With decreasing attention spans and everyone using small screens, it makes sense to publish 300 word blog posts, right?
You may argue – this content strategy works for Seth Godin. Just look at the number of shares on his posts.
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But you are not Seth Godin and you should consider long form content of short form content.
And the data on Google’s top 10 results also show an allergy to short content (unless you’ve a very authoritative domain).
Web users are becoming smarter every day. They want specific answers to specific questions. The number of long-tail searches performed are increasing every day. Your content strategy needs to match their increasing savvy.
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So as a blogger, you’ll have to laboriously compose more words for search engine optimization and conversion rate.
Let me just say the words:
You have to create long-form content, meaning 2000+ words high-quality blog posts. This needs to be your new content strategy.
I am a big believer in evergreen long-form content pieces. They perform better and add immense value to your audience by going beyond just scratching the surface.
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As per HubSpot, a companies are saving an average of $20K per year by investing in inbound vs. outbound marketing.
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Many bloggers suffer from little traffic and decide to kill their blogs. But don’t jump the gun!
Do you want to further optimize your inbound marketing efforts?
Then long form evergreen articles can give you that edge over your competition who focuses strictly on short form content.
Here’s how:
The majority of blog posts published are 500 words or shorter. You can stand out in the noise by putting an extra 1500 words worth of work.
Longer articles generate business leads for a longer timeframe. This is because they attract backlinks and organic traffic from Google timelessly, organically making it evergreen content.
You’re perceived as an authority in your industry. Your audience appreciates comprehensive posts that delve into intricacies of their pain points. They won’t need to jump on 10 different websites to get the same information.
Long form is sustainable. You can launch a marketing campaign solely by repurposing these epic content pieces.
Buffer experimented with not publishing any new content for a month and distributed their existing content in a value-packed email course. It garnered 18,185 signups within 6 days, a great conversion rate on a counterintuitive content strategy.
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Here at NeilPatel.com, all of my articles are 4000+ words. And, in a year, I’ve already crossed 100,000 visitors/month.
But creating long form content does not mean cranking out irrelevant and repetitive words.
Rather it’s all about Providing Value.
That should always remain your major blogging goal – even if you were focusing on short form content.
In this post, I’ll break down creating high-quality long form content step-by-step. I expect that you’ll feel confident in your ability to create 3000+ word articles by the end of the post as well as trust that this is at least a good option to test against existing short form content you may have in play.
