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Why Marketers Should Mix Content on a Small Business Blog

 

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dj crazeWhen I started writing frequently for this blog, I thought most posts would be pretty much the same: Concise, concrete tips about how to do inbound marketing and how companies can use it to market their medium and small business blog.

I was wrong.

While that may be a consistent theme of posts on this blog, there is no single type of post that succeeds. Like any medium or small business blog, this blog thrives on a healthy mix of content.

You can see the importance of varied content on large news sites like NYTimes.com or WSJ.com. They thrive on their mix. Their homepages are grab-bags of news, features, videos, pictures, graphics and who-knows-what-else. Even if you have a small team working on your small business blog, you can post multiple types of content for your readers.

You can also see this by looking at the posts that succeed on this blog. Below I've listed our top articles over the past three months, sorted by inbound links and page views. (I pulled this data from HubSpot's blog analytics tool.)

Top Posts by Page Views (Last 3 Months)

PostPage Views
Did You Graduate From Link Building High School Yet
11,270
State of the Twittersphere - Q4 2008 Report
8,768
You Oughta Know Inbound Marketing
7,498
6 Tips for Making a Business Marketing Video
4,211
Twitter in Real Life: The Follow Back [cartoon]4,137

 

Top Posts by Inbound Links (Last 3 Months)

Post
Inbound Links
Social Media Marketing Madness [cartoon]33
All Hail The (New) Twitter Elite List 27
6 Tips for Making a Business Marketing Video23
Forget Community. Forget Conversation. Business Blogging Is About SEO. 21
8 Marketing Tips From An Olympic Gold Medalist
20

 Looking at this data, three things jump out:

(1) Lots of different types of articles.
There are cartoons, a big report, a viral video, how-to stories and some bigger thought pieces.

(2) Little overlap between the two lists. You'd expect the articles that got the most traffic to also get the most inbound links. But that's only true in one case. Both metrics are important, so you need to create different types of content.

(3) Lots of surprises. The report, the video and the cartoons are not surprising, but the others are. It's hard to tell how these posts are any different from the dozens of others like them that we ran over the past three months.

The takeaway here is clear: Just like a venture capitalist or a movie studio executive, you never know which projects will be most successful on your medium or small business blog. The only way to deal with such uncertainty is to create a portfolio of different posts -- you gotta mix it up!

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Photo: Eric Hamilton

Posted by Rick Burnes on Mon, Jan 19, 2009 @ 07:23 AM

COMMENTS

Excellent, after revewing the statistics you appear to have made some fundamental discoveries which I certainly agree with. Niche writing is for niches and only apply to people who aren't capable of thinking outside of the box. You guys are great and reading your work is both entertaining and informative. Thanks,

posted on Monday, January 19, 2009 at 7:55 AM by Robert "Butch" Greenawalt


Butch -- Thanks for the nice comment. I hadn't thought of it in terms of niches, but I think you're right.

posted on Monday, January 19, 2009 at 7:59 AM by Rick Burnes


Interesting to see some example data. I'm just starting blogging casually, and I was thinking about how a variety of post genres, even those outside of my areas of expertise, might be more interesting... at least to write, even if no one's reading.

posted on Monday, January 19, 2009 at 8:08 AM by Nicolas Ward


Brilliant! as usually, great content and tips for promoting your blog and keeping your customers interest.

posted on Monday, January 19, 2009 at 8:30 AM by Ed


Thanks for the example data. Indeed surprising to see the little overlap the two lists. Any thoughts on the reason for this?

posted on Monday, January 19, 2009 at 9:14 AM by Johan den Haan


Hi Johan, it's a good question. Frankly, I don't have a good answer. The only thing I can think of is that the articles with more page views got a few links from large traffic sources, whereas the others got a lot of links for small site ... but I'm not completely happy with that answer.

posted on Monday, January 19, 2009 at 9:27 AM by Rick Burnes


Hi Rick, 
 
That could be a reason, but it's a bit of a coincidence if that holds for all the posts.  
 
I thought it could be a difference in article type (e.g. long articles bookmarked to read in parts or again), but both lists contain different article types... so...

posted on Monday, January 19, 2009 at 9:33 AM by Johan den Haan


Johan, at some point I'm going to look into this more, and figure out what's really going on (I'm trying to do more article-level analysis of the blog). For now, the varying types of posts is the most salient take away.

posted on Monday, January 19, 2009 at 9:36 AM by Rick Burnes


Rick, thanks anyway. Thats a great take away! I'm currently very focused on one type of post, let's see what other types can do for us...

posted on Monday, January 19, 2009 at 9:43 AM by Johan den Haan


Great post and I have a couple of comments. I have just started a blog on how to sell and manage salespeople in the new virtual environment. I look at it as the sales version of the new world that you guys are involved with for inbound marketing. It is definitely a niche and that is why people come because they don't find this content elsewhere. But that doesn't mean I can't experiment with different types of content that are related. I wouldn't however post about the Inauguration for example unless I could tie it to my subject. There is already enough content out there for that. Finally, I would encourage everyone to experiment with medium not just message. Use video, graphics, photos, songs, cartoons whatever gets your message across not just text.

posted on Monday, January 19, 2009 at 11:37 AM by Terence Lee


I agree with what you are saying. If your blog is about one main theme in particular (niche blog) then you are only targeting a small number of visitors. But if your blog topic is quite broad then you can include lots of subcategories. For example internet marketing can consist of blogging, affiliate marketing, niche marketing and so on. So there is more chance that your visitor will find some area of your site that he/she is interested in.

posted on Monday, January 19, 2009 at 2:06 PM by Brandon Walker


Yes agree. But I only have enough expertise in a few niche areas to be worthy of blogging about. I think I will link to others like Hubspot when I find worthwhile complimentary content like Inbound Marketing in this case.

posted on Monday, January 19, 2009 at 2:25 PM by Terence Lee


I agree that your blog posts should vary in content and not be the same boring topic over and over. You will lose your readers.  
 
 
 
I also highly suggest photos and video on your blog. Most of all links to other blogs that are relevant to the topic to show that you have been doing your homework and of course hoefully people will start doign that with your blog which creates great traffic and SEO for your site. 
 
 
 
Serena Carcasole 
 
www.vbsondemand.com 
 
Your 1STOP Business Service Shop 
 
Outsource your way to success!

posted on Monday, January 19, 2009 at 7:35 PM by Serena Carcasole


Blogging is writing commoditized, not writing because you have something to say that's worth reading but writing about whatever as long as it leads to revenue. Writing for revenue has just about taken over writing for purpose.

posted on Tuesday, January 20, 2009 at 5:46 PM by Susan


Comments have been closed for this article.