Story’s CEO Kirk Cheyfitz joined Jim Blasingame on the Small Business Advocate Show to discuss content creation and why everyone in business is in the content business. The better you get at it, he argues, the bigger your business will get.

People hear about your business in one of three ways: They walk by a storefront, get a personal recommendation, or come across it through some form of media (typically, the Internet). And whenever you publish something to the web — even something as simple as a menu — you’ve entered the content game. Social media (and marketing necessity) turns your business into media itself. So it goes without saying that your digital content had better be good to keep people interested and have positive natural search returns. And it had better be original.

2011 is the year of original content. In January, Google (Story’s partner for the Digital Archaeology project) changed its algorithms to reward people who publish their own work and punish those who repurpose that of others. The search giant recognized that too many leachers had been gaming the system, stealing content that didn’t belong to them to drive site traffic. A month later, Google made another change that affected 12 percent of all search queries: It developed a new algorithm to push down these content farms in search results. The moral of the story? You can’t cheat the system. And, as always, great, original content wins.

Listen to Story CEO Kirk Cheyfitz on Jim Blasingame’s Small Business Advocate Show: