For most of my career, I've had a confession I didn't like making. I've never been very good at creating a lot of content. I've worked in marketing for a long time. I've helped build audiences, grow companies, launch products, and sell things on the internet. But I've never been the person who publishes three times a day. I don't have 10,000 old blog posts sitting in an archive. I've never had a content calendar stretching six months into the future. For a long time, I thought this was a weakness. Now I'm starting to wonder if it might be an advantage. Especially now, in the age of AI, when content is flooding the market faster than anyone could ever consume it. The thing the industry spent 20 years optimizing for just became infinite. And the game it's been rewarding is about to stop working. 1. We were playing for the wrong prize.The content economy is real. You can turn one podcast into a newsletter, 20 tweets, five LinkedIn posts, and three videos before you finish your morning coffee. The marginal cost of another piece of content is approaching zero. Anyone can publish everything. And yet marketing doesn't feel like it's getting easier. It feels like it's getting harder. I think that's because we misread what the content economy pays out in. We assumed the prize was attention. So we optimized for the things we could measure. Views. Impressions. Followers. Opens. Watch time. The scoreboard became attention, and we built our content to win the scoreboard. But attention was never the asset. Attention decides whether someone stops scrolling. It doesn't decide whether they come back tomorrow, believe what you say, buy what you sell, or tell a friend about you. Only one thing decides that. Trust. And almost everything we've been taught to build is aimed at attention, which doesn’t inherently help us build trust. 2. The gimmicks are working. That's the problem.Open any platform right now and you'll see people who have become extraordinarily good at getting attention. They know the hooks. They know which controversy to manufacture. They know exactly how to make you stop scrolling. And it works. The views are real. The follower counts are real. So why doesn't the business follow? Because a million people can watch your video and still not care what you have to say tomorrow. A hundred thousand people can follow you and never buy your product. You can dominate someone's feed without ever earning a meaningful place in their life. Attention without trust is a sugar high. It feels good for a minute (and looks impressive on a dashboard), but it disappears almost immediately. Worse, the tactics that win attention often spend trust to do it. The exaggerated hook without the content doesn't pay off. The inflated headline that promises more than the piece delivers. The manufactured outrage. The curiosity gap that turns out to be empty. Each one wins the moment and teaches the reader something about you: This person will trade my time for their metrics. They may keep watching. They will not keep believing. That's the trap. The gimmicks work on the scoreboard everyone can see, and lose on the one that actually matters.
3. What it takes to build trust now.If trust is the currency, the strategy question changes. It's no longer "how do I create more content?" It's not even "how do I get more attention?" Instead, it’s “what could I create that would make the right person trust me more?” That question produces a completely different content strategy. It might mean publishing less. It might mean refusing a trend that has nothing to do with what you believe. It might mean writing something thoughtful when the market is rewarding something fast. It might mean telling a story that 1,000 people deeply care about instead of manufacturing a hook that 100,000 people casually consume. And it requires you to understand how trust is actually built, because it isn't built the way attention is. Attention has a playbook anyone can run in an afternoon. Find the format that's already going viral. Borrow the hook that's already working. Ask AI for ten variations. Post the one with the most tension in it. That's it. The whole system is public, repeatable, and getting easier by the month. Trust has a different kind of playbook. It's not a format you can borrow. It's a set of behaviors your reader is keeping score on. You say something true when it would be easier to say something with the potential to go viral. You make a promise in your headline and the content delivers on that promise. You show up when you said you would, again, next week, the week after that. You're useful before you ask for anything. You hold a point of view long enough that people know where you stand without thinking about it. None of these is difficult. Any one of them you can begin to do this week. What makes trust rare isn't that it's hard to build. It's that it takes time. It can't be batched. There's no version of doing six months of showing up in one afternoon. One useful idea. One kept promise. One meaningful interaction. One piece of content at a time. That's exactly why it's becoming the most valuable asset in your business. Content is abundant now. Attention can be engineered. But trust is the thing that remains scarce. 4. Put it to work.Pull up the last piece of content you published. Read it and answer one question honestly: Was this designed to win attention from anyone, or to earn trust with the right person? Not both. Pick the one it was actually built for. The hook you chose, the promise you made, the way it ends. They'll tell you. Then, before you create your next piece, write this question at the top of the page: "What could I create that would make the right person trust me more?" Let that question change what you make this week. Let it kill the idea entirely if it needs to. The content economy will keep rewarding whatever you feed it. Make sure you're feeding it the thing that compounds. Go move someone. Darrell from Copyblogger P.S. Interested in brand deals? My friend Justin Moore (who has generated more than $5M+ in sponsorships personally) is hosting a 4-day challenge where you'll learn how to build a high-paying brand deal offer—even if you don't have a huge audience. Join the $10K Brand Deal Challenge for just $27. |
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