A Different Kind of Content
Gregg Blanchard •
I’ve written a lot of content over the years. As in…maybe…3,000 blog posts in the last decade.
And I’ve kinda found a groove with my style. It’s casual, conversational, right around 300-500 words, maybe a subhead thrown in to break up the blocks of text, and lots of groups of three paragraphs to help keep people from getting lost in my imperfect prose.
But that content, it turns out, doesn’t exactly check the boxes for the ol’ Goog.
Better Content
Wanting to ramp our search efforts this year on SendView, I reached out to a freelancer writer I’d connected with a while back, Rachel Meltzer, and it’s been super interesting to watch her work. From the style of writing to the tools she uses, the content is very different than my natural approach.
For example, word count is 5x my usual post (or more).
The post she wrote about competitor analysis templates clocked in at over 2,000 words. The post about top email marketing tools was well over 3,000. Even the post about email marketing journeys that included a lot of great illustrations was nearly 2,500. The shortest – a piece about email marketing trends – was still 3x my typical post length.
And then there’s a very clear structure, hierarchy, and a similar introduction to kick off the piece.
A good example would be the post about email marketing competitor analysis and competitor tracking tools both start by answering the question “What is ____?” is a really clear, concise way that is easy for a human (or a bot/crawler) to parse and understand.
You can see from that post how that idea continues with other questions being answered like “why” and “how”.
Fun
It’s fun to see someone else creating the content for a purpose other than just entertaining or informing a primary audience. I’m not even doing the work but I’m learning a lot.
That said, this post clocks in at a classic 336 words.
Grooves will do that to you.