by Skellie
Photography: Jeurgen welding by scjody
In the month or so since I started writing on this topic I must have seen upwards of fifty articles on how to achieve social media success. A number of elaborate strategies have been devised across the blogosphere: the inexplicable magnetism of list posts, the fine art of constructing Diggbait, and so on.
I’ve yet to see a single article, however, give due time to the single most important element of creating content with the potential to define your site: hard work. With time and effort any blogger or webmaster, regardless of talent, can create content with the potential to become rip-roaringly popular.
The key ingredient to success on social media services, as I’ve observed it, is time — time to create carefully crafted and assembled content. Your instinctive reaction to that might be: sure, but I don’t have that time.
I’d argue that you do. In fact, anyone who blogs or runs a website has that time. You just need to change the way you use it.
The most popular post on Skelliewag is unquestionably 50 Tips to Unclutter Your Blog. At the moment it sits at over 64 comments and trackbacks. I mention this example because I think it encapsulates the point I’m trying to make. Anyone could have written it, it was simply a matter of taking the time to do so.
It did indeed take quite a bit of time — a number of hours all up, spent browsing dozens of blogs and noting down clutter when I saw it. What it didn’t take was a stroke of genius, or any amount of brilliant writing. It was nothing more than a time investment which paid off.
Readers can differentiate between content that has been crafted and content which has not. Crafted content is packed with value, carefully considered, and lovingly refined. Sometimes more effort goes into research and assembling links than into the writing itself. It’s not necessarily the result of a brilliant idea, or unprecedented inspiration. If you spend three hours crafting a blog post, I would argue that it’s likely to be great, regardless of the idea behind it.
Spreading your time more thinly in order to write frequent articles will not provide rewards on par with pooling your time into one, carefully crafted article. Next time you’re visiting a blog you like, take the time to browse through its popular posts and consider the time investment that would have been required to write each of them. When you stumble across an article that has achieved social media success, ask yourself the same question.
Pretty soon, a direct correlation between effort and reward will become apparent.
Next time you create something for your blog or website, make the decision to spend three (or four, or more) hours on it. If you don’t have the time, skip out on writing a shorter post or two and pool your time into the longer one. Making a set time investment will encourage you to keep pouring value into your article until the time limit is up. Encourage readers who liked your article to Stumble or Digg it at the end.
This approach doesn’t promise to guarantee social media success (and I don’t think any approach can), but the result of your time investment is likely to be a defining feature of your blog or website; the much vaunted ‘pillar article’ which attracts links and new readers to your content.
Take the time and effort to craft your content. The results will be worth it.
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5 Comments, Comment or Ping
Better Blogging with Michael Martine
Well said, Skellie! Really, all it takes is that one big surge of comments and trackbacks to take you to the next level of exposure and influence. And while it can happen from a quick, off-hand post, it mostly happens when we put in the effort as you describe.
Time spent is vital, but I might suggest something else that is also vital, if harder to put into practice: timing. If your post comes out in the middle of an onslaught of similar posts (how to do social media, for example), it’s not likely to have the results you want. If you’re first or if you post something more thoughtful after the initial hype dies down, your chances of getting noticed, commented, and linked are better.
Your post on decluttering your blog was not only well-written according to your ideas above, but it was also well-timed. With an utter explosion of widgets and what-nots on blogs everywhere, lately, it was the right post at the right time. As they say, timing is everything!
Sep 2nd, 2007
Ankesh Kothari
Thanks Skellie for making an excellent point.
1. Writing “pillar” posts take a lot of time. But are definitely worth the effort too.
2. Writing regularly is essential too.
3. But you can’t write pillar posts regularly. (Unless you have a schedule of writing less than one post a week.)
4. Thats where Edison helps. His strategy to earn 1093 patents in his life time was simple: have “2″ invention goals: create 1 minor invention every 10 days. And 1 major invention every 6 months.
5. You need to set goals and schedules for both: writing pillar posts and writing other good-but-could-be-better posts.
Sep 2nd, 2007
skellie
@ Michael: Good point. I suppose if everyone is doing posts on how to ‘unclutter your car’ or something, and you spend a lot of time on yours, you’re still probably not going to achieve great success with it because it’s all been done elsewhere. So there is an element of judging when the time is right, certainly.
@ Ankesh: I agree, you can’t write pillar posts every day. Some bloggers focus on updating once or twice a week with really carefully crafted posts, while others focus on a pillar article here and there, filling up the gaps with short, easy stuff. It’s definitely a matter of finding a balance, though I’d probably recommend cutting out more of the first to develop more of the second.
Sep 3rd, 2007
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