Do you make this content research mistake when you blog?
When we talk about content development and blogging research, all the strategies involve studying the web’s biggest sites.
It makes sense.
Why not turn to the best for content inspiration?
So, it’s natural to head over to popular sites to learn more about:
- The topics they’re covering
- The formats they’re using
Based on your analysis, you feel like you have a good idea of the kinds of content that matters in your industry right now.
Sound familiar?
It turns out this is a deeply flawed content development approach.
Fortunately, there’s a better way for you to find your audience online.
The problem
In this webinar, Derek Gleason, Content Lead at CXL, makes the case for everything that’s wrong with this content research method.
Gleason uses this example: study after study into the web’s best content tells us we need to write long-form content to attract traffic, links, and shares.
“Correlation between shares and long-form content…You want to have successful links and shares? You need long-form content.”
But, said Gleason, when you investigate these studies all the sites in the top 20 have one thing in common: strong domain authority.
Domain authority is a score of between 0 to 100. New sites start out at 0, and that number increases as you build links to your site.
Strong domain authority means you’ll rank higher in the search engine. Sites with a large number of high-quality external links have the highest domain authority.
Within this context, another story begins to emerge.
These studies are “Inherently biased towards big size,” adds Gleason.
Put another way, the quality of the content isn’t the reason the post performs well.
The single element shared by these pieces of content is the strength of the site.
Now, I have to be honest.
My mind was blown.
For years, my entire content process a step-by-step of what not to do, according to Gleason.
So, here’s exactly what I did when I started writing about productivity for Medium – link here.
- Go to Google and search for popular sites in my niche, let’s say productivity
- Enter the site into a tool like BuzzSumo to find the posts that got the most social shares
- Study these popular posts
Next, I’d develop my content plan around these themes.
The problem with this process is this: I’m assuming the post was popular because of the substance of the content
Now, let’s dig into why this method is misleading.
Survivorship bias
Back in World War II, Abraham Wald was a statistician with a massive job. He and his team at Columbia University needed to figure out how to make planes stronger against enemy attacks.
So they studied all the planes that managed to survive the enemy fire and inspected each aircraft to see where they were worst damaged.
Next, they worked to make those areas stronger.
“However, Wald realized there was a missing, yet valuable, source of evidence: Planes that were hit that did not make it back. Planes that went down, that weren’t surviving, had much better information to provide on areas that were most important to reinforce,” writes Shane Parrish on his Farnam Street blog.
And this concept became known as survivorship bias.
It’s a phenomenon we use in discussions about success in general. For instance, we hold up the habits of successful business people as a roadmap for what to do to achieve goals. But what about all the other people who do exactly the same thing but still struggle in obscurity?
How does this apply to content development and blogging?
Consider how many other, smaller sites are writing exactly the same content you’re writing. The content you’ve copied from the major sites. They’re not getting any traction.
Missed content opportunities
And then there’s the other problem with a focus on the big sites.
Somewhere along the way, we get stuck in an echo chamber.
New ways of looking at things might be tucked away on the second, third, or fourth pages of Google’s search engine results.
There’s the old joke that you can hide anything on page 2 of Google.
We’re missing out on new perspectives because they don’t enjoy the same visibility of more popular sites.
You could be connecting ideas in new ways. Your experience could light the way for your readers. A reliance on industry thought leaders might hinder these possibilities.
Content development: An improved approach
Here are some ways to counter the problem.
Using the data
Gleason’s not discounting the lessons we can learn from big sites.
He’s suggesting there are better lessons to learn.
Start by studying when the site became big.
“When did the magic happen?” said Gleason.
“You don’t want to be Moz in 2020, you want to be Moz in 2012 .”
Look for clues about their “changepoint”. What were they writing about when they become popular?
“When did they get their act together?”
There are ways to get your hands on this data. The simplest one is to pour over the site’s archives. Though, this could be time-consuming, depending on the number of blog entries on the site.
Consider using a tool like Screaming Frog to get all this information. The free version lets you crawl up to 500 URLs.
Write for yourself
Another way might be to just write for yourself.
Write about things you enjoy learning about. Chances are there others that like that kind of thing, too.
It’s even better when you are part of the audience you are writing for.
My most popular articles have been the result of me scratching my own itch.
There will also be bigger and better sites. But there’s only one you. Take what you must from the thought leaders in your industry and add your stamp to everything you create.
Image credit: Photo by Jakari Ward on Unsplash
