The long tail of blogging

Over at ProBlogger, Darren Rowse wrote about the “long tail of blogging.” His point: the older content on on your blog might as valuable as the new material. Bloggers tend to think about writing the exciting new post on the hot topic that everyone will talk about, link to, and Digg. But is that really the content that makes your blog valuable?

Following his suggestion, I took a look at the traffic stats for the last few weeks on this blog. I went to Google Analytics and exported the top content report into a spreadsheet, and then looked at how much of our traffic comes from materials that’s at least a couple of weeks old.

I was surprised by the results - nearly half.

If you’re blogging to build your professional reputation, this something very important to think about. In our case, a very big chunk of our traffic is coming from people doing searches and finding what we’ve written about their topic of interest - maybe last month, maybe last year. That traffic is as valuable as any traffic to the blog.

The lesson from this: it’s often better to write something good than write something timely. Sometimes you do want to be chiming in on the hot topic of the day - we’ve all seen these cross-blog conversations taking place.

But think about the purpose of your blog. You might be better off waiting a week, and then writing something more detailed that will be interesting when someone is looking at it a year from now.

I’m not suggesting that timely new content doesn’t matter, and there are always things you want to write about right away. But you should think about the reason you blog, and spend a little time looking at your traffic.

If you’re getting a lot of traffic on your long tail of archived material, you should write with that in mind. If you’re not, and you think you should, you should consider how you might create content with more staying power to build up that part of your readership.

More posts on blogging best practices:

• 2×10
• Whole Foods Makes a Whole Mistake

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