Day Three: Let’s get real. Content Marketing isn’t anything that my generation initiated, or the greatest generation of all before me, or several generations before them. In fact, men living in London in 1731 were content marketed by a chap named Edward Cave – no doubt the originator of the man-Cave. Every brochure, catalog, website, TV spot, video, direct mailer, you name it, is nothing more than an empty platform, a dinner plate without food, a beer mug without brew. And it’s been that way for several centuries.

But there are two critical Content Marketing differences between the days of yore and today. Okay, there are probably hundreds, but let’s focus on two.

1. In the past, Content Marketing was project-based, and to a great extent it still is, but its effectiveness can only be realized if it’s processed-based.

2. Not that many years ago, Content Marketing was voluntary, but today it’s a requirement and a mandatory discipline for effective search engine optimization, specifically, and business success generally.

You must turn Content Marketing into a regularly scheduled daily event just as you would a daily strategy meeting or a coffee break, albeit a very long coffee break. The point is, it’s just not going to work unless it consumes several hours of your day, and that’s at a minimum. A pro golfer doesn’t hit one bucket of balls and calls it good. Is it mandatory? Maybe not quite as much as the air you breath and the food you eat, but it’s up there. With 90% of all organic search occurring from the first page of search, you’ll need to Content Market to sustain your first page position, or climb the ladder to page one, presuming, of course, you have no interest in paying your way to the top. There’ll be plenty more on Content Marketing over the next few weeks, and even though I’ve been aggressively doing it since the turn of the century, it appears I’m still a few centuries behind.