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In Blog Marketing, Write Less??

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“This book is really short,” writes Seth Godin in the acknowledgments section of The Dip. This is something he’s learned from his readers, he says – Write less. “Seth Godin,” the book jacket explains, is one of the most popular business bloggers in the world. “While Godin doesn’t claim to have all the answers, he will teach you to ask the right questions”.

So, from a blog content standpoint, is “writing less” a good idea? Maybe not, according to these three sources, writes Jasmine Gordon of lean-labs.com.

  • Medium – The ideal length of a blog post is seven minutes or 1,600 words.
  • SERPIQ – Top three Google results are between 2,350 and 2,500 words.
  • Neil Patel – Posts of at least 1,500 words earn the best SEO and social sharing results.

On the other hand, Gordon points out:

  • Data from Write Practice indicates that posts of 275 words are best for eliciting comments.
  • While visual media is not technically part of the word count, it’s an aspect of length,, because it takes time to consume.
  • Some topics don’t need 3,000 words to be covered adequately.
  • If you’re blogging multiple times a week, you can afford shorter, engagement-driven posts.

At Say It For You, we tend to agree with the checklist Jasmine Gordon offers. We blog content writers will know we’re done with a particular post IF:

  1. we’ve covered the topic in depth
  2. we’ve offered more value than the competition
  3. we’ve incorporated high-quality visuals
  4. we’ve verified our research and facts

What’s more, Gordon says, if your name is Seth Godin (to whose book, The Dip, I referred in Tuesday’s blog post), all bets are off (Godin’s posts, God bless him, are often 75-500 words long).

“Opinions have always differed on the optimal size for a blog post,” I wrote just a little over a year ago. Having composed blog posts (as both a Say It For You ghost writer and under my own name) now numbering well into the tens of thousands, I’m still finding it difficult to decide on the best length for each post.

From Chip and Dan Heath’s book The Power of Moments, I learned about a phenomenon called “duration neglect”. The basic concept is that when people assess an experience, they tend to forget or ignore its length, rating it based on the best or worst moment in that experience. I suspect that principle holds true when readers are experiencing a blog post. They are going to remember only two things – the best part and the ending.

The long-form/short-form debate will no doubt continue for decades to come, but my own instinct is to stick to a central idea for each blog post, then “say it until it’s said”. Along the “write less” theme, Seth Godin once offered a piece on the length of business meetings, in which he observed “Understand that not all problems are the same, so why are your meetings?”

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In Blog Marketing, It’s Not Okay to Quit

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“It’s okay to quit sometimes,” observes Seth Godin in his book the Dip, and, he assures readers, quitters do win. But quitting doesn’t mean giving up and abandoning your long-term strategy, only quitting the tactics that aren’t working. In fact, Godin admits, most people do quit. Problem is, he observes, they don’t quit successfully or at the right time.

Blogging is a perfect example, I realized, reviewing this powerful little book, of a long-term strategy that is too often abandoned due to short-term discouragement. The strategy itself is well-proven and documented, and many business owners and professional practitioners embark on blog marketing in recognition of its power to generate interest in their products and services. It’s the tactics, the week-after-week work of creating new, relevant, interesting, and results-producing…blog posts. Those abandoned blogs belong to those who don’t recognize what Seth Godin describes as the “extraordinary benefits that accrue to the tiny minority of people who are able to push just a tiny bit longer than most”.

It’s not that blog marketing is an unproven strategy…

“Content is still king, and it is the fresh, customized, customer-centric content that gets the attention. Those that create more of it will certainly see positive returns for their efforts. Content marketing generates at least three times more leads than conventional marketing techniques,” says Digital.com. People love engaging with businesses in particular, and they tend to look positively on a company that releases custom content…Over the long run, you can expect 87% more inbound links, compared to companies who don’t blog at all.”

“Know for a fact that Google and other search engines tend to give more weight and SEO boosts to websites that update their content regularly over those that aren’t so frequent. “ BlogPanda explains. “The more you blog regularly about your product, business or industry, the more it increases your search keywords which further helps your website rank better for those keywords on Google and other search engines.”

Amazing, but true: In the face of all these compelling reports demonstrating the value of blog marketing, Caslon Analytics tells us that most blogs are abandoned soon after creation (with 60% to 80% abandoned within one month!, 1.09 million blogs were one-day wonders, with no postings on subsequent days. The average blog, Caslon remarks ruefully, “has the lifespan of a fruitfly”. No lack of starts, though: blogtyrant.com reports that there are over 1.7 billion websites on the internet today, and more than 600 million of those have blogs.

“A blog usually starts with a bang,” observes Antonio Canciano of technicalblogging.com. Then life gets in the way, postnig becomes less frequent and ore sporadic until the blogger pretty much gives up on their site entirely. That’s the usual path to blog despair, Canciano says. However, blogging is a river, not a lake, he cautions, and the constant stream of new content is what gives blogging its edge over other forms of content publishing.

Sure, it may be okay to quite sometimes, as Seth Godin observes, but not if you’re after those extraordinary benefits that accrue to the tiny minority of people who are able to keep posting blogs!.

 

 

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To Be Interesting, Think Broad

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“Many people and most organizations narrowly define what’s relevant and interesting to their followers. They mistakenly assume that their followers want to read about only a narrow band of subjects,” Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzgerald point out in The Art of Social Media.

As examples of how posts can be “broadened”, Kawasaki suggests that a restaurant chain might include news about atomic particles that help solve wine fraud, while an airline might offer news about drive-in theaters or mindful travel photography. It’s not that you don’t want to promote yourself and your own business to followers, the author explains; it’s that sharing interesting stuff and broadening by “catalyzing more interaction,” you earn the right to promote yourself!

As part of blogging training at Say It For You, I do often recommend including interesting information on topics only indirectly related to your specific business or profession (or, if you’re a freelance blog content writer, related to the client’s business or profession). If you’ve unearthed tidbits of information most readers wouldn’t be likely to know, so much the better. I agree with Kawasaki that even if some tidbits of information are not “actionable”, if they are intrinsically interesting, it’s worth including them simply to add fun and variety to your content.

But broadening the scope of information you offer in a business blog needn’t be only for the sake of adding fun to your content. Little known and trending news stories can be offered to readers with some very specific “ulterior motives” on the part of the business owner or practitioner, such as:

  • clarifying the way your business or practice works
  • demonstrating the many uses of your products
  • reinforcing the importance of a widespread problem
  • explaining why your business practices are designed to prevent that particular problem
  • busting a common myth

Online searchers who’ve arrived at your blog post definitely need assurance they’ve come to the right place. But now they’re here, you’ll have a better chance of engaging their interest by “going broad”!

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Content Creators – Craftsmen, Not Artists

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“If you build something for a specific purpose, you measure success by how well your creation serves that function. If you make pure art, your accomplishment is exclusively determined by how the creation makes you feel,” posit the authors of The Big Book of Big Secrets. “A craftsperson also follows a creative spirit, but his or her desire for artistic fulfillment is secondary to the obligation to make something that is functional.”

By that definition, I realized, all of us business blog content writers can definitely call ourselves craftspersons in that we follow a creative spirit in making our content functional for both our clients and their customers. In fact, Marc Prosser of SCORE names some very practical, functional reasons for business and practice owners to keep their business blogs active, including:

  • to drive traffic to your website
  • to inform customers about the good work you do
  • to promote a positive employer brand
  • to share testimonials to earn the trust of new clients
  • to establish your authority in your field

A functional professional blog, content strategist Laura Lynch of buildcreate.com adds, does all these things most effectively when it is presented in an attractive design. Images are what calls attention to high value content, Lynch asserts.

In fact, we’ve found at Say It For You, creating business blog content involves a mix of craftsmanship and artistry. Researchers at the University of Bath actually devised a score for ads that involves two measures: information power and emotive power. While I continually preach that blog posts are not ads, establishing connections is our function as content marketers.

As craftspersons, then, we content writers do what Jonah Berger, in his book Contagious, describes, which is offer useful, practical, functional advice and information. That kind of information and advice has utility, meaning it is useful, saving time, saving money, or improving health. Another form of “utility” is social currency, Berger explains, meaning the content offers ways for people to achieve visible symbols of “insider” status, helping them keep up with prevalent trends.

What is this “craft” called content marketing? We use creativity, not to satisfy our own creative urge, but to keep on telling the business’ or the practice’s story in its infinite variations over long periods of time. We know that readers who end up as clients and customers have self-selected rather than being persuaded.

 

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It’s Not the Blog That Makes You Rich

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“I’m not the guy that makes you rich; I’m the guy that helps keep you from being poor”. That unusual self-intro by financial advisor and insurance agent Jeffrey Eric Frank from Wayne, Pennsylvania really captured my attention at a recent virtual networking meeting, Of course, as a former financial advisor myself, I immediately understood the truth in Frank’s “motto” when it comes to wealth. Focused these days on marketing, though, I couldn’t help making a comparison with blogs…

Their very nature makes blogs ideal for marketing, Randy Duermyer explains in thebalancesmb.com, naming the following characteristics:

  • Blogs are inexpensive to start and run.
  • Blogs build website traffic.
  • Blogs are easy to use.
  • Blogs improve search engine rankings.
  • Blogs engage your market.

Blog marketing, though, is hardly a direct route to guaranteed marketing success; while starting a blog can be done quickly and easily, Duermyer cautions, it’s the ongoing management that will take time and patience. What’s more, blog marketing is not designed to “close” deals in the same way as a face-to-face encounter between a prospect and sales professional might do. Going back to our friend Jeffrey Eric Frank, the blog, however well-planned and executed, is “not the guy that makes you rich”.

What can and will happen, as Hubspot blogger Corey Wainwright explains, is that prospects who have been reading your blog posts enter the “sales funnel” more educated on your industry and what you have to offer. What business owners and professionals are doing with the blog is taking advantage of the main reason use the Web in the first place – to find answers and information.

Rather than running traditional ads for your brand of hats, vitamins, or travel, you provide lots of information on the history of hats, on why vitamins are good for you, and about exciting places to go on safari.  Consumers interested in your subject, but who never even knew your name come to see you as a trusted resource, possibly as a business to do business with!

No, New York Life’s JE Frank doesn’t for a moment pretend to be the guy who’ll make you rich. And, at Say It For You, we approach blog marketing with the same sort of practical wisdom in mind. Blogging is a very good “back door” approach to sales, helping you cultivate an audience of people who may well move on to become buyers.

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