You might have noticed there was no blog post last week.

I had no idea what I wanted to write about. I dove into my subscriptions in Feedly. I skimmed e-mail subscriptions and read random articles. I looked at my Wunderlist of blog post ideas. No inspiration. Total blogger’s block.

I had two choices: (1) skip a week; or (2) dial it in.

There’s a lot of content noise out there.

Hubspot has a terrific article about the challenge of content marketing.

There’s data from a 2010 benchmarking survey.

It’s only gotten harder since then to get heard.

Eric Murphy notes that, in 2015,”54 percent of B2B marketers and 50 percent of B2C marketers cited ‘producing engaging content’ as a top challenge. For B2B marketers, it was the most commonly cited challenge. For B2C, it was second.”

Then he says:

Content marketing is a quality game, not a quantity game. If you create the type of content that truly engages your audience, the proof will be in the results.

Bingo.

You can’t dial it in.

Bad content sucks. In a sea of content, there are plenty of other places your prospects, customers, and colleagues can go.

People rarely stop reading something because they get too much stuff. That’s like breaking up and saying, “It”s not you. It’s me.” People stop reading because your content isn’t good enough, or interesting enough, or relevant enough to them.

The quality of your content matters.

So I skipped a week–and hopefully you’ve stuck around to see what comes next.

Feature photo by Andre Hofmeister (Flickr).