There’s some great
ideas in his answer that in essence are similar to what I've written and spoken about previously on:
·
identifying who you
are trying to reach
·
asking where those
readers are gathering and/or focusing their attention
·
and then trying to
work out how to build a presence in those places
But one of the other
key messages in Tim’s podcast that really stood out to me was this statement
that he made:
There is so much
wisdom in this statement and I’d highly recommend bloggers ponder two parts of
it.
Long Form Content
There has definitely
been a trend over the last few years for many bloggers to move toward shorter
form content. I’m not sure if this has been the result of the short for nature
of social media, an assumption that people’s attention spans are short, the
pressure to publish more posts or something else – but I've heard it taught
from the stage at conferences and have definitely noticed more and more bloggers creating shorter posts in recent years.
My experience has been
similar to Tim’s. I've noticed that it’s my longer and more in-depth posts that
tend to get the most shares, the most links and the most traffic – both when
they’re launched and over their long tail life.
There are definitely
exceptions but today as I look through the top 10 most read posts here on over
the last 12 months the shortest one is 714 words and the longest is over 7000.
Their average is 2491.
I’m not arguing that
every post needs to be longer form – it takes a lot of effort to create and
there is a definitely place for shorter content – but the effort you put into
longer posts can be a great investment to make into your blogging.
Evergreen Content
Note for those not familiar
with the term ‘Evergreen Content’: Evergreen posts are ones that don’t lose their
relevancy over time. You write them today and they will be as helpful to
readers in a few months (or even years) time.
I know that not every
blog topic/niche naturally lends itself to the creation of evergreen content
(for example ‘news’ and ‘reviews’ sites can sometimes struggle with it) but
most blogs should be able to find a way to create at least some content that doesn't date quickly.
Of course part of the
reason for this is that it’s the main focus of what I do – but we do cover
‘newsy’ type posts from time to time on DPS and apart from a spike in traffic
shortly after it is published it rarely ever gets more than a trickle of
traffic ever again.
To illustrate the case
for Evergreen Content
Let me give you a
couple of case studies. Here’s how a time sensitive post announcing the
launch of the New Adobe Light room that we published on DPS recently performed in
terms of traffic.
You can see the
initial burst of traffic as it went live and as our readers excitedly gobbled
up the hot news (and it was fairly significant news in the photography niche).
But in the month after
it’s had little traffic and I suspect will never see more than a handful of
visitors coming to it in a given day again.
The post had its own
little spike in traffic in the first days (although I had hardly any readers at
that point) but to this day it continues to get traffic (for example yesterday
it had over 1100 visitors).
The beauty of
evergreen content is that it not only gets the same initial spike of traffic to
it when you publish but it also is much more likely to be searched for and
found in search engines in the years to come.
The other benefit of
the evergreen content is that you (and others) are able to keep sharing it on
social for years to come also! It is this evergreen content that I've built my whole social media
workflow around.
Take a look at this
daily traffic graph of the same post on ISO where you’ll see some bigger daily
spikes periodically on the days I retire it on social media.
Note: worth noting
here is that this example is not what I’d consider to be ‘long form content’.
It’s around 700 words in length which isn't short – but it shows you that
there’s a place for ‘mid-sized’ form content too.
The most compelling
case for investing time into Evergreen Content…
As I look at the two
examples of posts I've just shows you what strikes me most is the investment
that was put into those two posts was similar.
From memory I probably
spent an hour or two writing the post on ISO. I’m not sure how long the author
who wrote the Light room announcement post spent on it but looking at it he put
at least that much time into researching and writing it.
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