The World Wide Web is overflowing with content. The bad news, however, is that most of this content is of poor quality and will never a show an ROI. It is interesting to note that when an organization performed an audit of its content quality, it had to remove around 1,000 pages of its 4,000-page public website. The pages had to be removed be cause there was not a single query received from those 1,000 pages.

Tons of content is being uploaded on the internet everyday, without even considering the quality of web content. It is very unfortunate to say that majority of this content will not even cover the cost of publication. Additionally, this content will have a harmful effect on the website and its business. Most the content published on the internet is ‘filler content', resembling weeds in a flower garden. And these weeds will do their bit of choking the flowers.

No doubt, content has been the king and website owners need to wake up to this fact and understand the true cost of content. Yes, we (users of the web) are living in an age of information overload. Unless the content managers become more and more concerned about what not to publish, the weeds (filler content) will continue choking the flowers (quality content). Content managers need to become more responsible and stop taking approaches which has no future.

Let us ask this question: Why does spam exist? Simply, because it is quite cheap. The distribution cost of content over the internet is low and this works more as a bane or a curse rather than a boon or benefit for website owners and content publishers. Now, a spam may come in any form. An unwanted email is a spam. A web page that does not need to be there is spam. A poor quality document that does not serve the purpose is spam. As a result, most of the content which is published on the internet does not even fetch the cost of publication. Yet, content explosion continues. Publishers really need to wake up to the fact!

Most of the business organizations obviously know that quality content is costly. There is no doubt admitting this. What these organizations do not understand is that poorly written content or low quality content is even costlier. When it is about the true cost of content, the cost of attention and the cost of action are also among the inclusions.

Web users are, undoubtedly, an impatient lot. Nothing irritates them more than a website which wastes their valuable time. They detest such websites. It is these poor content or filler content websites that diverts their attention from killer web content. Worse is the situation when the user gets confused over poor quality content and killer content. At the end, the user is unable to decide what to do next.

The image of a company brand has everything to do with the content that you deliver. If the user is misled by poor content and takes a wrong action, it only damages the brand. The more frustrated the customer becomes, the more harm is done to the brand.

The decisive point is: content is not neutral. It will either deliver or destroy. Do not let yourself fall into the trap of thinking that publishing a large amount of content will bring no harm. You really need to understand the difference between the filler web content and killer web content. If you want to put your efforts of content marketing on a solid business footing, you need to focus on the killer web content and say good bye to the filler content.