{"id":29217,"date":"2026-05-29T14:54:02","date_gmt":"2026-05-29T19:54:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jasminedirectory.com\/blog\/?p=29217"},"modified":"2026-05-29T14:59:04","modified_gmt":"2026-05-29T19:59:04","slug":"content-marketing-for-small-businesses-a-practical-guide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasminedirectory.com\/blog\/content-marketing-for-small-businesses-a-practical-guide\/","title":{"rendered":"Content marketing for small businesses: a practical guide"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two small businesses spend the same modest sum on being found. The first puts all of it into advertising; the second puts part of it into producing genuinely useful content and the rest into advertising. A year on, the first business’s visibility is exactly what it pays for that month, and not a scrap more. The second business’s advertising does the same — but beside it sits a year’s worth of content that goes on attracting customers whether or not anything is spent this month.<\/p>\n

The difference is what this article is about. It is the pillar of the content marketing<\/a> articles in this series, and it sets out what content marketing is, why a small business should do it, what makes it work and what makes it fail, and how a business with limited time and money should approach it — honestly, including about how genuinely demanding it is.<\/p>\n

A note on sources is in order. Peer-reviewed research is cited by author and year and listed at the end; Google’s own published guidance is cited as a primary source and identified as such; and any claim resting on the common practice of the field is identified as practitioner consensus.<\/p>\n

What content marketing is<\/h2>\n

Content marketing is the practice of attracting and keeping customers by creating genuinely useful content — articles, guides, explanations, answers — rather than only by advertising directly to them.<\/p>\n

The content in question is not advertising dressed up. It is material that has worth to the reader on its own terms: it answers a question they genuinely have, explains something they genuinely want to understand, helps them with a decision they genuinely face. A customer reading it gets something of value even if they never become a customer at all.<\/p>\n

The marketing happens through that usefulness, not around it. A business that consistently helps people with genuine, well-made content becomes, to those people, a known and trusted source on its subject — and a known, trusted source is the business they turn to when they are ready to buy, recommend to others, and find again. The content earns attention and trust by being worth attention; the commercial benefit follows from that.<\/p>\n

This is, at bottom, an old idea given a current name. A business that has always been generous with genuine advice — the shopkeeper who tells you honestly what you need, the tradesperson who explains the problem clearly — has always understood that being genuinely helpful builds the kind of standing that brings custom. Content marketing is that instinct, carried out at the scale and in the medium of the web.<\/p>\n

It is worth holding onto that continuity, because it makes content marketing less intimidating. A business that is good at its trade already knows how to be genuinely helpful to a customer in person; content marketing asks it to do the familiar thing in writing, and at a scale where one helpful explanation can reach many people rather than one. The skill is not new; the medium is.<\/p>\n

Content marketing and advertising: the difference<\/h2>\n

Content marketing is best understood beside advertising, because the two work in genuinely different ways — and the difference, which the figure below illustrates, is the heart of why content marketing is worth a small business’s effort.<\/p>\n

\n\n <\/rect>\n <\/line>\n <\/line>\n visibility →<\/text>\n time →<\/text>\n <\/path>\n <\/path>\n Advertising<\/text>\n visible while you pay<\/text>\n spend stops — visibility ends<\/text>\n Content<\/text>\n accumulates, and keeps working<\/text>\n Conceptual chart — it illustrates the pattern, not measured data.<\/text>\n<\/svg>
Figure 1.<\/strong> How advertising and content marketing behave over time. Advertising buys visibility that lasts exactly as long as the spending; content marketing builds visibility that accumulates and persists.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The contrast the figure draws is genuine. Advertising rents attention: it works well, often quickly, and stops the moment the payment stops, leaving nothing behind. Content marketing builds an asset: each genuinely useful piece, once made, can go on being found and read for years, and the body of content compounds rather than evaporating.<\/p>\n

This is not an argument that content marketing is better than advertising; the two do different jobs, and a later cluster of this series treats advertising in its own right. It is an argument that they are different in kind — rented attention versus a built asset — and that a small business, whose resources<\/a> are limited and whose horizon is long, has particular reason to value the kind of attention that accumulates.<\/p>\n

There is a further difference worth noting, in who controls the attention. Advertising’s attention is rented from a platform, and the platform sets the terms and the price, which can change. Content marketing’s attention rests on an asset the business itself owns — its own content, on its own site. For a small business<\/a> wary of depending too heavily on terms it does not control, that ownership is a quiet but genuine advantage.<\/p>\n

Why a small business should do it<\/h2>\n

The accumulating-asset quality is the first reason a small business should do content marketing, but it is not the only one, and the others are worth setting out.<\/p>\n

Content marketing builds trust and authority. A business that genuinely and consistently helps people with good content becomes, in their eyes, a business that knows its subject — and that perceived expertise is itself a reason customers choose it. Genuinely informative content functions, in the language of economics, as a credible signal: it conveys real information about the business’s competence in a way mere assertion cannot (Nelson, 1974).<\/p>\n

Content marketing also addresses a problem this series has returned to repeatedly. A customer choosing a business they have not used faces an information gap — they cannot easily judge, in advance, whether the business is any good (Akerlof, 1970). Genuinely useful content partly closes that gap: a customer who has read a business’s clear, knowledgeable explanation of their problem has already seen evidence of its competence before any money changes hands.<\/p>\n

And content marketing is, finally, what much of the rest of this series quietly depends on — a point the next section draws out in full. For now, the summary is that a small business should do content marketing because it builds an asset rather than renting one, because it builds genuine trust and authority, and because it underpins so much else a business does to be found.<\/p>\n

It is worth adding one more reason, less often stated. Producing genuinely useful content forces a business to articulate clearly what it knows — and that articulation has value inside the business too. An owner who has written a clear explanation of how customers should choose a provider has clarified, for the business itself, what it does well and why. The content serves customers; the discipline of making it serves the business.<\/p>\n

How content marketing connects to everything else<\/h2>\n

Content marketing can look, set beside the SEO<\/a> and local SEO and AI-search articles of this series, like a separate subject. It is not. It is closer to the thing those other subjects all act upon.<\/p>\n

Consider what the earlier articles were optimising. On-page SEO is the practice of making content rank well — but there must be content for it to act on. AEO and GEO are about being a source answer engines draw on — but a business is drawn on for the content it has. Off-page SEO is about earning links — and links are earned, as that cluster argued, by having something genuinely worth linking to. Each of those practices presupposes content; content marketing is the practice of producing it.<\/p>\n

This means content marketing is not one more item on a list of marketing tasks; it is, in a sense, the engine the others run on. A business with no genuine content has given its on-page SEO nothing to optimise, its AEO nothing to be cited, its link-earning nothing to be linked to. The earlier articles described how to make content findable and useful to machines; this one describes how to have the content in the first place.<\/p>\n

Seen this way, content marketing is the most foundational of the practices in this series, even though it appears late in it. A business that has read the earlier articles and wondered what, concretely, all that optimisation is meant to be applied to has reached, in content marketing, the answer.<\/p>\n

This also reorders, slightly, how a business should think about the series. The earlier clusters can read as a sequence of separate skills to acquire; seen from here, they are better understood as ways of getting genuine content found, cited, and linked. A business that grasps this stops treating content as one more task and starts treating it as the thing the other tasks are for.<\/p>\n

Where content marketing actually lives<\/h2>\n

A small business often pictures content marketing as a blog — a stream of articles, separate from the rest of the website. That picture is too narrow, and widening it helps a business see content marketing as more achievable than it first appears.<\/p>\n

Content marketing is the production of genuinely useful content, and that content lives in more places than a blog. It is the clear, genuinely helpful service pages the on-page SEO articles described. It is guides and explanations.<\/p>\n

It is honestly answered frequently-asked-questions. It is articles, where a business chooses to write them. The blog is one form content takes, not the whole of it.<\/p>\n

This matters because it means a business is often doing more content marketing, or is closer to doing it, than it realised. A business that has written genuinely useful service pages has begun; a business with a genuinely helpful set of answers to common questions has a body of content already. Content marketing is not a separate publishing project bolted onto the website; it is, in large part, the website’s useful content itself.<\/p>\n

It matters, too, because content endures in a way worth dwelling on. A genuinely useful piece, once published, can go on being found and read for years — a customer in three years’ time can search a question and arrive at an answer the business wrote long before. This long shelf life is the accumulating-asset quality made concrete: content marketing builds something that keeps working long after the work of making it is done.<\/p>\n

This endurance is also why content marketing tolerates a slow pace so well. Because a piece keeps working for years, a business publishing modestly is not running to stand still; it is adding to a stock that does not deplete. A few genuinely good pieces a year, sustained, builds — over several years — into a substantial body of content, precisely because nothing already made stops working while the new is added.<\/p>\n

What makes content marketing actually work<\/h2>\n

Content marketing is often done, and often done badly, so it is worth being precise about what distinguishes the version that works from the version that does not.<\/p>\n

What makes it work, above everything, is genuine usefulness. Content that genuinely helps a real person with a real question — that they would be glad to have found — is content that gets read, trusted, shared, linked to, and cited. Content produced to fill a quota, or to carry keywords, or because a business felt it ought to publish something, tends to help no one and to do correspondingly little.<\/p>\n

What also makes it work is answering the questions customers actually have, rather than the things a business finds it comfortable to talk about. The next article in this series is devoted entirely to this — to what a business should write about — because choosing the wrong subjects is one of the commonest ways content marketing fails. Content aimed at genuine customer questions works; content aimed at the business’s own preoccupations usually does not.<\/p>\n

And what makes it work is consistency over time, a point a later section treats in full. A single good piece is worth little; a steady accumulation of good pieces is worth a great deal. Content marketing rewards the business that keeps at it and frustrates the business that publishes in bursts and then stops.<\/p>\n

These three — genuine usefulness, the right topics, consistency — are worth holding together, because a business often does one or two and assumes the rest will follow. Useful content on the wrong topics helps no one who is looking; the right topics treated thinly do little; and excellent, well-aimed pieces produced once and then abandoned never compound. Content marketing works when all three hold, and a business should treat them as a set.<\/p>\n

The many things one piece of content does<\/h2>\n

Part of why content marketing repays its effort is that a single genuinely useful piece of content does several jobs at once. The figure below sets them out.<\/p>\n

\n\n \n \n <\/path>\n <\/marker>\n <\/defs>\n <\/rect>\n <\/rect>\n Genuinely useful<\/text>\n content<\/text>\n <\/rect>\n Search visibility<\/text>\n <\/rect>\n Citations in AI answers<\/text>\n <\/rect>\n Earned links<\/text>\n <\/rect>\n Trust and authority<\/text>\n <\/rect>\n Direct help to customers<\/text>\n <\/line>\n <\/line>\n <\/line>\n <\/line>\n <\/line>\n One piece of genuinely useful content contributes to all five at once.<\/text>\n<\/svg>
Figure 2.<\/strong> What one piece of genuinely useful content does. It is not a single-purpose item but a contributor to search visibility, AI citation, trust, earned links, and direct help to customers — which is why the effort of making it compounds.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The figure explains a good deal about why content marketing, despite being slow and demanding, repays a small business. The effort of producing one genuinely useful piece is not spent on one outcome; it is spent on five at once. That multiplication is what makes content marketing efficient over time, even though any single piece, judged on the day it is published, can seem to do little.<\/p>\n

The honest difficulties<\/h2>\n

It would be a poor guide that sold content marketing as easy or free, and this article will not. The difficulties are real, and a business should know them going in.<\/p>\n

Content marketing is genuinely demanding. Producing content that is actually useful — clear, accurate, genuinely helpful — takes real thought and real time, and a business that imagines it can be done quickly or carelessly will produce content that does nothing. The phrase “content marketing” can make it sound like a light, automatic activity; it is not.<\/p>\n

Content marketing is also slow. As the time chart earlier showed, content accumulates its value; it does not deliver it on publication. A business that expects a piece of content to bring a rush of customers within days has misunderstood the mechanism, and will be discouraged into stopping exactly when persistence is what the method requires.<\/p>\n

And content marketing genuinely fails for many businesses — usually because of one of the difficulties above. They underestimate the effort and produce thin content; or they misjudge the timescale and give up; or, as the next article addresses, they write about the wrong things. None of these failures means content marketing does not work; they mean it was not done in the way that works. An honest guide names the difficulties precisely so that a business can do the version that succeeds.<\/p>\n

It is worth saying that the difficulties, named honestly, are also reassuring. They explain why a business that tried content marketing once and saw little may simply have done a version that does not work — too thin, too brief, on the wrong topics — rather than having proven the method fails. The difficulties are the difference between content marketing done well and done poorly; they are not a verdict against the practice itself.<\/p>\n

Quality over quantity<\/h2>\n

One principle does more than any other to keep content marketing on the side of success, and it is worth its own section: quality decisively beats quantity.<\/p>\n

The instinct, faced with content marketing, is often to think in terms of volume — to publish frequently, to fill a calendar, to measure the effort in the number of pieces produced. This instinct is mistaken, and it is mistaken for the same reason the link-quantity instinct was mistaken in the off-page articles: a count is the wrong measure of something whose value depends entirely on whether each instance is genuinely good.<\/p>\n

A small number of genuinely excellent pieces — each one a real, complete, well-made answer to a real question — will do more for a business than a large number of thin ones. The excellent pieces get found, trusted, linked to, and cited; the thin ones occupy space and do little. Worse, a site filling with thin content can dilute the impression a business makes, where a site with fewer but genuinely strong pieces reads as the work of a business that knows its subject.<\/p>\n

For a small business with limited time, this principle is also a relief. It means content marketing does not demand a punishing publishing schedule. It demands that whatever is published be genuinely good — which is a far more achievable, and far more sensible, standard than a relentless quota.<\/p>\n

It is worth being precise about what quality means here, since the word is easily emptied. A quality piece is not one that is long, or elaborately produced, or decorated. It is one that genuinely and completely answers a real question for a real reader — one that a person who had that question would finish and feel genuinely helped by. That is a demanding standard, but it is a clear one, and it is the standard that matters.<\/p>\n

Consistency and the long game<\/h2>\n

Quality decides whether a piece of content works; consistency decides whether content marketing, as an ongoing practice, works. The two are different, and both matter.<\/p>\n

Consistency does not mean frequency. It does not mean publishing often; it means publishing steadily and not stopping. A business that produces one genuinely good piece every month or two, reliably, over years, is doing content marketing well. A business that produces ten pieces in an enthusiastic month and then nothing for a year is not — even though its total output might be similar.<\/p>\n

The reason consistency matters is that content marketing’s value compounds, and compounding requires time and continuity. A body of content built steadily over years becomes a substantial, wide-ranging asset; the same effort spent in one burst and then abandoned becomes a small, ageing one. The business that keeps going, modestly, wins over the business that sprints and stops.<\/p>\n

This reframes what a small business should commit to. The commitment that content marketing actually requires is not a heroic burst of activity; it is a sustainable, modest, genuinely maintainable habit — a rate of good work the business can keep up indefinitely. Choosing a pace that can be sustained for years is more important than choosing an ambitious one that cannot.<\/p>\n

A useful way to set that pace is to choose, deliberately, a rate that feels almost too easy — a frequency the business is confident it can keep up even in its busiest months. Content marketing’s value comes from continuity over years, and a pace that survives the busy months is worth far more than an ambitious one abandoned at the first pressure. It is better to under-promise the pace and keep it than to over-promise and break it.<\/p>\n

Measuring whether content marketing is working<\/h2>\n

A business investing real effort in content marketing will want to know whether it is working, and honesty requires acknowledging that this is genuinely harder to judge than a business might wish.<\/p>\n

The difficulty follows from the mechanism. Content marketing’s value compounds slowly and arrives indirectly — a piece read today may produce a customer months later, through a path the business cannot fully trace. Judging a single piece by what it did in its first week is judging it by a measure that the method itself says will be near zero.<\/p>\n

What a business can sensibly do is watch the trend rather than the piece. Over months and years, is the body of content drawing a growing stream of visitors? Are people arriving at the business through its content and going on to make contact? Are the genuine questions customers ask increasingly ones the business’s content has already answered? These broad, patient measures suit content marketing’s nature far better than any single-piece metric.<\/p>\n

The honest framing, then, is the one this series has urged for other slow-compounding work: measure the direction over time, not the instant return, and give the method the patience its mechanism requires. A business that judges content marketing by the standards of advertising — fast, attributable, immediate — will conclude wrongly that it is failing, when it is in fact doing exactly what it does.<\/p>\n

What content marketing is not<\/h2>\n

It is worth being plain about what content marketing is not, because the term is used loosely and attracts some genuinely bad practice.<\/p>\n

Content marketing is not the production of thin content for search engines<\/a>. The practice, sometimes sold under the content-marketing name, of churning out keyword-stuffed pages aimed at an algorithm rather than a reader is not content marketing; it is the writing-for-the-algorithm mistake that the on-page SEO articles in this series warned against, and search engines work continually to discount it.<\/p>\n

Content marketing is not disguised advertising. Material that pretends to be helpful but is really a sustained sales pitch is quickly recognised as such by readers, and it does not build the trust that genuine content builds. The usefulness has to be real; content that is only advertising wearing the costume of help fails as both.<\/p>\n

And content marketing is not a quick or guaranteed source of traffic. It is a slow, compounding investment<\/a>, and a business approaching it as a fast tactic — or being sold it as one — has misunderstood it. What content marketing genuinely is, against all of these, is the patient production of genuinely useful material; the rest of this article, and the next, concern doing that well.<\/p>\n

Content marketing and the rest of your marketing<\/h2>\n

Content marketing should be understood as one part of a business’s marketing, working with the rest, rather than as a replacement for everything else — and seeing the relationship clearly prevents two opposite errors.<\/p>\n

The first error is treating content marketing as a complete marketing strategy on its own. It is not. It is slow to build, it does not suit every commercial need, and a business also has reasons to advertise, to gather referrals, to be present in directories<\/a> and local search. Content marketing is a powerful component of a marketing mix; it is not the whole of one.<\/p>\n

The second error is the opposite — treating content marketing as separable from, or in competition with, the rest of the marketing. In fact it strengthens the rest. Content gives advertising somewhere worthwhile to send people; it gives a business the authority that makes referrals more likely; it supports, as earlier articles showed, the whole of a business’s search visibility. Content marketing and the rest of a business’s marketing are complements, not rivals.<\/p>\n

The sensible position, then, is to see content marketing as a foundational part of the marketing mix — the part that builds the lasting asset and underpins much of the rest — pursued alongside the other parts rather than instead of them. A later cluster of this series treats paid advertising in its own right; the point here is that the two belong in the same plan.<\/p>\n

A realistic scope for a small business<\/h2>\n

A small business reading about content marketing can feel that it implies becoming, in effect, a small publishing operation — and it is worth saying clearly that it does not.<\/p>\n

A small business does not need to publish constantly, cover every conceivable topic, or compete with the output of dedicated content teams. It needs a modest body of genuinely useful content, on the questions that genuinely matter to its customers, built up steadily over time. The realistic scope is small and sustainable, not large and exhausting.<\/p>\n

What a small business does have, against a larger competitor, is a genuine advantage that content marketing rewards: real, first-hand knowledge of its trade. A small business genuinely knows its work, its customers, and its field, and content built from that genuine knowledge is more useful, more credible, and harder to replicate than content produced at volume by those without it. The small business competes here not on quantity but on the authenticity of what it knows.<\/p>\n

The realistic scope, then, is this: a modest amount of genuinely good content, drawn from what the business genuinely knows, addressed to what its customers genuinely want to know, produced at a pace the business can sustain indefinitely. That is achievable for a small business, and it is what content marketing, honestly scoped, actually asks.<\/p>\n

Who should write the content<\/h2>\n

A practical question follows from all of this: who, in a small business, should actually write the content? The answer matters more than it seems, because it bears on whether the content is any good.<\/p>\n

The content marketing pillar’s argument points toward an answer: because genuine usefulness depends on genuine knowledge, the content is best when it draws on the people who genuinely know the trade — which, in a small business, usually means the owner and those who do the work. They hold the first-hand knowledge that, as this article has argued, is the small business’s real advantage.<\/p>\n

This does not mean the owner must personally write every word. A business may reasonably get help with the writing itself — the drafting, the editing, the polishing — and that can be sensible where the owner has knowledge but little time or confidence as a writer. What matters is that the genuine knowledge comes from the business; the craft of writing it up can be assisted.<\/p>\n

What a business should be wary of is content produced entirely outside it, by someone with no genuine knowledge of the trade, with no real input from those who do. Content produced that way tends to be the thin, generic content this article has warned against, because it has no genuine knowledge behind it. The practical rule is that the knowledge must be the business’s own, even where the help with writing is not.<\/p>\n

A practical approach to getting started<\/h2>\n

The article’s argument resolves into a practical approach, and the table below sets out what separates the version of content marketing that works from the version that does not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Aspect<\/th>\nContent marketing that works<\/th>\nContent marketing that fails<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n
Purpose<\/td>\nTo genuinely help a real reader<\/td>\nTo fill a quota or carry keywords<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Topic choice<\/td>\nThe questions customers genuinely have<\/td>\nWhat the business finds comfortable to talk about<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Quality<\/td>\nEach piece genuinely good and complete<\/td>\nThin pieces, produced quickly to exist<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Quantity<\/td>\nA few excellent pieces<\/td>\nMany forgettable ones<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Consistency<\/td>\nSteady, sustainable, not stopping<\/td>\nA burst of activity, then silence<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Time horizon<\/td>\nPatient; the value compounds<\/td>\nExpecting fast results; giving up early<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

The approach, in short, is this: commit to a modest, sustainable pace rather than an ambitious one; write genuinely useful pieces on the questions customers actually have, drawing on what the business genuinely knows; favour quality over quantity without exception; and stay with it patiently, understanding that the value compounds over years. A small business that does this is doing content marketing in the way that genuinely works.<\/p>\n

One encouragement belongs with the approach. A business reading this article may feel content marketing is one more demand on time it does not have. But the approach asks for something modest: a few genuinely good pieces a year, on questions the business already hears, drawn from knowledge it already has. Stated honestly, that is not a heavy programme — and it builds, patiently, an asset the business will be glad of for years.<\/p>\n

Concluding remarks<\/h2>\n

Content marketing is the practice of attracting and keeping customers by creating genuinely useful content rather than only advertising to them. It differs from advertising in kind: advertising rents attention that ends when the spending ends, while content marketing builds an asset that accumulates and persists.<\/p>\n

A small business should do it because it builds that lasting asset, because it builds genuine trust and authority by demonstrating real competence, and because it underpins almost everything else in this series — on-page SEO, AEO, and link-earning all presuppose content, and content marketing is the practice of having it. A single genuinely useful piece does several jobs at once, which is why the effort compounds.<\/p>\n

What makes content marketing work is genuine usefulness, the right topic choices, quality decisively over quantity, and steady consistency over years. What makes it fail is thin content, the wrong subjects, an unsustainable pace, and impatience. It is genuinely demanding and genuinely slow, and an honest guide says so — but its realistic scope for a small business is modest and sustainable, and the small business’s first-hand knowledge of its trade is a genuine advantage in doing it well.<\/p>\n

The next article takes up the question that stops more content marketing efforts than any other: when you run a small business, what should you actually write about?<\/p>\n

Future developments<\/h2>\n

Content marketing is, of the practices in this series, among the most durable — and it is worth saying why, because the reasons hold against the changes reshaping search.<\/p>\n

The AI-search articles argued that answer engines retrieve, synthesise, and cite genuinely useful sources. That makes genuine content not less valuable in the AI era but more: an answer engine has nothing to draw on but content, and a business with a body of genuinely useful, accurate, well-made content is exactly the kind of source the new systems are built to use. The shift toward AI search raises the value of having genuine content to be found.<\/p>\n

The same shift raises the penalty for thin content. As search engines and answer engines grow better at distinguishing genuinely useful material from material produced merely to exist, the gap between real content marketing and its hollow imitation widens. The business that produces genuinely good content is investing in something the direction of search keeps rewarding; the business producing filler is investing in something it keeps discounting.<\/p>\n

For a small business the conclusion is steady. Genuinely useful content, built patiently from real knowledge, is not a tactic tied to the current shape of search; it is an asset that whatever comes next — a results page, an answer engine, a format not yet seen — will still be trying to find and to surface. Of everything in this series, content marketing done genuinely is among the safest long-term investments a small business can make.<\/p>\n

Related reading<\/h2>\n