Creating quality content isn’t nearly as hard as coming up with the ideas for that content. Even if you have top-notch content marketing services at your fingertips, you still have to come through with some great ideas that will get people to give your content a chance.
Now, it’s understandable if you feel like you’ve said everything there is to say about a given topic, or if you simply think you’re out of ideas. But what if your idea for one blog could become something much greater? What if you could take one idea and turn it into several pieces of content?
Why Produce More?
We all know the adage that quality is greater than quantity. But deep down, we all know that’s not necessarily the way it works in the content marketing world. No matter how passionate you are about your chosen field, nobody wants to read 5,000 words about a niche topic. And this isn’t just an issue of perceived loss of attention spans – it’s a real thing.
A Canadian research study showed that humans lose their ability to concentrate after eight seconds of looking at anything. Not only is this a decrease of 33 percent over the past 15 years, but it also shows that humans have shorter attention spans than goldfish.
How does this affect you? Simply put, longform content isn’t going to work in most cases. You’re better served taking that one big idea and breaking it up as much as you possibly can. This way, you have many pieces of content instead of just one.
The Benefits of Diversity
It might seem like you’re dumbing down your content by taking this approach. You’re not. All you’re doing is presenting your information in a format that your audience is most likely to understand. After all, the whole point of content marketing is to create materials that appeal to the people who might consider doing business with your company. Doesn’t it make sense to give these people what they want?
What’s more, having more pieces of content has plenty of residual benefits. Taking that 5,000 word white paper and chopping it into 20 articles of 300 words each now gives you 20 different pages for people to peruse on your website. That helps to immerse them into your website and your company as a whole, and that makes it easier for people to subscribe to your email list. Additionally, you can promote these smaller articles as part of a larger series, which always keeps people interested in learning more.
Best of all, the more content you issue, the more people will share that content. It’s hard to predict exactly what will go viral. The more irons you have in the fire, the more likely it is that something will catch on with a larger audience. And even if your content doesn’t take the world by storm, you’ll still have plenty of material to distribute through your email list and on social media, and you’ll get a lot more mileage out of these avenues if you have multiple pieces of content to share.
The next time you find yourself getting carried away on a given topic, take a step back and think about how it can be presented differently. Maybe you can take your one big idea and convert it into three smaller ideas. Or, take a longer blog post and try to make multiple blogs about the different parts of that piece. The more content you issue, the more likely it is that people will find you – and the more likely it is that they’ll become customers.
BIO:Bryan B is a freelance writer who lives in Long Island, NY. He’s way too excited about fall weather and fantasy football.
