This week’s Content Makers episode is a solo episode talking about the framework I use when determining whether it’s worth putting time and effort into creating a piece of new blog content. From blogging, to social media, we’re often told by “experts’ that showing up and consistently producing new content is the most important thing. But I’d like us to consider a different view point, one where strategy and substance, over speed and quotas, are the most important markers of success. Listen to the episode below or scroll further to read the blogpost.
How to Decide What to Blog About
As a content marketing professional the question I get most asked is, how much new content do you produce each week? About three years ago, it was to produce three new pieces of blog content each week. Sound familiar? Then it went down to one piece per week and now. Now, myself and my team don’t work to a quota.
I know this might sound crazy, do we just not do any work? How do we keep our jobs?
This is quite difficult for some people to get their head around and I can understand why. For a long time now, there has been this importance placed on creating new content.
But as Simon Schnieders mentioned briefly in episode 13, this is a bit of a myth founded around a Google update that was mainly for news publications like the Mail Online, where content has to be timely and updated to almost minute-by-minute updates in order to rank highest for users searching on the latest information. But unless you’re a news site, or a site that focuses on timely content about current affairs, you don’t have to be producing new content each week, or even each month. This idea that Google likes to see you blogging each week is a myth. Today, a better approach might be to create 15 key blog pages, then refresh and update the content each six months instead.
At the same time we’re told that our audiences will only stay interested if you consistently show up. Again, there are cases where this is true, but it doesn’t apply to everyone. If you’re say a blogger, and you have a loyal community, then yes, part of your appeal is that your audience wants to see new content from you. But if you’re a software company, who mainly gets found by a customer googling a question to help them make a decision, that user doesn’t care if you’re blogging once per month or even once per year. What they want is to find the blogpost that answers their query.
So in all honesty, how often you blog is really dependent on who you are, what your business model is and how your audience behaves. There is no point blogging for the sake of blogging in today’s noisy world.
Today, Google is looking for the highest quality, the more relevant, or the most authoritative content. Rarely, when we are writing one blog each week, and that blog’s often written by a freelancer or a marketing intern, are we going to produce a piece of content that is the best piece of content for that search term.
Also, writing is hard. It isn’t natural to most, and as a result, trying to force new words out each week leads to thin, under researched and half hearted content. It will inevitably lead to putting something out, just to fill that “one piece per week” quota, rather than saying is this the very best piece of content I can produce?
Reasons to be producing new blog content
At ScreenCloud where I work today, we’re working on content all of the time, in fact, we’re obsessed with content. And yet there is no set quota for how much “new” content we produce, and on some months, we don’t produce any new content at all. Instead, we might be working on a piece of “hero” content which has nothing to do with SEO, we might be updating old content, or we might be working on whitepapers or company culture content that has absolutely nothing to do with search or Google at all.
So if you’re in the position where you’re not quite sure whether you should be writing new content or not, I wanted to share a framework with you that I use to determine whether a piece of content is worth writing. You can think of this a bit like one of those “choose your own adventures” if you like. If you answer yes to any question, you go write that piece of content. If you answer no, you move onto the next question. If you get to the end and you haven’t answered yes once, then you my friend, get the afternoon off.
A framework for deciding whether you need to blog at all
1. Is this blog to fulfil a search term or query you’re looking to rank for?
When I first started writing for ScreenCloud we blogged three times per week, every week without fail. The reason was, there was a huge host of search terms that we were trying to rank for. Because ScreenCloud touches on many different industries, there were lots of queries we could rank for, that would bring self-serve traffic to our website. It took a good couple of years of consistent blogging in this way until we’d hit on all of those keywords and today, we get more self-serve leads through organic search than any other medium.
However, even this strategy would look different today, just three short years later. Back then, we were writing one post to serve every long-tail term.
This modern strategy used today, is what you might often hear referred to as long-form content, pillar posts or cluster content. It basically means creating one really in-depth blog about a topic on your website. Which means you can often sew up the search market for your audience with between 10 – 25 pieces of content only.
So question 1: Is this blog to fulfil a search term or query you’re looking to rank for? If yes, great – write it. If no, move on to the next question.
2. Is this a blog to help build your brand awareness?
Writing for search isn’t the only reason you might want to blog. Many brands are also now publishers and sometimes you might want to create a blog for brand awareness. Rather than being optimised for search, this is a blog that helps to tell people more about your why and makes them feel a limbic-brain connection (that’s the emotional bit) to want to work with you.
This might be a blog about a partnership, a charity initiative, an interview with an employee, or some lessons you’ve learned recently.
If this is a blog to build brand awareness, it’s important you consider distribution channels. Think of this like a twin for your brand awareness blog. The reason being, you can’t expect this blog to be found through search. If you think about user behaviour today, it’s also rare for people just to browse blogs for something to read, unless you’re a blogger with a loyal readership. So you need to consider how you can distribute this brand awareness blog.
It might be through the CEO’s LinkedIn, by an email newsletter, or on your social media channels, but brand building blogs and distribution go hand in hand.
So question 2: Is this a blog to help build your brand awareness? If yes, great – write it. If no, move on to the next question.
3. Is this help content or aimed at my existing customers?
Sometimes our blog is a great home for content that can help our existing customers, or provide them with new value. This might be a tips post on how they can get the most out of your product, an FAQ post on what it is like to work with you, or a how to guide for doing something tricky that you can help with.
If this is the case, go write that blog. Retention of existing customers is a far under-utilised strategy and creating content for not just new customers, but for your existing ones, can be really beneficial.
So question 3: Is this help content or aimed at my existing customers? If so, go write that blog! If not, move onto the fourth and final question.
4. Do you desperately need to write this blog?
This isn’t really aimed at businesses looking to blog, but it is one for the bloggers, the small business owners, the writers and the big-hearted creatives who feel as though writing is a passion for them. You might have heard me ask Imogen Roy in episode 11 how she manages to write so much great newsletter and blog content each month and she told me that she has to. That if she isn’t creating, she doesn’t feel right.
If you can relate to this then you should go write whatever the hell you like. You don’t need to worry about SEO or distribution channels, because your writing is a part of who you are.
Creativity is far more beautiful than commercialism and I wouldn’t want you to stop writing based on these very commercial questions.
So if you desperately need to write that blog, then please, go write it.
Now if you answered no to all of the above, the truth is you shouldn’t go write a new blogpost. In this case the pressure is probably coming from someone above who wants you to hit a quota, or maybe you’re even putting pressure on yourself. In this case, stop, take a breath and really focus on what your business or work needs to help push it forward.
I wouldn’t even give the blogpost to your marketing intern “to keep them busy”. It’s a waste of everybody’s time and the blog will sit on your website, averaging a few views at best, and screw up your bounce rate as well as telling Google you have lots of “thin” content that’s not of much value.
You’re much better spending the time you would have put into the blog, updating or repurposing old content, working on campaign ideas or building landing pages for specific areas.
So again I ask you, how many times do you plan to blog per week this year? Hopefully I’ve helped change your mind about your editorial calendar.