UPDATED APRIL 13, 2026
What can I tell you about content?
Well, let’s see… I’ve been writing and ranking blog content for the last 17 years. For my last employer, for my own business and for countless clients I’ve worked with as a freelance content writer. And I’ve made it pay.
Most things I know about content, I’ve learned from my own experience.
Content marketing is something I truly believe in, because it makes good sense, it’s effective and it delivers results. But there are so many content marketing myths and misconceptions — from what content is, to how much you need and how to measure its success.
So let’s go bust some of those content marketing myths and uncover the truth.
What’s the point of content marketing?
Let’s start by looking at some of the myths around why you need content and why it’s such a good investment.
Myth #1 Content is just for SEO
This is a content marketing myth peddled by some SEOs who are purely concerned with boosting your rankings and traffic.
If they can show you your website is ranking for more keywords and your traffic numbers are up, they’ll think they’ve done a good job. Cue the self-congratulations and back-slapping.
But they’re missing a key piece of the content marketing puzzle. Because unless those additional rankings and traffic are translating into more engagement and more business, they don’t actually mean much.
Traffic = discerning human visitors
Traffic isn’t just numbers — it’s people. People who’ve come to your website in search of something and are expecting to find it.
The content you’re putting out there should be search-engine-optimised to bring more traffic to your site. But it should be written for your human visitors, because they’re the ones with the money!
Myth #2 You don’t need content if you’re advertising
Some business owners see content and advertising as an either/or, like, you only need one or the other.
But they’re missing the bigger picture.
When you advertise, you’re selling to the people who are ready to buy. But that’s just a fraction of your market. What about all the other people who would buy from you, but aren’t ready yet?
These are the people who are still doing their research and still have questions. Content answers those questions.
If you’re not creating this content and your competitors are, you’re missing out on potential sales from your wider market.
Myth #3 Content marketing is the same as advertising
When content marketing first became a thing, it was touted as a new approach to advertising. But it’s not advertising in the conventional sense and there are several important differences.
Content marketing brings your audience to you
Advertising is outbound. It involves placing ads where your ideal customers will see them and persuading them to click the link to your landing page.
Content marketing is inbound. It involves creating content that will help and benefit your audience, so they actively seek it out.
Content marketing is a long-term strategy
Advertising gives you instant gratification, using paid promotions to help you reach a large audience quickly. The aim is solely to generate sales and leads for your business.
Content is a long-term strategy, where you create and distribute valuable content to build and nurture an audience of your ideal prospects. The aim is to promote your authority in your sector, build trust with your audience and, eventually, convert those prospects into loyal customers.
Content marketing inevitably takes longer to yield results, but the results will be worth waiting for.
Content marketing is more sustainable
Advertising is only sustainable while you’re funding it. When you stop paying, your ads will stop and so will your revenue stream.
Content is yours forever. It creates a valuable resource on your website and can stay there, attracting visitors, for as long as it’s relevant and still has value. The more high-quality content you add, the more valuable your resource becomes. This makes it a more sustainable way to continuously generate new business in the long term.
Content marketing gives you more control
Advertising involves post ads on third-party platforms, like search engines and social media. To post, you have to abide by their terms and follow their rules.
With content marketing, you’re publishing content on your own website which gives you more control and more freedom to publish what you wish.
Content is more like an antidote to advertising
Advertising is everywhere and it’s relentless. Some of us are exposed to hundreds of adverts every day. But we’ve become pretty adept at ignoring and avoiding them — assisted by ad blockers, delete keys and skip buttons.
Content, on the other hand, is something we actually want to consume — and that may be the biggest difference.
Myth #4 My content should be all about my business
It’s your content, so surely you should be using it to talk about your business, right?
Wrong.
This is one of the biggest content marketing myths and something a lot of businesses are still doing wrong.
Thing is, content marketing will only work if your audience is actively looking for the content you’re creating.
For example, your audience might be searching for ‘How to unblock a toilet’, but they’re unlikely to be searching for ‘We’ve unblocked 500 toilets this year’. See the difference?
When you’re planning your content, you need to be thinking about what benefits your audience and what’s going to pull them in.
Myth #5 Content marketing is all about sales
Content marketing is ultimately about generating new business — of course it is. Nobody would bother investing in it if they weren’t going to see some returns.
But the main goal of content marketing isn’t sales. It’s to benefit your audience by giving them the help, information, advice or inspiration they’re searching for.
Content actually has a whole range of objectives, such as:
- Demonstrating your knowledge and expertise
- Increasing the authority of your brand
- Building your audience’s trust and loyalty
- Introducing your brand to new people
- Attracting warm leads to your website
- Getting new email sign-ups.
You might, occasionally, create a piece of content that’s intended to drive sales. But this would be an exception rather than the norm.
Content strategy
If you’re creating content, you need a strategy. This will help ensure you’re targeting the right people, in the right way to get the best results.
Your strategy should take into account your products/services, audience, media channels and platforms. Plus the amplification and promotion of your content.
Myth #6 A content strategy is a waste of time
This is a content marketing myth peddled by some SEOs who either don’t know what they’re doing or can’t be bothered to do it properly.
One SEO told our mutual client that putting together a content strategy was a waste of time and I should just be targeting the list of keywords they’d provided.
But they were wrong. Because content marketing is about much more than just SEO and targeting keywords (see Myth #1).
A content strategy helps you set out a proper framework and a clear direction for your content.
It helps you determine:
- Which markets you need to target
- The content you need for different audiences with different awareness levels
- The key messages you want to get across
- The media you want to use and how you plan to promote it
- The results you’re looking for.
A content strategy helps to focus your efforts and make sure you’re getting the most from your content marketing investment. Without one, you could be wasting money and not getting the results you deserve.
Myth #7 My industry is too boring for content
Some prospects have told me what they do is so boring that if they had content on their website, no one would bother to read it.
Another content marketing myth.
A quick search on Google was all it took to prove:
- Their audience had questions — lots of them
- The questions were being Googled — lots of times
- Their competitors had content — lots of it.
And they were missing out on valuable traffic by not creating the content their audience wanted to see.
Remember that content is subjective and it’s never boring to someone who needs to read it. Also, investing in a good content writer will help make the content more informative and engaging.
Myth #8 Written content is all you need
Written content still works best for SEO, because search engines and AI are trained to ‘read’ and make sense of written words.
But not everyone wants to sit down and read an article. Some people find reading difficult, some don’t have the patience and some prefer other ways of consuming information.
For example, some people would rather:
- Watch a video
- Listen to a podcast
- Look at a graphic
- View a SlideShare
- Consume more bite-size social media content.
Repurposing your blog articles into other forms of content, like these, will help you reach and engage a larger audience.
Myth #9 Posting more frequently gets better results
I once saw a content writing opportunity where the client wanted to hire one writer to publish four 600-word articles on his website every day.
Yes, you read that correctly.
Posting lots and lots of articles is one way to build up your blog. But quality and consistency are so much more important than quantity. One in-depth 2,400-word article will serve you better than four 600-word articles.
You should be aiming to post consistently high-value SEO content with consistent regularity. One exceptional article a week is better than four mediocre articles a day.
Myth #10 Longer word counts get better results
Longer and more in-depth content does tend to perform better on Google. But a longer word count alone doesn’t automatically mean a piece of content will get you better results.
It’s much better to write something of quality and value that’s a proportionate length for the subject than to hold out for something longer. Because writers who have to meet word counts often resort to wordiness, waffle, and rambling off on tangents that aren’t really relevant.
Posting high-value content that delivers what it promises is more important than the length. This is why I don’t work on word counts. I write until I’ve covered the topic in sufficient detail — then I stop.
The process of creating content
In this section, we’ll look at how your content gets written and who should be writing it. This matters, because content that’s written on the cheap will, without doubt, be missing the elements it needs to make it successful.
Myth #11 Anyone can write my content
Anyone can write, right? I mean, most of us learned it in school, so how hard can it be?
This content marketing myth is why a lot of businesses fail to make an impact with their content.
There’s actually a big difference between someone who can string a sentence together and someone who can write effective content that engages your audience and satisfies Google.
Because for your content to work properly it needs to:
- Show you understand your audience and what they want to see
- Include credible research to back up what you’re saying
- Communicate with your audience in a clear and meaningful way
- Stand a chance of ranking on Google so your audience can find it.
These are skills that often take years to master. And they’re probably not skills your work experience person or marketing junior will have.
So, can anyone write your content? Yes. Can anyone write your content in the way it needs to be written? No.
Myth #12 AI will solve all my content problems
When AI started to become more mainstream, many businesses saw it as the answer for their written content needs. It was cheap, it was fast and it sounded credible. What more could they have wanted?
For some of those businesses, this turned out to be one of the most damaging content marketing myths.
These businesses started publishing huge volumes of content. Populating their blogs with hundreds of AI-written articles in the space of just days. All put together with very little human input and no human oversight.
Then Google got involved.
Google decided this influx of low-quality content was serving no one. It started the rollout of its helpful content update in August 2022. And many of those businesses that had gone overboard with AI articles felt its wrath. Some found their websites had been wiped off the face of the internet.
Google has since said that it isn’t disallowing AI-written content, so long as it’s helpful, reliable and puts people first. Translated, this means AI-generated content needs human oversight to read, edit and fact-check what the AI has produced.
What you need to know about AI
AI doesn’t have any ideas of its own
AI can’t do anything without human instruction. If you use it to write your content you’ll need a human content strategist to tell it:
- What to write
- Who to write it for
- What style/voice to use
- What questions it needs to answer.
AI doesn’t research well
AI doesn’t vet its sources and even makes things up when it doesn’t have the answers. Any points AI makes using flawed research will be flawed, too. So you’ll need a human to fact-check and fix all that.
AI writes like a machine
When AI writes it uses familiar patterns, phrases and words that are easy to spot and easy to ridicule. If you don’t want to sound like a machine, or be the butt of people’s jokes, you’ll need a content writer to humanise it for you.
Shall I go on?
There are so many reasons why AI won’t solve all your problems. And if you think this is a shortcut to getting cheaper content, you can think again on that too.
Fact-checking and rewriting AI ramblings, with information sourced from god knows where, is no fun and it can take longer than researching and writing it from scratch. Any content writer who agrees to fix it for you should be charging more than their normal rate, not working at a discount!
Publishing and tracking content
In this section we’ll look at what happens when the content is written — because, contrary to popular belief, that’s not the end of the story.
Myth #13 Publishing the content is the final stage
Some businesses hit ‘publish’ on their content, then sit back and wait for their audience to come and find it. These are often the businesses that say content marketing takes too long to work and then give up on it.
When the content is published, that’s when you start promoting it to the audiences you have on your social media and email lists.
To reach the most people, you should be sharing your content on your socials at different times and on different days. Keep a check on your account and respond to any comments to amplify your reach even further.
You can share the link with your email subscribers, too. And include a share button in the email, so they can share it with other members of their network, if they choose.
Promoting and amplifying your content like this will get people engaging from the start, so you won’t have to wait for it to be found before it starts working.
Myth #14 The success of your content is in the sales
The sole goal of conventional advertising is to sell. This means you can evaluate the success of a conventional advertising campaign by how many sales it made.
But the impact of content is more difficult to measure. And it can be virtually impossible to attribute a sale to a particular piece of content.
For example, a piece of content might encourage someone to sign up to your email list. But it could be days, weeks or months before that person decides to buy something from you.
The point is, you’ll be on their radar when they’re ready. And in the meantime, you’ll be on their radar if anyone they know needs a recommendation.
If your content isn’t translating directly into sales, that doesn’t mean it isn’t working. Behind the scenes, it’s:
- Boosting awareness of your brand and introduce you to new customers
- Showing your expertise and build trust in your brand
- Encouraging visitors to sign up to your mailing list, so you can target them with email marketing
- Pointing visitors in the direction of more information.
Want to start a business blog?
Or to improve the blog you already have?
I’m Jenny Lucas, a UK freelance copywriter with a wealth of content writing experience.
I work mainly with SMEs to create content that helps attract visitors, build an audience and convert new business. It’s a process that’s worked for me and many of my clients — and it could work for you, too.
For more information, have a look at my content writing service page or complete a contact form to get in touch.
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