A year and a half ago, Jimmy Daly of Animals wrote a well-liked article
explaining that there are two sorts of content strategies, publications and
libraries. It got tons folks thinking.
The Publication seeks to create an audience of repeat visitors by
consistently and regularly publishing topics of broad interest to an industry,
promoted to subscribers and followers.
The Library seeks to create relevance on more narrowly focused topics with
deeper, more interconnected articles, discoverable through search and there
when the visitor needs them.
We’re getting to expand on Jimmy’s thesis here, starting with this visual
breakdown showing the most differences:
So here’s what it comes down to…
To news or to not news?
That’s the large content strategy question. And it’s answered once you
create your content mission statement. If you haven’t done this yet, you'll
create yours using this template.
It’s an issue of topics, which is that middle part.
• You are running a publication if… [Content Y] includes the words news or
trends, latest or recent.
• You are building a library if… [Content Y] doesn’t have any of that, then
it’s probably all educational and evergreen, as in, it's relevant for an
extended time.
Let’s look closer at these two sorts of content strategies.
“The Publication” Content Strategy
What is happening? That’s why your readers are listening to you. They click
and skim because they need current information that's relevant to their
industry.
Promotion and traffic patterns
Because your content is about the newest information, social media and
email marketing are your most vital promotion channels. They aren’t checking
out it..
Publications need subscribers
Here’s an Analytics account for a publication. Notice the spikes. Notice
the traffic mix.
Social and email are high bounce rate channels, which explains why
publications have higher bounce rates than libraries. And since social and
email work so well, publications get tons of mobile traffic.
Key success factors: Speed and frequency
Publications move quickly. You would like to leap in fast and report on
trends, add a replacement spin to the subject du jour. And to condition your
subscribers and followers to stay opening your emails and following your
streams, you would like to publish frequently and consistently.
Our annual blogger survey shows the facility and effectiveness of high
frequency blogs. Bloggers who publish more often are much more likely to report
success.
Pro Tip: Uploading a handout doesn't cause you to a publication. the
thought is to BE the press, to not RELEASE information to the press. Really, no
blog should ever post a handout . It’s much better to show that handout into a
piece of writing before publishing.
Blog design and management tips for publications
The design of publications may be a bit different than the planning of
libraries.
• Dates
Visitors got to know when it had been published because value is tied to
recency. The blog article template should show the date.
• Prominent share buttons
Visitors often share a piece of writing before they’ve read it so put those
share buttons high on the page. Here’s the info showing the shortage of reading/sharing
correlation. Thanks, Chartbeat!
• Actively manage social snippets
Set your Open Graph tags manually or with a tool like Yoast. this provides
you control over how the article will look in streams when it gets shared.
Extra credit if you employ data to make a decision what to use as your social
snippets. Wait a couple of days after launching the article, then search the
highest shares in your social media management tool (every publication should
have one). Drop that into your plugin for managing social snippets thereon
article.
Team and resources
Publications are difficult and expensive to take care of , which is why
most folks are building libraries.
• Staff Up: you're totally committed to your publishing calendar.
Sustaining this usually means several full-time team members dedicated to
research, writing, editing, email and social promotion.
• Stay Agile: Articles can’t stay within the review phase for weeks. So
workflows need to be quick and leadership can’t micromanage the method .
• Tough to Outsource: Every journalist features a beat. Brand journalists
are not any different. It’s difficult to seek out vendors with specialized
industry knowledge and connections. Outsourcing a newsroom is hard .
“The Library” Content Strategy
How am i able to do this? That’s why your readers are listening to you.
They click because they need utility. they need to find out . they need
practical, how-to information and advice.
Promotion and traffic patterns
Because your content answers questions and is evergreen (it time travels
well) search may be a big opportunity. SEO is vital . Align your content with
keyphrases and make it easy to seek out .
SEO is humanistic discipline
This solves an enormous problem inherent to blogs: the
reverse-chronological order. Blogs are basically huge piles of posts with the
foremost recent on top. It’s an ever-growing mess. Fine for publications but
bad for libraries.
Google helps solves the matter of organization. It doesn’t matter much if
the blog is disorganized, as long because the content is search optimized and
therefore the technical SEO is sweet .
So within the end, libraries get huge amounts of traffic from search.
Here’s an Analytics account for a library. Notice the rhythm of weekday traffic
and low spikes. Notice the traffic mix.
This is an amazingly efficient thanks to create visibility. A high-ranking
article may attract many visitors everyday for years. But the downside is that
the over-reliance on search. Beware that big, looming SEO trend: declining
click-through rates from search.
But albeit search traffic declines, there’s another benefit to best-page-on-the-internet
content: it attracts links, especially when it’s original research. this is
often the cornerstone of the content strategy framework for SEO, which is that
the key to B2B lead generation.
Pro-Tip: Create a start here page. Clear blog categories are critical for
libraries, but a page that welcomes the visitor to the blog is that the
ultimate in categorization.
Key success factors: Depth and length
Libraries have detailed, practical, often exhaustive articles.
Again, the blogger survey shows this clearly. Bloggers who publish
long-form content recover results.
But wait. We saw that frequency correlated successfully . How is it
possible to publish a replacement 2000 word best-article-on-the-topic every
day?
It’s not.
The bloggers who post daily are running publications. These are two
different content strategies.
Blog design and management tips for libraries
The experience for visitors may be a bit different for libraries.
• No dates
it’s best if your blog template design doesn’t date each article. it'll
simply make your evergreen content look older faster. If a date has relevancy
to the piece (i.e., its research) then simply put the date within the header
and body text. Yes, i do know this is often controversial advice. Yes, I’m
ready for the talk .
• Categories and Search Tools
As the library grows, so does the importance of categorization and search.
Faceted search allows visitors to filter using several categories (both “safety
tips” and “roofing”), but avoid the temptation to form one among the facets a
content format( ) since this feature isn’t as usually that helpful or popular.
• Keep updating old articles
SEO makes a number of your articles highly visible for years. So plan to
keeping those posts current. Use Analytics to ascertain which articles are
performing best in search and put those on a schedule for updating. roll in the
hay for the readers, but enjoy the more durable rankings which will follow.
Team and resources
Libraries are inherently more efficient, because each bit of content works
harder over time. But they still take dedication, time and possibly money.
• Lean and mean
You can share the load of writing across several experts on the team, but
someone must be serious about SEO and content promotion.
• Outsourcing is an option
How-to content is comparatively easy to outsource, because the seller can
simply check out high-performing content in your industry, then beat it with
something higher-quality.
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