A Brief History of Content Marketing - #Infographic

What started as a way to create useful and relevant content for consumers, shifted to a cash cow for pumping out posts. Content marketers, realizing that crap was flooding the internet under the guise of content marketing, started backpedalling on some of their best practices, advising for more quality and new, better practices. Today, content marketers are trying to perfect the ratio of quality to quantity, bringing real thought leadership back into the equation, and finding that ever-so-precarious balance of keyword optimization and readability.

Throughout the evolution process, there have been arguments over keywords, word counts, and the mysterious quality barometer. Google’s gotten smarter at detecting spammy practices, while new technologies, trends, and social media platforms have all played a role in the direction that content marketing has taken over the past ten years.

In order to definitively say that, as content marketers, we’re creating valuable content for real readers, it’s necessary to look back at the history of online content marketing. We’ve been yo-yoing back and forth between one practice or another, but the goal of content marketing should really be to satisfy its original intention– to create valuable content for human beings.

Check out the infographic below to see the evolution of online content marketing tips, tricks, and trends so that we can avoid the merry-go-round of advice and get back to what matters most: the content.

H/T: getapp