Tag Archives: Content Strategy

Is longform content always better compared to shorter pieces?

Is longform content always better than short form content

I have multiple times written about the benefits of longform content.

Longform content is very long blog posts and articles comprising of at least 2500 words, or more.

Medium-sized blog posts consist of webpages and blog posts having more than 1000 words and less than or equal to 2500 words.

Various SEO plug-ins will tell you that anything less than 1000 words isn’t good for SEO.

Is it really so?

This Content Marketing Institute blog post says that not every piece of content needs to be longform content.

The author of the above post rightly says that not every topic requires 2000 words.

Suppose, I want to explain to you what is longform content; do I really need 2000 words to explain what longform content means?

I can explain it in 200 words, or even less.

How do you decide how long your blog post or web page should be?

You can decide this by considering what sort of information will be useful to your readers.

If you write something like “15 tips on creating highly effective SEO content”, then, while explaining these 15 tips, you may go beyond 2000-3000 words. This is because you will be talking about 15 topics or 15 tips.

I have seen on many blogs that they unnecessarily go on throwing around statistics from scores of blog posts and articles just to inflate the number of words.

This can be exhausting for the readers. Even I find such articles off- putting, especially when I’m looking for some quick information to use.

Best thing to do is, create a roadmap for your blog post. If possible, use a mind mapping tool. Keep on adding points till you feel that they’re going to be useful to your readers. The moment you feel that a particular section is not going to be useful, remove it. It is not going to adversely affect your SEO.

How to come up with great content writing ideas every day

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How to get great content writing ideas every day

Content writing is an everyday activity.

No matter what is your content publishing schedule, if you continuously want to engage visitors on your website or blog and you also want to improve and maintain your search engine rankings, regular content writing and content publishing are some activities that you cannot avoid or brushed under the carpet.

The biggest problem faced by people who want to use quality content to improve their presence on the web is a lack of great content writing ideas.

What to write?

To understand this, you first must understand why quality content matters.

What do you want to publish content?

Of course, instinctively, you’re going to say, to improve your SEO.

This is understandable, and easy to relate to, but if you simply focus on SEO, or even simply on your business, you are not going to get anywhere.

You want to publish content to help people.

You want to write content because you want to offer something valuable, something people are looking for, and can use to solve problems and enrich themselves.

Even if you don’t want to make this world a better place through your writing, trying to help people is a self-serving activity, especially on the Internet.

The thing is, both your SEO and conversion rate depend on how people react to your content.

Both your SEO and conversion rate depend on how people interact with your content, how much time they spend going through it, how they share it, and how they engage with it.

Hence, if your content is not appealing, nobody is going to care.

You may say, who cares, as long as my SEO improves?

Well, Google cares.

If people don’t find your content valuable, Google is spending millions of dollars in research precisely to find whether people find your content valuable or not and if not, how to make sure that less people are able to find your content on the search engine.

They are a search company.

The most important thing Google wants to achieve is, find the information for its users that is valuable and useful.

So, yes, write and publish lousy content and bid goodbye to your hopes of improving your SEO.

Here is another interesting bit of information I found while researching for this blog post: the amount of data produced in the year 2017 was more than the data produced by the whole of humanity in the past 5000 years.

According to this Neil Patel blog post, only Huffington Post, in 2013, was publishing 16,000-2000 articles per day.

Just imagine how much content it must be posting now.

You can very well imagine how much data Google is processing on daily basis.

Amidst this deluge, you need to make your own presence felt.

I’m not telling you this to scare. Despite this humongous amount of data, businesses that publish quality content on an ongoing basis do manage to create a presence for themselves and increase their visibility on search engines.

Why getting good content writing ideas on regular basis is important?

Publish content regularly

Do you know Google has a “Query Deserves Freshness” algorithm?

According to this algorithm, publishing fresh content can improve your search engine rankings.

When a user conducts a query, when finding information based on the query, aside from quality and relevance, the Google algorithm also considers the freshness of your content.

This doesn’t mean freshness takes precedence over quality and relevance, it’s just that, if there are two blog posts of similar quality, the fresh blog post will be ranked higher than the older blog post.

As mentioned above, every time you publish something, you need to make sure that it is valuable.

Hence, you constantly need to come up with great content writing ideas that people will find useful.

Actually, when I say “regular basis” I don’t exactly mean every day.

Even if you don’t publish every day, this is fine.

But at least publish 10-15 times in a month.

How frequently you should publish depends on your competition.

It also depends on the status of your current rankings.

My advice to my clients is, in the beginning when your search engine presence is meager, publish as frequently as you can.

There are multiple reasons for that:

You cover all possible topics in your realm.
You write and publish authoritative content, increasing your authority in the process.
You send signals to Google that you have got quality content that can be crawled, indexed and ranked.
The greater is the frequency, the more Google bot visits your website or blog and consequently, your newer content will be crawled, indexed and ranked faster.

Once you have improved your search visibility, maybe you can focus on fewer, high-quality blog posts and articles.

But until that happens, you need to have some great content writing ideas.

Here is what you can do…

Use Google Alerts to monitor new content being published in your field

Google Alerts is a great tool.

Google is constantly crawling every possible piece of content and adding it to its database.

No tool can inform you of the latest content in your field faster than Google.

You can set Google Alerts to send you an email the moment someone publishes a blog post or an article or a web page on a topic concerning your business.

Google will send your way news alerts, blog post alerts, user forum updates alerts and sometimes even social media alerts.

Use Twitter hashtags to monitor conversations

Twitter hashtags are a great way of monitoring subject-specific conversations.

Suppose I want to know what people are talking about in the field of content marketing.

I can monitor the hashtag #contentmarketing.

Even if you’re not crazy about hashtags, you can simply search on Twitter about your field and the website will throw up lots of useful conversations.

Join LinkedIn Groups

The professional networking platform has many niche groups where professionals and experts are constantly exchanging useful information and insights with each other.

People ask questions and either moderators or other group members provide answers.

You can get many content writing ideas simply by going through the questions.

Use Quora to find useful topics

Quora is another great place where you will find great content writing ideas in the form of questions and answers.

In fact, Google prefers content in the form of questions and answers because most of the search engine users post questions.

Monitor content syndication and curation services

I regularly use Flipboard.

Sometimes I also use Feedly.

Then of course, I save lots of good ideas in my Getpocket account.

Even on Medium you can find very good content writing ideas.

Develop a system to maintain content writing ideas

No amount of research, hashtag tracking and communicating on various online forums is going to help you unless you have a system of preserving your content writing ideas.

I bounce from one app to another, or one system to another.

For a few years I used Evernote.

The Evernote plug-in allows you to save blog posts and articles from the browser itself.

Even if you don’t want to save complete blog posts, you can simply save the URLs. Or the text versions.

Then for a year I used OneNote but it proved to be a bit clunky and bulky.

I used Google Keep notes. I still use them.

These days I use Trello.

Use whatever works for you.

The more you think about a topic, the more content writing ideas you get.

How do I get regular content writing ideas for my clients?

Many of my clients like to do the job of finding new content writing ideas on their own because assigning me the task costs more.

Regularly coming up with great content writing ideas is sometimes difficult than writing complete blog posts on these ideas.

Nonetheless, when my clients want me to come up with great writing topics, aside from the methods mentioned above, I also study the client and customer persona and make a list of what all questions and queries they may have.

My entire focus is on giving them reasons to visit my client’s website or blog as regularly as possible.

For that, I try to come up with relevant and high quality blog post and web page ideas.

Should content writing be a big part of your digital marketing budget?

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Content is the pillar of your content marketing strategy

If you feel I am constantly talking about content writing budget and how most of the clients are not very eager to pay deserving rates for writing quality content, it’s just that, lots of thoughts and content are coming my way on this topic that are acting as stimulus.

So, bear with me.

It’s just that, I was going through this blog post on how you should decide your social media marketing budget and I was wondering, very few people talk about having a budget for content writing, and maybe this is why, most of the clients want to save the maximum while getting content for their websites and blogs.

They want to pay for web design.

They want to pay for SEO.

They want to pay for hosting.

They even want to pay for Google ads (AdWords).

But they don’t want to pay for content that is going to improve their SEO.

Content is the pillar of your entire content marketing and social media marketing strategy, whether we are talking about written content here, or videos and infographics.

As far as content goes, videos, infographics and quality images still demand a good price, but when it comes to paying for content writing, most of the clients think, well, it is just writing.

You don’t even need special software.

You can use Google Docs.

You can even use Notepad, for that matter.

But, when you are paying a content writer or a copywriter, you are not paying for software, you are paying for his or her ability to put across your message convincingly.

If people are not convinced, they are not going to buy from you.

It is as simple as that.

What are you going to market, when you have got nothing substantial to market?

Hence, when you are formulating your content marketing, Internet marketing and digital marketing budgets for the year, keep in mind that content writing is also going to be a big part of that budget.

Is publishing less content good for your content marketing?

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Is publishing less content better for your content marketing?with the funeral me

This Forbes update says yes. Gary Vaynerchuck, on the other hand, says you should publish as much content as you can possibly publish because ultimately, who decides the quantity?

I am often approached by clients who, although want to benefit from publishing high-quality content on their websites and blogs, don’t have much budget.

Consequently, they want to pay less for my content writing services. I politely refuse their work.

I agree with the Forbes article, and I also agree with Gary.

Mindlessly publishing content isn’t profitable, especially when you have limited budget, but you should publish as much as you can and there is no clear definition of what’s more and what’s less.

If you have a website or a business blog, you may publish 1-3-4 updates every week, or even less. For an average business website or blog, this is a good number.

But if you publish an online news magazine or newspaper, you publish 30-40 updates in a day.

So, how much content you must publish depends on your business and your capacity.

Gary in the above link says that don’t worry about the quality and keep on publishing. His logic is, unless you regularly publish, you are not going to improve your quality. Again, I agree.

But this is applicable when you are not paying. For example, he seems to be creating most of his content on his own and even if he is not creating a big part of content on his own, he must have enough money to pay good content creators.

Even for my own content writing blog, I don’t have to worry about the quality of every post. Sometimes, I just want to publish something random and I do that. This is because I’m not paying anyone. It hardly takes me 10-15 minutes to write a quick blog post, like this one.

If you’re paying for every piece of content, you need to be mindful of its quality.

Therefore, if the client has a smaller budget, I advise him or her not to go for a certain number of updates on the website and the blog. Instead, just focus on very few updates, but very good and very relevant updates.

This is what the Forbes article suggests. Instead of trying to publish every possible content idea and trying to cover every possible publishing platform, pick and choose your battles and then stick to them.

The article rightly says:

Whether you’re a small business owner who is doing the work yourself or a large brand with a dedicated marketing team, this approach on a social network can be overwhelming in resource drain without garnering much of a return.

My suggestion is like this:

Have a target for your blog or website: Maybe 20 webpages for your main website and then 150 posts on your blog every year.
Once your target is met and if you have more budget, then focus on other publishing platforms.

Initial thrust is definitely needed. It’s no use publishing highly remarkable blog posts on which you spend a couple of weeks on research in the very beginning unless you have a good marketing budget.

In the beginning, you can also publish less than remarkable blog posts that give you some organic exposure on search engines and then you can reduce the quantity and start focusing on quality.

When it comes to writing and publishing content, does quantity ultimately lead to quality?

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When it comes to writing and publishing content does quantity lead to quality

It is often advised that instead of relentlessly writing and publishing content on your website or blog, you should focus on quality and meaningfulness.

In his latest blog post, Gary Vaynerchuck has raised a valid question, “Who decides the quantity?”

Then the blog post further asks, can quantity lead to quality?

When it comes to filling up your website and blog with quality content, this is a pertinent question to ask.

But, as an experienced content writer who routinely comes across clients who don’t want to spend much on content writing, I know the answer.

Quantity differs from person to person. It also depends on how much effort and time you’re spending on writing and publishing your content.

When a client doesn’t have a big budget, I always suggest him to focus on quality and not on quantity.

For writing for my own Credible Content Blog, I try to maintain a balance between quantity and quality, although, I wouldn’t say that when I am shifting towards quantity I compromise on quality. No, on my blog, it doesn’t happen.

I can totally understand where Gary is coming from. And I totally understand that unless you don’t bother about quantity, you don’t know how to attain quality. As they say, it is difficult to grow your business if you are counting every penny.

Again, clients who are paying for every blog post and web page, would beg to differ.

If money is not a problem, I’m totally fine with going with quantity, as long as you are not publishing trashy content that is going to get you penalized by search engines and social networking websites.

Quantity doesn’t mean writing and publishing inferior content. It just means publishing lots of content that does not require lots of research.

Take for example this blog post. I suddenly come across a post from Gary, link to it, and share a few thoughts from my side. This post doesn’t require lots of research and time. Nonetheless, my blog has new content. I would call it quantity.

Also, when you are continuously writing and publishing content for your blog or for various channels, and if you have enough time and money, you get to play around with different ideas. This is not the case if time and budget are limited.

My personal experience with my personal websites and blogs has been that quality does lead to quantity as long as you stick to the bare minimums. The bare minimum means not going overboard with keyword-centric content and not diluting your core topic.

For example, my core topic is content writing. Then it is content marketing. Digital marketing affects my business, so sometimes, I allow guest bloggers to write on digital marketing. SEO, yes, as long as it is related to content writing.

But, it doesn’t mean that I publish whatever content ideas that come to my mind. That I would call wasteful quantity.