In Blogging – the Devil is in the Details

“Whether you’re measuring engagement in terms of blog comments, social media interaction, or a combination of metrics,” James Parson opines in contentpowered.com, “ there’s one universal constant. You want more engagement.”

Engagement facts, Parson thinks, are some of the most interesting, because analytics reveal that details as seemingly insignificant as the placement of a punctuation mark can make a big difference.

“Devilish details” include these:

• Including a hyphen or a colon in the middle of a blog post title can increase search engine click-through by as much as 9%. (Notice what I did in the title of this post?)
• 54% of blog posts that rank well include an image or video.
• Best time of week to bring a blog post “live”? Tuesdays and Wednesdays (What day is it today, again?). What time? 9:30-10AM Eastern.
• “Listicles” beginning with an odd number outperform lists beginning with an even number by 20% (Who knew?)
• Blog headlines with only 8 words do better than those with a different word count. (Words in my title – count them!).

Entertaining and, to an extent, enlightening info, to be sure. Can’t help thinking about what Neil Patel had to say about “over-optimizing” a website or blog, which is “Too much of a good thing is a bad thing.”

Main thing is, as we teach at Say It For You, content is meant to be written for people. Sure, you want good ranking so more people see your blog link, but first and foremost, you’re writing blog content to solve problems and appeal to customers, clients, and prospects. So, yes to the listicles, the short headlines, and the images, and certainly yes to providing “snippets” to give web searchers snippets a preview of your content.

With those “devilish” details in mind, still it pays to never lose sight of the essence of content marketing: creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content.