How Effective is Your Blogging?

[webgeek]

...participated in a survey on LinkedIn and finally got the results...

Sorry if this has been shared previously, but I thought it was particularly handy benchmarks for a number of content related topics.
https://www.orbitmedia.com/blog/blogger-trends/

Please note that I am not the author, not affiliated with the author, not the site owner and make nothing for sharing these insightful survey results which were compiled recently.

 

[fisicx]

Interesting report. But I would suggest that the results show more bloggers are now doing what successful authors have known for years. Sites like http://www.copyblogger.com/ have been promoting these techniques for a long time as have many UKBF members.

 

[webgeek]

Yep, agreed @fisicx - it's a bit like the mainstream is catching up with the leaders in terms of basic volume, frequency, etc.

 

[fisicx]

One of the things the report reports is the dropping off of frequency, mainly because authors are spending more time curating high quality readable content. Which as ane fule kno is far better than the mass of low level verbiage churned out by many who believe more is better. Which it isn't. Even Google has woken up to this and rewards the well written informative and interesting articles.

 

[webgeek]

I think the content driven marketing effort is a bit like social media, too. Both are losing steam in 2016 and will likely see considerable numbers of people who know they need to blog, but not how to blog, drop out in 2017.

 

[Michelle Harris]

That is an excellent find, thank you - It said that most bloggers are writing 2000 odd words - and getting seen more - but said less frequently - However the chart still showed most writing once a day. Maybe I missed something there, but I will look more closely thanks.

 

[Scott-Copywriter]

Long, high quality content is key these days. From what I've seen, Google tends to favour that a lot more in the rankings.

Frequency is less important, and high frequency is potentially harmful if people are signed up to e-mailing lists for new post notifications.

Personally, I'd be much happier submitting my e-mail address to subscribe to a blog if I saw one high quality post every few days instead of multiple smaller posts one or more times per day.

 

[Michelle Harris]

Oh I agree - and yeah Google likes more its said. But 6 hours to write 2000 is pretty poor lol

 

[Scott-Copywriter]

Oh I agree - and yeah Google likes more its said. But 6 hours to write 2000 is pretty poor lol

I'm currently writing articles for my own independent blog, and some of them are taking 2-3 full working days to write 2,000-4,000 words.

When there's a lot of research and planning behind them to maximise value, they can just take an awful long time.

But you certainly reap the rewards from that sort of effort. Take the article Robb linked to. One of the writers in the comments said it took 100+ hours with five of them working on it. I certainly don't doubt that, but they are likely to receive a lot of traffic and exposure from it as it spreads throughout the web.

 

[Michelle Harris]

I have no doubt that post was very time consuming it is/was very in-depth and not your average blog post, which I'm sure yours isn't either. There are some posts that do take a very long time, I have spent hours on some of my posts that need a lot of research. Usually, though I write about something I know about, giving advice and guidance to others, so it's from my head. But if you are researching something you have to get the right information especially if that is how your earn your daily crust. But out of the 100's of articles I've written I would say that wasn't the norm and I'm surprised this research says it is.

 

[Ian J]

Long, high quality content is key these days. From what I've seen, Google tends to favour that a lot more in the rankings.

I'm not so sure from my own personal experience.

I have been writing a blog on my thoughts about what is wrong with the factoring industry for the last eight years which is widely read within the industry and is different from all the other factoring bloggers as mine is designed specifically to be read by people and not search engine algorithms but it has made no difference to Lord Google who ranks the site on it's twentieth page amongst the dross.

I expect that the problem is the lack of inbound links as no-one in the industry will link to the site deeming me to be a competitor.

For anyone interested the site is at http://factoringblog.co.uk/ and even includes an article rubbishing one of the sponsored adverts on this very forum which is disgracefully misleading

 

[webgeek]

@Ian J - you might want to check out the siteliner.com report on the site. It's showing 7:1 nofollowed vs followed pages and 1/3 dupe content, 1/3 common content and 1/3 original.

By comparison, they're showing 1:8 nofollowed vs followed and 20% dupe, 30% common, 50% original on ours. Out of 1112 terms rankings tracked: 73 top 3, 300 top 10, 560 top 30 and 750 top 100 ranking.

 

[Ian J]

@Ian J - you might want to check out the siteliner.com report on the site. It's showing 7:1 nofollowed vs followed pages and 1/3 dupe content, 1/3 common content and 1/3 original.

I think that some of the less flattering statistics may come about due to the way the site is structured as there should be no common content apart from what is in the sidebars and there is certainly no duplicated content.

I think that Siteliner counts certain things in more than once eg once in the post itself and again in the categories etc as I've just had a quick look and my two most recent posts supposedly have common content of 74% but I can't find anything common to anywhere else apart from "posted by Ian" and "Leave a comment"

 

[Scott-Copywriter]

I'm not so sure from my own personal experience.

I have been writing a blog on my thoughts about what is wrong with the factoring industry for the last eight years which is widely read within the industry and is different from all the other factoring bloggers as mine is designed specifically to be read by people and not search engine algorithms but it has made no difference to Lord Google who ranks the site on it's twentieth page amongst the dross.

I expect that the problem is the lack of inbound links as no-one in the industry will link to the site deeming me to be a competitor.

For anyone interested the site is at http://factoringblog.co.uk/ and even includes an article rubbishing one of the sponsored adverts on this very forum which is disgracefully misleading

There are certainly some exceptions, especially in niche fields. I've seen plenty of smaller articles which just happen to have something of great value and interest, and they spread like wildfire.

But the key about long, highly detailed articles is that, if they are written for the user, and they are that long, having a lot of value tends to go hand-in-hand. Google really likes it, but so do the readers, so the content scores highly on all fronts in terms of algorithms, social shares and backlinks.

However, this must involve writing very long articles just because there is that much useful information to include. If someone takes a small topic and tries to pad it out with thousands of words of fluff, it will certainly be detrimental.

For example, in one of the 4,000 word articles I've written, I've actually tried to keep it succinct as possible. I couldn't thin it out anymore if I tried without removing important information. It's not long intentionally. It's just long because there's that much information to present to the reader (tips and advice etc on a particular topic).

 

[webgeek]

I think a big part of it is the homepage is showing full posts rather than excerpts, which then makes the homepage the source of duplication as it's echoing full post pages content.

 

[Scott-Copywriter]

I think a big part of it is the homepage is showing full posts rather than excerpts, which then makes the homepage the source of duplication as it's echoing full post pages content.

This is a huge point I missed actually. Good spot.

Google will be seeing nothing but duplicate content on your home page and all of your internal pages. Definitely look at making those home page posts excerpts so the internal pages consist of unique, stand-alone content. It will probably make quite a difference.

 

[Ian J]

Now changed to excerpts. Thanks both

 

[UKSBD]

I would also display more posts in each category

Take your factoring category 29 pages with only 5 posts on each one,
Content on them is temporary, most of those pages will just get dumped.

You may have them set to noindex,follow but you will be losing the links from psge/5/, page/6/, page/7/, etc. as they are just too deep in the navigation system.

Have a category with 50 (or 100 even) posts instead of 5 and it is effectively 50 permanent links to the posts

If you want to take it to next step, make it 50 posts displayed and only ever have 50 posts in each category.

 

[RedundancyClaim]

We're only producing news on our site at present, 500 words. Will definitely look at introducing more blog style articles.

 

[aManHasNoName]

Thanks for the link webgeek, some interesting information