Online, your message is fighting for the attention of the user alone against the rest of the internet. There are no sectors, there are no walls. The internet is one vast open playing field. And your message is up against the BBC, YouTube and blogs about kittens.

You’ve seen the success that other sites have had and you want that. But your downfall is that you do not appreciate why those others have succeeded. You want what they have but you haven’t done the work they have.

The BBC and Amazon are classic sites we all rightly admire and desire to copy in some shape or form. But the one principle many fail to recognise is their commitment to quality and engaging content – content that tells a story that people want to hear .

Every organisation has a story to tell about its brand, its products and services and online their is an audience that is receptitive to that message. Understanding the value proposition of your business and your customer is essential to ensuring your content reaches that audience.

Remember the film The Field of Dreams ? In it, Kevin Costner was told that if he turned a field into a baseball pitch dead players would turn up to play on it. He was told: “Build it and they will come.”

In the online world, baby, they don’t. They really really don’t. You have to go and get them with the content you have to market, no matter how much good work you’ve done.

The Information architecture may have been well designed; the creatives and navigation structure may have been user tested and the stakeholders may have all signed it off. No doubt, the content management system is industry standard and you bet it’s flexible enough to cater for future developments. It goes without saying the site is 3A, XHTML and W3C compliant to boot. Your analytics package will be in place ready to measure the large number of customers who will come to admire your work. You are all so very very proud as your new site launches. Look upon our works, ye mighty, and despair. You have built it and they will come.

But they don’t and after a short peak of modest initial interest the traffic begins to die off. It dies because you haven’t attracted anyone to your site with interesting stuff .

The reality is you live and die by your content . No matter what your business, when you are online you are in the content publishing business. The content your beieve in and want to market is the only long term determinant of the success of your site.

David Petherick has done an interview with our very own Tony Purcell. In it you can hear Tony’s soothing Irish brogue explain how our content marketing approach increases traffic for our clients online messages. David has a number of other very interesting interviews, including one with Werner Vogels (or is it Verner Wogels) of Amazon.

Listen in, and find out a little more about content marketing in the social media sphere.

By the way, just as an aside, you have to be pretty clever to produce an automated link exchange site like this one I found recently.