With everybody saying the secret to effective inbound marketing is quality content it's pretty clear, to me at least, that all this SEO Keyword stuff is missing the mark.  Indeed Mr. Google says so!

But that raises another question. Where on earth do we get genuine content for our blog, so Mr. Google will send us people interested in buying what we sell.

There are lots of people using somebody else's articles.  That's why sites like Ezine Articles and I-Snare exist.  Somebody else writes it, they let us know it's there, we publish it in our blog and give credit to the author.  This adds to the authors credibility in Mr. Google's evaluation, so everybody's a winner.  At least that's the theory.

Except that's not the whole story.

Mr. Google really wants our insight and experience, not somebody else's.  He wants to answer searches with genuine stuff.  How well an article is written is a secondary consideration.  He's trying to fill millions of niches and anybody who feeds his machine with real insight of a niche will get air time.

So the real answer to where do we get the content from is ourselves.  We have the insight, the experience and the war stories to illustrate, making it genuine for the reader.

Ultimately it's about stories.

Whoever wrote the Bible knew communication was about stories.  We've all grown up learning from stories.  When we try to explain stuff to people who don't know what we know, we use stories.

So when we're looking for content we need look no further than our own stories - things that made a difference to us, that we learned from, and which we can share with others so they might learn as well.

A few weeks ago I asked a friend  (@getresults) to comment on my content.  What he said was a lesson I've tried to learn.  

He said "I really don't want to read the theory, that's hard work.  I want to read stories of ways what you do has made a difference to real people, in circumstances to which I can relate."

And so this post is an attempt to do just that.  It's my story about my writing and the feedback I've been lucky to get from people kind enough to take the trouble.