Blogging is continually changing and evolving.
Blogs are a great way to showcase your knowledge and expertise while giving you the freedom to genuinely connect with your audience.
Social media gives you the impression that you can connect with your audience, but if you don’t hit the right keywords or the algorithm in the right way then your target audience may miss your post.
Maintaining and posting to a blog can help bridge the gap and give people a more consistent way to learn about what you do as a business or in a more personal way.
Orbit Media released its annual report asking more than 1,000 bloggers about how they post content to their website. The digital marketing agency focused on the following topics: length, time, frequency; process and measurement; content formats, original research, and promotion.
Blog posts are getting longer
Whether content is being produced for businesses or personal posts, over the years, posts are getting longer.
In 2014, blog posts were average 808 in length compared to 1,151 words in 2018.
As you’d expect, with longer content comes an increase in time to create each post. It’s taking people about 2 to 4 hours to write a post in 2018 compared to less than an hour to 2 hours in 2014.
What’s working: It appears, in general, according to Orbit Media that bloggers who spend more time writing longer posts are having success with their content. This doesn’t mean people posting shorter posts are having less success, it really is audience dependent.
Remember, people aren’t really reading your content, most are just skimming it. So while you’re spending time crafting the perfect post, remember people will most likely scan your post and may or may not make it through the entire article.
Posts are becoming less frequent
Many bloggers are taking more and more time to craft their posts which is causing less overall posts to blogs. Most bloggers are only posting a few times a week to several times per month.
What’s working: Orbit Media’s survey found many bloggers seeing increased success with more frequent posts. Posting more frequent longer form posts can be overwhelming, especially for individuals. While this may be a working strategy for some, focus more on being consistent and match your post frequency with what your audience expects.
Bloggers using variety of content
Effective blogs use a variety of elements that tell great stories and engage their audience.
In some ways, this may be text, images, interactive content, audio, videos, or a combination of different media types.
To goal is telling a story that is informative, relevant, and is interactive.
Orbit Media found that bloggers have consistently used multiple images in posts. Lists and videos have slowly started to become more popular media types to include in posts. Audio hasn’t been overly popular and has remained amount the same in usage over the past year.
Despite having low usage rates, audio seems to have the highest reported success among bloggers.
Audio does include podcast data which could explain why audio is having the highest level of success. Podcasts are a low commitment media because it allows people to be doing other things while still consuming content. For example, you can drive while listening to a podcast or do chores while listening to a podcast. The same can’t be said about reading or watching content.
What’s working: Look for ways you can incorporate audio files or podcasts into your digital strategy. Allow people to find your content by getting it p
Getting people to your posts
With more and more time spent on creating and posting content, many expect to their hard work to pay off. Many bloggers are using various strategies and tactics to try and get people to read their content.
Orbit Media found, as expected, most bloggers are using social media, SEO, and email marketing to drive traffic to their websites. While this may gain traffic, bloggers are seeing the most success with influencer marketing.
Influencer marketing is effective if the posts are genuine and the individual fits your overall mission and brand. People follow people that they believe are part of their group and fit their ideals and beliefs.
Bloggers also found success in using paid advertisements for their posts and blog.
What’s working: Consider working with influencers in your niche that can help build your exposure. Be very selective and only utilize influencers that match your mission and target audience’s goals. Social media is increasingly crowded with people trying to get free exposure, so paying for posts that are not time sensitive can help build a following and gain web traffic.
Your turn, what’s working and not working for you on your blog?
Joe Gullo