Publish Fewer Blogs and Work on Getting Better Results Instead

Resolved for 2018: Less Worry About Blogging Frequency and More Attention on Quality Story Telling

We suddenly noticed the quiet.

Apparently, the two little cousins — 4 and 2 — snuck away from their parents at our family’s holiday get together. When we didn’t hear the usual cacophony of laughter, yelling, fighting, squeals, tears and make believe run amuck, we knew that something was afoot.

Or maybe “a-mouth” is a better description because when they were found under the table, we discovered that the reason for their silence and the perfect choco-ring around their face from forehead to chin was the result of two-fisted cramming 5 or 10 pieces of artisanal chocolate into their mouths.

Apparently, some of the pieces of candy made it to their intended destination, others did not.

The “I-don’t-feel-so-goods” started soon thereafter, and we can only hope that the tummy ache and lesson of “too much of a good thing can quickly turn into a bad thing’ will stick.

Yeah, sure.

We’ve Been Schooled that Publishing Lots of Blog Posts is a Good Thing, but…

Lately, I’ve been wondering about the lesson of good thing/bad thing when it comes to blogging. Over the past ten years or so, we’ve been fed a steady diet of statistics and data telling us that it’s a good thing to Blog! Blog! Blog!

Collectively, it seems that we’ve been listening. According to WordPress, about 85,000,000 blog posts are published worldwide every day, and that’s just on the WordPress platform. For fans of statistics, that’s 31,025,000,000 blog posts every year.

Blogging is being driven by a search engine ranking mythology that equates quantity of keyword-enriched posts with securing a higher ranking. This mythology is ever changing and with every change, comes a slew of pundits offering guidance on how to game the change.

But the common denominator of all blogging mythology seems to be a focus on quantity – the more posts, the better. We’re taking a key word or a key word phrase and choking the life out of it with posts that lack creativity, insight, and a compelling narrative.

Instead of quality writing that is compelling and tells a story of use to readers, we get a cornucopia of drivel and shit.

It’s no wonder. To feed the blogging beast, we need to find quick and cheap ways of writing and producing posts. Hence, we get the rise of the “$30 per post” writers that produce unimaginative, incomplete, poorly written, typo-laden efforts that have a few relative key words embedded in a 400-word plop.

Or, we get pleas from the marketing department for blog posts from anyone who is willing to write a post.

But as long as we’re publishing 10 posts per month, that’s OK, right?

Make Quality and Story Telling Your Blogging Mantra in 2018

I’d like you to reconsider your blogging strategy for 2018:

1. Think about the complete story you want to tell a reader about an issue or topic, and then use blog posts as individual chapters to tell that story. For example, if a CPA firm wants exit planning business, a complete story would have elements of succession planning, tax strategy, business valuations, and a lot more. A commercial roofers’ story might include chapters on materials, labor, weatherization, contractor checklists, and more. A recruiter’s story for hiring authorities might include interviewing guidance salary surveys, insights on industry trends and more. 

2. Look at all the posts you’ve written that can be used as chapters for that story, and find the gaps. Those gaps are the posts you’ll want to put on the publication schedule, rather than trying to just do a key word match with a blog post. 

3. Instead of writing more content, figure out ways to repurpose, repackage or reuse the content you already have. You might find that you have the foundation for building a content pillar, or eBooks or whitepapers that can be gated and used for lead generation.

4. By writing fewer posts, you’ll should be able to hire experienced writers that will be worth every penny of the fee they charge. Stop using cheap writers because you’ll only get cheap results. 

5. Spend more time, energy and resources on integrating your blogging efforts with social media and other means for getting more readers and visibility. Unless you have a large marketing department, doing all the promotion that should be done for each post you publish will be quite difficult.

6. Instead of publishing posts for the masses, think about redirecting your writers and writing resources to more personalized content that complements an account based management.

Savor Every Piece

If you think about each blog post you write and publish as a piece of gourmet, hand-crafted artisanal chocolate, you’ll want to savor the experience. Sure, each piece will cost a lot more than what you can get at the dollar store, but it will be so much more worthwhile – to your company, to your readers, and to those who find you through search.

When it comes to great blogging like when it comes to great chocolate, less is more. You might just find that less cramming and more savoring is the key to more visibility and readers for your blog in 2018.