Why The DIY Approach Won’t Work in Content Marketing

If you’ve ever wasted too much time on Pinterest like myself, you know that there are a gazillion things you can DIY.

Everything from 10,000+ mason jar projects to straw-bale couches, outdoor benches to brighten the yard, and bathroom re-dos to warm the soul. Shoot, I’d bet you a hundred bucks you can find out a project to recycle your poop. No, I haven’t searched that yet. Yes, I bet you are going to. Tell me what you find!

In all seriousness, I’m here to say there are some things you just shouldn’t attempt to DIY.

I’m not talking about mason jars here…I’m talking about the content part of content marketing.

Nowadays, DIY content is all the rage and there are dozens of platforms that allow content creators to put together everything — from infographics to videos… there really is a tool for everything, and the things that DON’T have tools, WILL soon.

But I’d like to stop the conversation for a moment to raise the question. Is DIY content really a good idea?

I say NO, and here’s why.

DIY Leads to BIG Mistakes

A while back in our content creation history, I published an infographic with ONE fact that we unfortunately hadn’t researched enough. Out of all the facts, yes, this one tiny sentence got us called out by Joe Pulizzi himself, the great head of Content Marketing Institute, on Twitter. I immediately jumped on fixing it, re-publishing it, and then thanking him publicly on Twitter — which I think is the best route. Honesty is next to… something good.

But needless to say, this WASN’T a fun experience. I mean, Joe is like my king in the sphere of influencers that influence me.

So while we take our content creation seriously, humans are humans, and when you DIY content long enough, you’re bound to make a mistake. In that particular case, it would have been much better for me NOT to publish our content until my team and I had spent twice the time researching and proofing.

I tell this sad tale because it’s an example for all businesses to follow: unless you can produce what Rand Fishkin calls “10x Content,” then you arguably shouldn’t be producing content at all. 10x content, to put it simply, is the kind of quality, researched, evergreen content that Fishkin and other content experts claim will be the only stuff to rise to the surface of today’s so-called “content sea.”

According to Fishkin, you shouldn’t hit publish unless you’re going to publish a piece that can be “the top 10% quality in your industry” and virtually the only reliable way to ensure you’re doing that is to not DIY your content.

Yeah Fishkin! Good stuff.

Another Sad Infographic Example

Not trying to out one of my favorite companies here, seriously — they have the BEST Twitter chat #bufferchat community and they rock the house. But that said…

Buffer recently published a piece called, “7 Tools for Building an Infographic in an Afternoon (Design Skills or Not).” It’s easy enough to guess what this post is about, but it’s slightly harder to ascertain its ramifications in the content creation world.

(Did you read their title? You absolutely need design skills to create an infographic…I’m sorry, but I’d bet you an easy 90% of people would agree with me here.)

While it’s fantastic to create your own content, there are several things that go into the process and are required in order to do it effectively. For example, it’s one thing for Rand Fishkin himself to create his own content: he’s an expert and he’s spent years studying the patterns, requirements, traits, and trends of successful, high-quality content. It’s entirely another thing, however, for a marketer that doesn’t even like to talk on the phone to press record on any old video camera and try to emulate the great Fishkin’s Whiteboard Fridays.

It’s also one thing for a designer who went-to-school-for-it and then spent-the-last-seven-years-creating-brand-stuff to design an infographic, then for a marketer that’s never so much as opened Photoshop to buckle down into creating his or her own infographics…

…and for that content creator to then expect the results to perform well and reflect positively on his or her business.

While this content creator will certainly wind up with an infographic at the end of the day, it’s a pretty guaranteed fact that the infographic will be poorly put together. And why create it, if that’s the result?

Good content takes time and it takes expertise. While any of the multiple DIY infographic creation platforms today allow any Fred, Dick, or Harry to create an infographic, you can bet that these would-be designers don’t know which color palates translate into the best psychological results, how to properly research or cite facts for an infographic, and how to optimize it for sharing across a variety of platforms.

This is the inherent fallacy with the “DIY in an afternoon” approach: while you’ll certainly be able to produce something in an afternoon, good content (for this example, a good infographic) can easily take months to produce and if you’re cutting enough corners to do it in an afternoon, it’s likely that you’re skipping over some of the most important aspects of the content creation process.

In other words, creating an infographic in a day is a little bit like what would have happened had Steve Jobs built the first iPhone in a week: shoddy results, displeased customers, damage to the brand. And the latter is one of the most insistent risks of DIY content.

How DIY Content Can Harm Your Brand

Let’s face it: DIY content is aimed at one specific group of marketers: small businesses or people who are trying to stay small because they have no budget.

This is a Catch 22 if I’ve ever heard of one because, for these people, quality content is hugely important: it’s how your company gets noticed, it’s how you build a name for yourself online, it’s how people find and share your stuff, and it’s how you make sales. But if you’re a small business and you’re struggling through DIY Content creation, it’s highly likely that you’re going to produce sub-par content that nobody wants to interact with or share. Or, worse, you’ll create content that’s inaccurate and then you’ll be called out by people you want to impress.

This, in turn, can actually downgrade your brand by giving would-be customers a bad first impression. Sloppy infographics don’t convert and those without a marketing budget may be better off publishing nothing at all than publishing shoddy, poorly-researched, poorly formulated content for content’s sake. This only dumps more water into the content sea and serves to further bog down the marketer and all the people around him or her.

Conclusion

While DIY is all well and good, stick to mason jar projects and outdoor bencherification (translate: make-a-bench-fancy) for those.

If you’re DIY-ing simply because you can’t afford to hire a professional, it’s possible that you’re doing more harm than good to your business. The risk of publishing bad content is simply too high and if you get called out by your influencers like we did, it stands a great chance of ruining your business and getting your business, lead generation, reputation and overall success started on a bad foot.

Instead, focus on creating the content you can excel at… and hire professionals to excel at the rest.

I end with a quote from Yoda. I feel he sums up the meaning of my post, and try is that grey area when you’re just aren’t doing hard enough.

DO, my friends: don’t just try.

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