Brands and small businesses invest time and money into content creation because they know that it has myriad benefits—including increased brand awareness, boosted website traffic, and higher conversion rates.

But of course, not every piece of content has the intended effect.

In fact, some content can actually be counterproductive—turning off your readers and failing to move the sales needle in any meaningful way at all.

In this post, we’re going to list a few content archetypes that are guaranteed to fall flat—content FAILs to avoid at all cost.

Content That’s Guaranteed to FAIL

Boring Content

We’re not suggesting that you need to make every company blog post a masterpiece, but there should be some kind of story—a theme, hook, or angle to engage readers. It’s essential to remember that you’re always creating content for people, not just for search engines; if you don’t find the content interesting and easy to read, neither will anyone else.

Brand-centric Content

It’s not about you! It’s about your readers. Make sure your content focuses on what’s in it for them—benefits, value, actionable takeaways that they can draw from your content.

Content That’s Written to Nobody in Particular

When creating content, it’s important to think about your audience—a particular group you want to reach, based on data or buyer profiles. The content should be designed to meet your audience’s needs, issues, and values; generic content that isn’t aimed at a specific audience will struggle to provide clear benefits and should be avoided.

Content That’s Written for Robots

Are SEO tricks and gimmicks making your content unreadable to actual human beings? If so, then you might as well not bother. People matter, and Google will see right through your tricks.

Salesy Content

Your content can obviously be written to build trust, to increase brand awareness, and ultimately to sell, but it shouldn’t just be straight-up advertising. On the contrary, content that is aggressively salesy and interruptive will peter out pretty fast, as readers just aren’t going to want to engage with it, share it, or link back to it.

Your Content is Hard to Read

Paragraph breaks, short sentences, bullet points, section subheadings—all of these things are important for making your content easy to skim and to digest. Poor formatting will leave your content basically useless and unread.