I’m a writer and content strategist in the medical, pharma, wellness, healthcare, healthtech, and health spaces. I like to call them health-adjacent; however, they are different.
For some brands, I have created landing pages to sell supplements or concierge programs aimed at optimizing Gen Z metabolic health.
For pharmaceutical enterprises, I have been the content creator behind their video content or data sheets.
I have written whitepapers for Fortune 20 companies and helped bootstrapped startups craft their LinkedIn content marketing strategy. I have even developed sales brochures to help one of the world’s largest laser manufacturers sell machines for measuring neuronal activity!
What I’m trying to say is that I have been around.
The need to communicate to the market that your company exists and that, if people buy from you, you can help them achieve their goals will remain, as humans will continue to need food to subsist.
What will cease to exist are the mediums, such as blogging, that I use here, as technology advances, people’s preferences shift, and the world evolves in ways that often surprise us.
This blog, which has lived for the past 5 years following a model based on Search Engine Optimization principles, has ranked #1 for business keywords and has been a branding asset that has helped me grow my business.
But it has also seen me, his owner, try dabbling in affiliate marketing and AI-driven content, with no success at all.
Creating and Distributing Content: Two Bottlenecks
Working with clients, like really smart individuals who have made millions, or with academics who patented machines that, with AI algorithms, detect cancer, I have noticed a pattern around content creation for business purposes.
There’s the idea that if you create something interesting (according to you, of course), readers will organically find you.
So the bottleneck here is actually writing the blog post, case study, or white paper.
For people like me, who you pay for advice on these topics, creating the piece is not a bottleneck. Don’t get me wrong. It’s hard work.
I mean, I used to spend hours listening to Zoom call transcripts before AI tools helped me find what’s worth keeping quite swiftly.
But as a writer by trade, a mix of nurture and nature, if you will, I always knew that creating any content asset was doable. I put out the hours, and the content will be there.
What I was really selling was, yes, the creation of a quality blog content asset, but packaged and placed in the best possible way to reach the readers who matter. The ones that open doors for your career or hand you that check that keeps your company alive for the next quarter.
Distribution was the main bottleneck in my mind, the person responsible for generating results through those content pieces.
Content Spinners Go Mainstream
Distribution was the bottleneck for people like me because it required increasingly greater effort and investment to achieve the results clients believed content creation would guarantee.
Link placements, PR campaigns, email blast partnerships, semantic optimization, boosted posts, all of these, with different budget sizes and impact on results, became critical to fight for limited attention. They still are.
But as mass AI content-driven production became an industry in 2022, the main bottleneck, at least from the client’s perspective, the creation side of it, in many cases, seemed to be gone.
Now creation is easy. Right? Yes, and no.
Content spinners, tools that reword what already exists, have existed for many years and have not been sustainably popular with Google and other search engines. They may rank for a while, but then crash, a tendency we have seen since 2022 with most sites that decided to turn on the Generative AI engine and churn out content en masse.
Full Circle: The Return of the Personal Blogger?
So with the deluge of AI content, the systems that rank its quality, such as algorithms in LLMs, social media platforms, and search engines, constantly need to improve how they evaluate what’s worth spreading and what’s not.
So how do they do that? Well, it’s a bit of a mystery, for I believe even the people running those operations, but, in simple words, Google search, for instance, they are trying to gauge how much of an expert on the topic you are talking about you really are.
Beyond trying to decipher whether there’s a real person behind a YouTube video or social media posts, these systems are purging what they deem as not valuable content for the people who use their platforms, so internet users get a better experience when they use their products.
Are you saying things that are already there? Or are you adding some unique insight to the conversation?
Traditional blogging was about connecting to the reader through written content.
That’s what my new blog section will be about. I work with clients every day, helping them get their content around. Many times it doesn’t work as expected, but many other times we get the distribution machine rolling and make tons of sales or sign a new contract because someone who matters discovers us.
So here I am. I will use this personal blog, if you wish, to talk about what I learn out there.
To comment on what’s happening, and to share my voice, hoping that the overlords of content distribution help me reach those who care, even a potential customer, with a healthy dose of organic traffic.
If they don’t, it won’t matter. As I said before. I’m a writer by trade. Creation was never my bottleneck.
