Introduction

In one of the strangest twists in my life, I likely wouldn't have finished university if it wasn't for Bill Hicks. I wasn't a very good fit for the traditional university student and when I caught the startup bug in the late 1990s, I was required to discontinue. I went back a few times, once as a History major and again as an English major, but always dropped out within the year. It was a familiar pattern. I would start off gung ho, get bored, and start working on a side project. The side project would be way more interesting than the main project, so I would show up to one or two classes a semester, then drop out again.

When I was 27, I got into a car accident and had a bad concussion. That night, I was watching old comedy routines that I sailed the high seas for and came across a Bill Hicks routine with a joke about marketing. He had been one of my favourite comedians for a long time, but I had never heard his routine on marketing before. It was irreverent and funny, but it also explained a lot about why so many of my businesses had failed.

It strikes me as peak irony that a routine in which Bill Hicks suggested that people who work in advertising or marketing save their souls in a rather colourful way would get me to study marketing. But it did. He spoke to my love of product over pitch and it made me want to learn how to do marketing without completely selling out.

Now that I have completely sold out, or bought in if I'm being charitable, I'm relating that story to start with one of the central tenets of my entire marketing practice. Not everything has to be a sales pitch. If you want to build a long-term relationship with customers who understand your company, your product, and your values, most of your content should not be about closing the sale on the spot.

I know what the sales people are saying. He's doing a pitch. Quit doing that. Quit letting a brilliant comic's words do something he would never have wanted them to.

And now to the regularly scheduled argument.

Not everything should be a sales pitch

Most people do not wake up hoping to be marketed to. Even when they are open to buying something, they are surrounded by people competing for their attention. That alone should make us more careful about how we publish.

If every page sounds like it is trying to drag the wallet out of someone's pocket, a lot of people will tune out before your argument even starts. Some will leave because they are not ready to buy. Some will leave because they are tired. Some will leave because sales language has become so common that they can smell it a paragraph away.

This is not an argument against selling. It is an argument against turning every piece of content into a pitch. Those are different sins.

The problem: Sales pitches are boring

The biggest problem with highly persuasive content is that it often becomes boring. If you are trying to sell something, the content has to stay focused on the product and its benefits. You have to educate people on the problem and the solution, but the solution always has to be your product.

That means you end up polluting the world with a lot of one-dimensional content. Yes, I hope you buy Siteimp. I would not have spent months working on a product and putting up a website if I did not want that outcome. Heck, I do not always make good decisions, see my educational odyssey above, but I do try to learn from my mistakes.

But if you do not buy Siteimp, I still hope you get something out of this. Maybe you will learn something. Maybe you will be entertained. Maybe you will be inspired to go out and get kicked out of university. Actually, let's not put that one on the brochure.

Not everything needs to have a dollar sign attached

Admittedly, I am lucky because I really like writing and have been doing it for a long time. Way back in the day, when I was 11, I even tried writing a novel that I was not qualified to write. It was terrible, but writing was fun and I kept at it. Years later, I got into blogging and that was a lot of fun too. Then after I finished university, my friend Stacey and I started a magazine because we both really loved writing and had a shared activist streak.

So I get a lot out of writing beyond the potential to make money. That makes me biased, and it means that I get to gain even if my bank account does not. But even if I did not love writing, I would still want to produce high-quality helpful content that did not always have a sales pitch attached to it. The reason is simple. It is a more efficient way to market a product.

Let me put it like this. I can write sales-heavy material and accept that a large percentage of people will mentally file it under "pitch" and move on. Or I can write engaging content and give myself a better chance of being read, remembered, revisited, and maybe even shared. And if people remember that I exist, there is at least some chance they will buy the product when they actually have a problem that it solves.

It is not like people who are open to being sold to will become allergic to learning something useful. And people who are not open to being sold to right now are a little more likely to come back later if your content was worth their time. Why waste traffic by making every page do only one job?

The loop: Expertise -> credibility -> trust -> sales

Would you rather buy a product from someone who is an expert in the field or someone who knows absolutely nothing about it? I would rather buy from the expert. The fact is that I would trust the expert more.

Expertise leads to credibility, credibility leads to trust, and trust leads to sales. It may not lead to sales today, and it takes time to build credibility. But it can lead to sales tomorrow, next week, or next year. Better still, expertise tends to attract enthusiasts, and enthusiasts like to talk. They give you ideas, become excellent beta testers, and tell their friends about you.

Creating content is a good way to both acquire expertise and demonstrate it. It forces you to learn while you create, and it gives you something tangible to show for that learning process. Through the years, you will be able to watch your own expertise grow as you retire, or quietly delete, articles that now embarrass you.

A word of caution

It is important to remember that you do still have to sell. Very few markets can support purely educational content with no call to action at all. As an example, I have a product called Siteimp that has been known to make its users between 38 and 42% more attractive. Siteimp: for all those times when you want to get hot without hitting yourself in the face with a hammer.

Sales and marketing involve a mix. Just as you mix acquisition channels and use a range of mediums, you should also vary the tone of your content. Some of it can be educational. Some of it can be direct. Some of it can contain long-winded looksmaxxing jokes, though preferably in moderation and with adult supervision.

I am not telling you to never make a sales pitch. I am telling you to mix it up and make sure that not everything is one. The companies worth paying attention to usually have something more interesting to say than "buy now."

Make the pitch when the moment calls for it. Then get back to publishing things that are useful, memorable, and worth sharing. That is how you earn attention without begging for it, and trust without trying to mug the reader on the landing page.