Believing the "Content Is Easy" Lie Will Kill Your Writing and Marketing

I keep getting "AI makes writing easy" and "Writing is easy" ads in my various social feeds. These liars are full of shit. Ignore them.

Content writing (and content marketing) is pain, anyone who says differently is selling something.*

There's been a run of email and marketing pitches in my inbox and online that offer "easy" solutions for all the writing pains that ail you - email, subject lines, LinkedIn (and other social channels), blogs, ebooks, blah blah blah.

Some of them are good, but there are more that leave me feeling icky. The underlying promise is some variation of "everything you need to know to write [insert thing here] quickly, easily, and simply."

And don’t get me started on the “one person AI content agencies.” Oh, yes, let’s set ourselves up to use genAI to mass plagiarize and turn ourselves into a generic content mill.

No thank you.

The good one's note that you're going to have to work. The rest leave the impression that you'll have it figured out in no time.

Which, as anyone who writes a lot knows, is horseshit.

Simple, Yet Oh So Complex and Difficult

Content marketing is simple - write useful stuff, create funnels with emails and landing pages, do some SEO, and have a regular presence where your audience is. That's often enough to get you started (though it takes more time that anyone wants it to take).

Writing (for business) is also fairly simple - there are frameworks, copywriting structure, subject line approaches, etc. that are straightforward.

If only simple meant easy.

There is a lot of pain and experimentation and getting it wrong in the process; even as there's also a lot of joy and getting it right.

What it isn't is easy.

Anyone that pitches some variation of a pain-free writing process . . . I'm thinking they're mostly full of shyte and they have self-selected to be ignored.

And now I'll descend my soapbox for the afternoon.

My fellow Princess Bride folks now what's what with the bastardized initial quotation. For non-fans (and, really, I'm not judging, much), it's a quote from Westley dressed as The Dread Pirate Roberts to Princess Buttercup, his one true love who doesn't yet know it's him: Life is pain, anyone who says differently is selling something."