A Simple Content Philosophy
I have no empirical evidence to back this, but I want to say people trust companies that look busy.
Busyness suggests ambition, drive, momentum, and growth. Busy companies are in demand. If you’re in demand, you must be growing. And people prefer to engage a company that, by all appearances, is winning, over those that aren’t.
How does a company show it’s winning?
Content.
Loads and loads of content.
Without it, a company can look like a static or nascent concern. Whenever I stumble onto a shallow website—just a handful of pages that don’t say or show much—I assume the company hasn’t been around that long, doesn’t prioritize brand or marketing, or simply doesn’t have much going on.
Doesn’t mean I’m right, but those are my impressions. The content that is there could look great or strike a unique tone. But without much else, it’s unclear if this a great business, or just a great idea for a business.
Content can change that.
Always Be Mythologizing
I’m setting aside explicit arguments about SEO and competing on keywords because that’s a different content framework (though I’ll address it in a bit), and the search game is changing drastically anyway. AI search—whereby the AI in a search product summarizes the answers to your queries instead of presenting a list of pages where you might find those answers—is already forcing companies to think about how they publish and organize information online to capture demand for their services.
Simpler reasons exist for producing content, like just showing users everything you’ve done and everything you’re doing. No matter how big or seemingly inconsequential.
Open AI uses a simple carousel above the fold to show how busy and ambitious the company is (in case you didn’t already know).
It starts with answering some basic questions:
What have you built?
What’s inside what you built? How and why did you build that?
What’s the underlying principle? What’s the insight you’re operating on?
*What can you do with what you’ve built?
What are you building now, and why?
How does it fit the company’s vision?
Who are you building this stuff with?
Who are you building it for? Why?
Who’s using your stuff already, and how’s it going for them?
Suddenly you have more content than time or patience to publish.
A great problem to have.
Open AI’s many research reports.
The tiniest update—to the company, the product, the use of the product—can be part of your brand’s mythology. And that’s what we’re doing here. Building mythology. Myths are how we compute what matters and what doesn’t. Always be mythologizing.
How To Look Busy With Content
Many companies make the mistake of leaving all their content on pages people scarcely visit. Like a blog you can’t locate in the site’s navigation.
The homepage is likely your most visited page, and it needs to impress people. Looking busy is a way to impress people. Since the blog is likely your means of publishing frequently on your site, you might as well a.) fill it with content that makes you look busy and b.) merchandise some of that content in a high traffic area like the homepage.
You can do that without taking up many pixels. OpenAI does this with a simple carousel that routes people to content on all the interesting work they’re doing. It even has an instance of Chat GPT you can try right then and there. And it’s all above the fold, where you’re guaranteed to see it.
Why do they do that? In part because they want to impress audiences with the scope of the company’s ambition and its discipline in executing it.
It’s certainly working on one observer.