Stop Garbage Blogging

Every. single. company. that sits down to start a business blog sits down at a table and asks themselves “What do we offer?”
The answers might be SEO, or emergency blankets, or an app. It doesn’t really matter: let’s just call it X.

In the worst-case scenario, they turn around and pay for a writing platform to deliver 10 posts a month about X. Or, ugh, find a blog they like about X and hire someone to rewrite all of that content to repost their own blog.

In the second-worse-case scenario, they make a list of blog post topics about X:

• What is X
• How does X work
• Why you need X
• Current trends in X
• How X benefits you
• 10 reasons for X
• Things you didn’t know about X
• Why does X matter
• When to use X

Then they write (or hire a writing platform to produce) these posts, and start posting them every week. And they think they are doing it right: that this is what content marketing looks like, and it’s what they need to do.

Eff that.

If you come up with a potential blog post topic, google it. Search for “top trends in video marketing” or “how to use a fountain pen” or “best time-tracking apps”. Are there a bajillion results already? Are they from credible sources, and been covered thoroughly in Forbes, or Business Insider, or Lifehacker, or whatever? Of course there is, because your brain is lazy, and you are just rehashing old ideas.
Rewriting content that has already been covered in a credible, high-quality source is garbage. You can’t compete for SEO in that space, and your audience doesn’t need that content from you, and you don’t have the credibility or authority position to make an impact anyway. Even if your posts are true and accurate, by virtue of referencing better sources, it’s a garbage blog, just adding more noise.

Eff that noise.

I have been a freelance writer for about 5 years, and I have written nearly a hundred posts for dozens of different business blogs with the topic “What is SEO?” There is literally no reason for people to keep on writing this blog post, and yet it goes on and on and on.

The most charitable interpretation I can come up with is that businesses want their blogs to “start with the basics” about what X is, before doing a “deeper dive” into more advanced topics. But basic information about what you offer belongs on your web pages, not on your blog.

• A visitor to your blog will not:
  read in chronological order, “starting with the basics” way back in time and “moving on” to a “deeper dive”.
  be impressed that your blog shows that you read other websites
  be passionate about X if you aren’t

It’s cheap and lazy and, furthermore, it doesn’t work. That isn’t content marketing.

Your Business Blog is Not a Space Filler

If you are working on a business blog, your task is not to produce a bunch of blog posts just for some vague goals about “generating awareness” and having “content” to spread around your social channels. Your blog isn’t an obligation, a formality, the same content posted by the same businesses in an endless parade of empty parroting of other ideas from other sources. Your brand deserves better than that, and your customer surely deserves better than that.

Your Business Blog is Your Greatest Marketing Asset

A corporate blog should demonstrate, in every single post, who that company is, what it thinks, and why it matters. If you can’t produce authentic, relevant content, then skip it.

What would that look like? It could look like all kinds of things, if you were creative about it.

• “Our take on the latest news in X”: Our CEO or lead designer read this article…
• “How we practice/make X”: We believe in X and do it every day. Here’s how…
• “5 ways X makes a difference for our customers”
• “3 times X got unexpected results in our business”
• “Why we do X differently”

Your blog should be authentic, personal, creative. It’s your chance to explain why you make certain design decisions, leadership decisions, hiring decisions, marketing decisions. It’s your chance to show why your team, your approach, your philosophy, is different than anyone else in the marketplace. It’s a chance to reflect on what you’ve done right, what you’re doing now, what you hope for in the future. Your chance to talk about what’s going on in the industry, where you are leading, where you are following, where you are forging new paths altogether. It’s your chance to share the ambitions, problems, goals, and successes of your customers. It’s your chance to show the world who you are, and invite them to join you on your journey. That’s content marketing.

Good Corporate Blogging Gets Real Results

When your blog reflects who you are as a company, then audience response becomes truly meaningful. Rather than simply scoring hits and likes, audience response becomes a much more meaningful measure of what people are responding to, motivated by, interested in, and passionate about. Your blogging response metrics become authentic, tangible, and useful, to the direct degree that your blog is itself authentic, tangible, and useful to your reader.

The ideas explored and expressed in your blog elaborate, demonstrate, and authenticate ideas described in your mission, your values, your product differentiators, and your brand story. These ideas then go on to fuel more content, as you discover what your reader really cares about and engages with.

For example, if your blog posts that feature thoughts from your company leadership get good response, it’s probably worth producing a video interview with that person. If your audience likes case studies, make a testimonial video. The blog can be the jumping-off-point for a more effective, targeted, and meaningful content marketing strategy.

It’s difficult, and time-consuming, and worth doing right. Anything less is garbage.

 

Featured photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

Grow Revenue Right Now: Practical Tip #1: Streamline

I am seeing a lot of posts online lately from small business owners who are really frustrated because they are spending a lot of energy on social media and getting lots of followers and engagement, but not seeing a resulting uptick in sales. It’s maddening, because they feel like they are doing everything right, but why spend all this time on something that doesn’t generate results?

It’s difficult to give generic advice that applies to everyone, so instead I’m going to digress and talk about my cat.

Wasn’t he gorgeous?

I used to have a cat, and I also used to have houseplants. Unfortunately, both of them wanted to be in sunny windowsills, but could not happily -share- sunny windowsills. My cat would eat the plants or knock them down or both.

Now, I was young and naive and thought that this undesirable behavior could be somehow -trained out- of the cat. Like, if I nudged him off the windowsill often enough, or scolded him enough, and I was super consistent about it, my cat would stop wanting to hang out in the sunny windowsill.

This is a losing proposition in all ways, because hanging out in a sunny windowsill, like hanging out in a box, is in the cat’s NATURE. No matter how many times I repeated my behavior, he was going to go right on repeating his. That’s what cats are like.

If I wanted him to behave differently, I had to behave differently, and in this case it meant rearranging my living room. If there was one sunny windowsill that was empty, and the cat could get to it by hopping from the couch to the bookcase to the windowsill, he would go that way. If there was another windowsill with plants in it, and no easy way to get to it, he would leave it alone. I had to change my approach, so that it was easy for him to do what I wanted, and difficult for him to do what I didn’t want.

Improve profits by streamlining your funnel

So, in the case of a business with their customer, think about every single click between their point of origin and the “check out” button (or whatever it is you want them to do). Look at that journey and remove every possible obstacle, making it as fast and easy as it can possibly be for them to act on the impulse to buy your product.

It is normal to have a progression of dropoffs. You might have 1 website visitor for every 100 social likes. You may have 1 item in a shopping cart for every 100 site visitors. You may have 1 actual completed transaction for every 100 items placed in shopping carts.

Look at where and how your traffic falls off, and try to eliminate as many of those dropoff points as possible.

Current shopping cart abandon rates are between 60-80%, for even the biggest brands, and a full 60% of those are due to users finding out the true and final purchase price of the item with shipping. Another 30% are people who wanted to buy something without creating an account on the site. That’s nearly a third of people who would have bought something, but didn’t want to have to create an account. Can you ease that pain point with guest accounts? With a super-fast, no-struggle account creation process? With a shipping estimator on the project page? You get my drift.

Improve profits by directing your traffic

In the case of social networks, you have a battle on your hands, because the social network’s objective is to keep the traffic, not send it through to you. For example, a big factor in YouTube algorithm rankings is not views, and it’s not engagement, it’s whether a viewer goes on to watch another video on YouTube. There is a reason that, when someone taps a profile on Instagram, they see the Instagram user’s profile page (rather than their website or some other user-defined destination); Instagram wants to keep people on the platform.

So, when considering what social channels to engage most with, consider how those social followers may or may not convert, and spend your time accordingly.

For example, on Pinterest, when a user clicks on an image, it can take them directly to your product page, where they can click and buy without navigating your website or searching for anything. On Instagram, you can do that with paid ads, but by default they make it difficult to leave the platform. Twitter makes it easy to direct your followers to any link you like, Facebook makes it a little more difficult.

And what social networks do people use to make purchase decisions? Snapchat might be a decent channel to increase brand awareness in your demographic, but do they consult Snapchat when they are comparing your product with a competitor’s? My guess is that they don’t.

If your objective is to use social channels to not just raise awareness or build relationships, but to directly drive sales, you need to do two things:

1. know your customer and the platforms they are likely to use and engage with, particularly when making purchase decisions
2. spend your time on the channels that drive sales, not just follows and likes

Improve Profits by Leveraging your Data

Basically all I’m saying is:

• Look at all your statistics and data for how traffic progresses through your site. Review abandonment rates. Study your customer data. Look at which reviewers are working for you.
• Map a typical customer journey and take out every. single. non-essential. click from the moment they are interested in your product to the moment they purchase it. Make it easy for them to do what you want them to do.

I’m going to close here with another cute cat because I like cats and don’t get enough opportunities to put cats in this blog.

adorable image from comedy_nose on flickr

 

 

Surrogate Markers and Blog Post Length

I encountered the phrase “surrogate marker” several years ago, and it has stuck with me ever since. We are surrounded by them, although they are seldom identified or examined. And the world of content marketing is saturated with them.

A surrogate marker is when you use an easy-to-test variable as a substitute for a more-difficult-to-test variable, and assume that the correlation is identical for both. For example, say that you understand that lower cholesterol = being healthier = living longer. So you conduct a series of tests on habits or medications that reduce cholesterol. When you have a scientifically reliable result for your medication, you may claim (and it makes for better press if you do) that this medication increases your lifespan. But what if someone does another study and questions the core assumption that there is a relationship between cholesterol and longer life (something Malcolm Gladwell actually explored this very topic recently in his excellent Revisionist History podcast). If there is no correlation… in other words, if your assumption of the causal correlation between your actual variable and your substitute variable is incorrect… then your science is good, but your conclusions are bad.

Blog post length is one of those things. For a while, it was conventional wisdom that nobody liked to read long posts, so you needed to keep them short and sweet. Then everyone did a bunch of research and found that 1600 word posts rank the best, so now everyone is scrambling to write longer posts. As a freelance writer, I am seeing clients want longer and longer posts, and as a reader of content, I am seeing it increasingly on blogs, particularly in the inbound community.

Blog Post Length is a Surrogate Marker

As I mentioned, inbound marketing is full of these, and this topic in particular is riddled with them. Blog post length is assumed to correlate to:

• high-quality content
• content that is valuable for the reader
• high-ranking content
• sharable content

But it goes even deeper than that. High-quality content is assumed to correlate to:

• higher traffic
• increased brand awareness
• improved visibility

And THOSE things are assumed to correlate to:

• higher sales
• increased revenue

Whew.

I’m not saying that there isn’t a relationship between those three layers of assumptions: there absolutely is. But what everyone takes away from the science is that longer blog posts = higher sales, and that specific correlation hasn’t actually been tested. These are the most robust correlations between blog posts and business sales that I have been able to find:

• SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate, while outbound leads have a 1.7% close rate. But that stat doesn’t link to a source.
• Another statement without a data source is that a high quality blog generates 67% more B2B leads and 88% more B2C leads per month.

Again, I believe that to be true (of course I do – I’m in content marketing!) but it’s also riddled with assumptions. And what’s bothering me is that everyone is asking for extremely long posts without that much to say.

There is No Perfect Word Count for a Blog Post

Asking how long a blog post should be is like asking how long a story should be. A story should be as long as necessary and no longer.

That being said, a blog post needs to be at least 300 words, to make it worth a click. Shorter than that, put it in a tweet.

Blog posts are one aspect of your content strategy, and your entire strategy is to provide value to your audience. The length of the post should be driven by the value you can provide. An ideal blog content strategy would be multi-layered, and would include:

Shorter posts (~400-600 words):

• breaking news in your industry
• update about a product or feature
• tips for how to do a thing your audience wants to do
• events and announcements

Medium-length posts (~700-1000 words):

• how-tos and tutorials
• comparisons and feature explanations
• origins and process descriptions

Long posts (~1300+ words):

• guide to
• history of
• manuals

And there may be occasions, depending on your audience, to produce a very long post. For example, if you are explaining something highly technical and complex, it’s often useful to go back and explain the history and terminology before exploring the issue at hand.

All these types of posts (and all the appropriate word lengths), should be part of your content strategy and part of the overall value of your blog to your customer.

Tips for Long Blog Posts

All that being said, conventional wisdom is also true: people don’t actually want to read a lot. 43% of people skim blog posts. Here are some ways to keep a long post engaging:

• Let people know up front that it’s going to be long. If the headline is “The Ultimate Guide to X”, I know it’s going to be a long post. I love how Cognitive SEO put a TLDR at the top of this post. Let people know how much you expect them to invest.
• Break up your wall of text. Use images (infographics are awesome) and bullet points and headlines to facilitate skimming.
• Be smart about your sourcing. Neil Patel writes epic blog posts, and they are really valuable, but I do feel like he often goes on and on proving his point. If you make a point and back it up with 2-3 sources, citations, or examples, you can move on. If someone doesn’t believe you by then, they never will, and you’re wasting the time of people who are thinking: “I get it. Now what?”
• Provide a “now what”. Of course a blog post should always end with a CTA, but even if you don’t (I almost never do), you should try to bring it back to what is relevant and actionable for the audience. Don’t just make your point and leave it there; if someone has spent a lot of time reading your content, then give them something they can take away from it.

Let Go of Surrogate Markers

Content marketers love metrics because they are fascinating and offer a way to demonstrate the concrete value of the rather intangible process of relationship-building. But don’t confuse word length with quality, or quality posts with increased revenue. Be attentive to your audience and let their needs guide your strategy. Focus on authenticity and value, and less on one specific statistic or another.