carefully of the potential for adverse consequences in the long-run.  Google has been laser-focused on changing the infrastructure of the Internet on a global scale. Moz.com explains how Google developer Matt Cutts refers to these updates and changes as “Data refreshers.” In May 2003, Google announced the initiation of Google bots (“Freshbot” and “Deepcrawler.” This change directly affected backlink marketing and implementation. But the most impactful effects of this change may have been in the Google’s shift from cumulative indexing to daily indexing of webpages. The impact of these early changes were documented in drops in websites ranking and page rank, due to a change in the way the new Google bots evaluated backlinks, including internal, inbound, and external links. What was even more dramatic is that on August 6, 2013, Google added an upgrade in search results called "in-depth articles." Google analysts and experts, explain this in-death articles search results optimization as writing that is “evergreen” meaning new, fresh, and “long-form,” meaning substantive. If you look at any of the content brokerage website, you will find all these buzz words in their requirements and Q&A. MozCast tracked links to three articles based on this Google update and find that those articles show up in 3% of the tracked searches. In response to these developments, the backlink market and websites changed or adjusted their link building strategies to conform to the new Google’s standards for successful back-linking and search engine results. Needless to say that Internet businesses, website, and Internet marketers, all, have been re-active in their strategies. This is precisely the peril of the new content marketing hysteria that is being passed for a marketing strategy. 

The Ethical Sub-Standard of Content Marketing 

 Before we get to the real business thinking behind content marketing, we must first define the word content. We know what marketing is: It is a coordinated group of activities designed to communicate with consumers and present them with products, ideas, and services in ways that are persuasive enough to convince them to engage in transactions that are profitable for the company that is selling such ideas, products, or services. But content marketing functions differently. No one is being persuaded to engage with or transact with content. Instead, content marketing is a wink-wink team effort, to be king, between knowing and consenting web-based business interests to beat Google’s SEO stratagem. So, in reality, still to be kind, content marketing is really a scheme, if one can find any positive definition in any dictionary for the work scheme. Let us back up this admitted declaration with this fact, when Google went after shell-website for “keyword stuffing,” the practice of littering useless and irrelevant webpage content with search engine keywords, the industry was trapped. As a result, dummy websites and internet marketers needed a way out. That way was to change course, and what would look better than to now litter blog and webpages with SEO-targeted keyword content? At least that is the thinking behind the content market.

Content Marketing  - What Is Involved 

 The word content entails an array of literary (writing), creative (art and design), technology (graphics, and audio and video), and commercial (informational and anything else and tools) products.  Thus, the paradox of narrowing content as written articles containing media inserts, because what it is in fact being heralded as content marketing is no more than articles written by “writers” to be sold and used  primarily for search engines, in hope that users will find them and like the content or even care about it. This strategy serves the purpose of dressing up previously unabashed shell-websites in new and improved sheep clothing, and it can attract visitors to websites and blogs. But deception by any name is still wrong. Users whose queries yield a specific result may find themselves reading an article with the keywords they put into the search engine, rather than what it is they really started out to find. To be fair, users are being deceived by webmasters and search engine giants, including Google. For example, the majority of users are not aware that many of the results on their search pages are from Google-sponsored ads. Google might argue that it gives some indication to users on search pages about its sponsored ads. However, the language Google uses to make its so-called disclosure on search pages is ambiguous at best, and definitely obscure.   Facebook is guilty of the same offense. Facebook is doing whatever it takes to make money, a part of that is to exploit the self-adulation, self-worshiping, cult of personality culture. Therefore, Facebook is contributing to nothing positive, but rather taking advantage of the worst aspects of society.

Content Marketing Websites Editors – A Profile in Self-Importance                                       Photo_bizzfillings.com

 With the collapsing of traditional book publishers, daily newspapers, and magazines, the profile of the content marketing website editor appears in the analyticall mirror as a former editors of books, journals, newspapers, and magazines, combined with former journalists, college professors, authors, and plain business entrepreneurs who see a new market opportunity and are taking advantage. Based on our research deep within this world, all of those people, with a few exceptions, have two things in common: they treat writers miserably and demand everything from writers, while dropping them peanut shells. Again, with a few exceptions, those so-called editors are arrogant, self-centered, and utterly unprofessional. Those are the same people who guide writers to write in “the first or third voice,” as if there was any such thing in the rules of grammar, which specifically dictates speech in the first, second, or third person, as the noun or pronoun subjects are the only parts of speech that can speak, and not a voice. In any event, it is just miserable to witness such unprofessional self-important and exploitative individuals hiding behind a virtual screen and treating skilled writers with automated “deny and reject” when the internet has more poor writing than there poor people dead or alive. 

The content marketing world is basically ruled by articles brokers who serve as middlemen between website owners, bloggers, merchants, and businesses in need of written articles, and writers in need of an income. Businesses are not philanthropic enterprises. The goal of running a business is to make a profit. Unlike prior Era economic environments, however, the entire new global economy is based upon vulture capitalism. The model of this economic system is that somebody has to win and everyone else is on their own. The latter are the losers. They lose by having potential or duly earned income and benefits retained or taken away from them.  In this instance, the winners are the content website brokers who make profits selling other people’s writings and pay them pennies on the dollars. It is not uncommon to browse content-selling websites and find articles listed for as little as $5.00. Who exactly would write anything for $5.00? With the availability of voice -activated technology and other computer writing gadget and software, one has to believe that many of those $35.00- 800 word articles are made of scrambled rewriting from previously written work. And nothing says that those articles are being generated by real writers. Another way content websites exploit writes is through pay-per-click (PPC) posting. You post an article on www.example.com, the website places ads around your article and “if” a reader clicks on your ad, the writer get  1 cent or 2  for the article, or we will say - to be precise-- for the PPC.. The problem is that even though some of those sites provide writers with “analytics,” which should show how many people have read their postings, writers have no ability to assess the validity of those figures, which are internally generated and could easily be self-serving. Further, the writer has no method by which to assess what percentage of the 1 cent earned represents the website’s overall profit from the ads, or even if the website is telling the whole story about the number of clicks on ads for any given articles. In addition, the writer has no control over what ads are placed on any given post.  This is important in the sense that some sponsored ad may be more profitable than others.

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Legitimate Content Acquisition Needs 

 Many categories of people have a legitimate need to get their writing done by someone else. Businesses have been hiring freelance writers since the beginning of time. With the major financial, development, operational, management, and maintenance facets  that required the attention of a business owner, there simply are writing tasks and assignments that must be outsourced to allow a business to focus on customer services, operational efficiency and productivity,, as well as growth and profit. Similarly, bloggers and some website owners have certain legitimate needs to sub-contract for written articles and other forms of content. Many bloggers are involved in larger projects that require large investments of time. And some bloggers schedule their blogs to publish daily, in which case they would find themselves behind schedule unless they outsource some of their work. Moreover, some website owners truly need outside write to boost their website standing on Google’s pages and in Alexa Ranking. If you run a real estate, travel, shopping, gaming, financial, or manufacturing websites, or any number of product and sale-based websites, chances are you not only are not a writer, but you also need all the time you can fin to focus on growing your business, and a blog is just one way to attract customers, a smart business owner would hire the services of a writer to handle the writing needs of the company. None of this, though, provides any excuse for any business leader to participate in any scheme or to contribute to exploit writers who, too, need to earn a living. Ethical business owners know exactly where to find writers who write for a living. The content fuss has nothing to do with accessibility to rich and well developed articles, but everything to do with using content mill and sweatshops to buy good copies at cheap gig prices. Google’s Algorithms will eventually catch up with this scheme, too, and those who persist in this practice rather than upgrading their article acquisition standards may end up paying a higher price in Google PageRank and Alexa Websites Rankin.