The Frequency TrapWhy the most prolific travel bloggers need to refocus

“While I was gone, my blog didn’t explode. My readers didn’t all hit unsubscribe. The world didn’t end.”Matthew Kepnes, Nomadicmatt.com

"There really is no ideal length, but there is an ideal question: "Should this page exist?""Grant Simmons, director, The Search Agency

That was then...

• Average time spent on a news site is two-and-a-half minutes (Pew, 2010).

• Studies say screen reading is bad for consumption and production of information.

• Commercial publishers favour short, pageview-boosting material.

• Lengthiest pieces online are poorly optimised dumps from print media.

• Blogging experts recommend ‘goldilocks’ length: around 500 words.

• Leading aggregation tools have limited filtering options - reader sits at the centre of multiple firehoses.

This is now

• RSS readers are in decline.

• Social filtering is the norm.

• Twitter and Facebook replace RSS as ‘following’ mechanisms.

• Bookmarking tools are ubiquitous, from Twitter favourites to Instapaper.

• Advertisers want engagement metrics, not just high pageviews.

• New-breed publishers are questioning ‘goldilocks’ word count (Quartz aims for under 300 or over 800).

• New devices are helping to bring long-form in from the cold.

Content lives longer

Reader as ‘hub’ for content feeds Reader as node in overlapping networks

Social sharing acts like a collective memory, keeping the best content alive.

The long-form revival

• 42% of news readers regularly read in-depth news articles and analysis on their tablet (Pew, 2011).

• Content driven social movements begin to emerge:

‣ Longreads.com

For articles “perfect for the iPad, iPhone or Kindle, and apps like Read It Later, Flipboard and Instapaper.”

‣ Longform.org

For articles “too long and too interesting to be read on a web browser.”

Google’s quality drive

• 2011: Panda hammers keyword-stuffed articles, duplicate pages and poor user experience.

• 2013: Hummingbird cements shift from simple keyword matching to analysing purpose and context of query.

• 2013: Google trials ‘in-depth’ box designed to highlight long, detailed and authoritative work (US only).

• Some commentators identify a link between search success and length:

‣ Top-ranking pages for a sample of over 20,000 keywords run to over 2,000 words (serpIQ, 2010).

‣ SEOmoz finds a correlation between content length and backlinks on their own blog (SEOmoz, 2011).

“I don’t know what it is - if it’s social media fatigue - or what’s happening out there in the marketplace, but it seems like people want

higher quality content less frequently.”

Michael Hyatt, Michaelhyatt.com

Content analysis• Three travel blogs over the course of 140 days:

‣ Everything Everywhere

‣ Nomadic Matt

‣ Planet D

• Each post assessed for page authority (MOZ), shares and comments.

• Each post assigned an aggregate ‘efficacy rating’.

• Benchmarked against a publisher successfully doing ‘slow’ content:

‣ A List Apart

Frequency is not a condition of success

In fact, efficacy and authority scores increased as post frequency decreased.

Everything Everywhere Planet D Nomadic Matt A List Apart

Posts in samplePost authority (av.)

Length and authority

0

1,000

2,000

3,000

4,000

Word count

Of the 20 best posts by page authority, 17 were over 1,000 words and eight were over 2,000 words.

Length and efficacyOf the 20 best posts by efficacy rating, 16 were over 1,000 words and 10 were over 2,000 words.

0

1,000

2,000

3,000

4,000

Word count

Why might long articles perform well?

• Detailed

• Structured

• Goal-focused

• Exhaustively researched

Not every long article has authority, but truly authoritative articles are often long.

Space-filling posts performed poorly

• Of the bottom 20 posts by efficacy score, 13 were single-picture photo posts.

• Every photo post had an efficacy score below the sample average.

• Guest posts were more complex:

‣ Detailed, expert posts showed high efficacy scores

‣ ‘Keep the site moving’ posts showed low scores

Less, better

• Brands are increasingly interested in partnering with bloggers

• They will look beyond reach, at professionalism, engagement, authority, user experience.

• Refocus energy away from ‘junk posts’ and into:

‣ Design and UX

‣ In-depth posts and ongoing themes/projects

‣ Other writing opportunities

‣ Proactive pitches to travel publishers/marketers

The full paper includes extensive tables and footnotes.

Read and download at meltcontent.com.