When you set out to start a blog, you might make a common content strategy mistake: Modeling your blog like a magazine or newspaper.
It’s tempting to want to churn out a large volume of content and to organize it chronologically. That’s how we consume content on news sites or social media feeds, after all. But brevity—not length or cadence—is the key to effective content marketing with a blog.
Tip: Create a blog with the Wix Blog Maker.
Blog cadence tips
01. Audit blog content for better decision making
The key to setting up a strong, reliable blog is to focus on fewer, better pieces of content. This will require conducting regular content audits to ensure existing posts are up to snuff. If you already have an established blog, you’ll want to perform a comprehensive audit as well as considering if a library publishing cadence is the strongest approach for you.
Here at Wix, we've developed a method we call the Shark Tank. “Sharks” are the pieces of content with the most impact or potential. (There are both “known sharks” and “potential sharks.”) To identify these sharks, we use a simple formula to see how each article performs against a set of KPIs including things like traffic and conversions.
The formula helps us quantify our 50-70 best performing posts, which we then mark with a shark emoji (yes, really). This indicates which posts we’ll prioritize regularly maintaining and updating.
We might choose to prioritize these, over publishing new blog posts for example, if we're able to evaluate that updating high performing content to make it perform better, will have more impact than increasing blog cadence and publishing more.
02. Focus on evergreen content
Content agency Animalz uses the “library approach” for their blog. Libraries are distraction-free sources of authority for curious audiences, and Animalz does their best to emulate that with their content. Former Animalz strategist Jimmy Daly summarized the strategy well when he said: “The best content strategy is one that prioritizes quality and depth, not volume and breadth.”
Focusing on strong, evergreen pieces of content rather than adhering to an output-heavy publication schedule is key. In the early days of blogging, emphasis was often placed on churning out content but it’s since been proven that blog post quality is much more important than quantity.
But libraries are also organized into sections, which means that content agencies following the library approach need to think about how content fits into a blog ecosystem. “Each piece of content needs to be the fiber of this specific environment,” says Wix Director of Growth Idan Segal. “Your client’s blog needs to be the go-to place for information in your client’s industry for years to come.”
In order to make sure that your blog shows up the relevant SERP's, conduct comprehensive research of your client’s competitors and how customers interact with those rival blogs. The research should let you answer key questions like: What do people actually want to know about this topic? How can we provide the best answer possible?
The goal of your blog post is to provide comprehensive answers to customer questions while simultaneously providing them with a great user experience. Stronger, more selective posts do a better job of that compared to rushed, high volume content platforms.
03. Avoid the impulse to publish like a newsfeed
After making your website and then deciding to establish your online presence with content, it can be easy to assume that your expertise will automatically translate into blogging success. It’s your job to educate them on the significant effort and content strategy involved in becoming an industry standard when it comes to content, and that their audience likely isn’t bookmarking and refreshing their site every few days for the latest updates.
“If you want to read the news, you go directly to the home page news site like CNN,” says Ruth Eschenheimer, the Wix Organic Content Team Lead. “You know where to go and you’re going through the site’s front door.”
But not all traffic is going in through the same entrance, especially not when you’re looking to dive deep on a specific. That divergence is an opportunity for your brand’s content. “As a consumer, you might not be sure about where to look if you want to go in-depth on a topic,” says Eschenheimer. “So you use the backdoor to find that information, and in this case the backdoor is a search result leading to a blog.”
You may also be tempted to try and cover every topic in their industry. But, while it’s important to demonstrate a breadth of authority, focusing on depth will pay larger dividends. Ensuring that each blog post is comprehensive will serve audiences (and search engines) much better than quickly putting out lots of content that covers a variety of topics superficially.
04. The 80/20 rule
While fewer, deeper blog posts should be the rule, there are circumstances that may demand quicker, shorter posts to be most effective. Switching up the publishing cadence is fine as long as you stick to the 80/20 rule: Keep 80% of your content in-depth and evergreen and reserve 20% for those brief, succinct posts. Sometimes your client needs to get information out about an event or product update or post something on social media, and timeliness in these few instances matters more than depth of knowledge.
Ultimately, your blog approach will depend on what your client’s business goals are and why they want to create a blog in the first place. “Not all traffic is born equally,” Segal says. Some companies are purely focused on creating content in order to boost ad traffic, but if your goal is to sell a product, you’ll need to make sure your content is much more substantial and timeless. Demonstrating authority through a blog means creating blog posts that require significant research and effort, but the payoff can be huge. By providing comprehensive answers to vital questions, an effective blog can draw in new prospective customers that may not be regular site visitors.
Slow and steady ultimately wins the content marketing race. If your clients are aiming to prove their expertise and attract more customers with their blog, fewer posts that demonstrate research and authority will benefit them much more in the long run.
Looking to start a blog? Consider some of these popular blog niches