So you have a blog
The Business of Food
by Jennifer Barney
So you have a blog
3-min read
I challenged you to think about if you could be a thought leader. If you answered yes, keep reading.
If you want first party data, and you can be a credible authority on something that will educate the consumer, content is the way to go.
I’m not talking about putting up a blog post every now and again. I’m talking about publishing long-form articles, weekly or bi-monthly at least, that are optimized for search, and putting ad dollars behind it.
Why do this?
As discussed , it’s becoming harder for marketers to advertise to consumers as Big Tech’s consumer privacy protections have gone into full force. Data sharing is no longer a reliable mechanism for targeting potential new users. You’ve felt this if your posts have not performed as expected on Facebook (excuse me, Meta) properties.
Is long form content for you?
If you’re burning to tell people something they’ve never heard before, or correct a misconception, or help with a problem, then content is for you. The idea here is not to immediately sell anyone on your product. The idea is to create an informed space – that answers a question, enriches, educates and entertains an audience – so that you become a trusted source.
Some brands that are doing an amazing job of this:
Four Sigmatic, makers of mushroom coffee, have positioned themselves as an authority on the health benefits of mushrooms. Not only do they inform on what different mushrooms like chaga and reishi are for and what they taste like, they put out relatable content with deep empathy for their readers. Articles like “Why am I so tired: five ways to stop being sleepy” have great ranking keywords. All articles are hosted on a Magazine tab on their website.
Healthy ramen brand Immi is speaking to a very niche group – young, first-gen Asian-Americans as well as better-for-you ramen lovers. Their content is uniquely catered to culture and community. One piece focuses on all the different kinds of Asian candy they and their friends loved as kids – nothing to do with ramen at all! Some content is reserved to their private community – they built a hefty following on their Facebook group and loaded it with authentic off-the-cuff content as a pre-launch campaign.
This top-of-funnel approach does have particular requirements to be effective, and none actually have to do with the content itself. They have to do with getting your content to come up on the first page of Google search, so focus on:
Keywords
Link building
Publishing
This is a crazy statistic:
95% of all search queries in the U.S. get fewer than 10 searches per month.
Keywords are popular search term queries. You want to do your research here to include keywords that are getting a decent number of searches but with a reasonable difficulty score for a chance at a top spot on Google. These will be long-tail keywords and you want them because they get a higher rate of conversion.
Link building is linking and creating backlinks from other websites back to you to build authority and higher rank. A natural way to do this is to guest post on a related publication or link to a podcast interview of you.
Where you host your blog matters. And publishing has to be consistent and frequent. For CPG brands where you have many product pages, it’s better to put your blog on a sub-domain to keep the two sites separate and easier to manage.
Optimal word count
Long form articles perform better, but more words for the benefit of more words is not the point. The point is more opportunities for long-tail keywords and backlinks while maintaining the reader. The sweet spot is 1000 – 2000 words because after that, people just stop reading.
Here is a cool chart on the correlation between word count and backlinks.
More on content creation next week.
All my best,
Jennifer
Social commerce is going to take over says this study by Accenture
I'd love to hear from you - get in touch at jennifer@3rdandbroadway.com