You’re competing with millions of blog posts if you’re producing 750-word posts, but you’ll shrink your competition pool by making them longer. If you turn just half of your shorter posts into whitepapers, comprehensive guides, or e-books, you’ll start seeing results.

Long-Form Content Defined

There is no shortcut to investing the time necessary to creating well-written, full-length guides or e-books. However, the result of boosting your company’s credibility pays off (quite literally).

The Key to Ranking for Competitive Terms

Especially if you’re not a universally known brand, ranking for competitive keywords is incredibly challenging.

However, every single piece of long-form, value-adding content produced helps your case.Users and search engines prefer it when they have more content to consume and choose from.

Naturally, search engines favor the kinds of content that users prefer. The next step is to re-evaluate how the creation and distribution of valuable content is aligning with the needs of your users.

3 Long-Form Content Writing Tips In a Timely Fashion

Even if you do experience a slump in publishing frequency, don’t let the initial set back throw you off course completely. It’s normal for your team to focus the majority of its time on the first 2,000-7,000 word piece.

However, this does not mean producing long-form content should permanently slow down your content marketing efforts. Here are three of our tips for not letting long-form content drag down your productivity.

1) Start with what you have and what you know

Simply breaking down big concepts into multiple smaller, easier-to-digest explanations makes your content longer without making it more convoluted. Take a blog post that performed well for a popular topic (verify this first using Google Analytics) and make a longer piece of content (like an e-book) out of it.

2) Gradually increase the word count

Finish your rough draft, step away from it, get a colleague’s opinion, and revisit it. You’re much more likely to come up with great ideas and find missing sections in your second or even third draft.

Like any other skill, practice makes writer longer content easier.

When you’re spending an extended period of time on something like an e-book, it forces you (in the best way possible) to focus on why you’re spending that time on it.

The topic you pick should match your goals. Attracting leads requires different subject matter than content designed to retain existing customers.

Remembering why you’re even bothering to write something is important. When you know you will serve your specific audience with content they want, you’re on the right track.

It’s your responsibility to make sure you have a method in place for measuring your results.

3) Collaborate and quote experts

When you include a thoughtful snippet of analysis from an industry leader, not only does it boost your own credibility, but it could also introduce a different perspective.

Wherever there is an interesting question asked that inspires discussion or debate, it’s more engaging for readers.

On this note, don’t become too overzealous and start randomly reaching out to every industry expert in your field for a few words.

If you’re attention-grabbing in a professional way in your outreach, you could even set yourself for a mutually beneficial business relationship in the future.

2 Big Reminders When Writing Big Content

1) Long Does Not Mean Long-Winded

If you’re struggling to make a piece longer, you might want to take a step back and review your outline. Chances are you didn’t break down your topics into small enough sub-topics.

There is almost an infinite amount of subtopics you can break down a larger topic into (if you really reflect on it).

2) You Don’t Need To Consider Yourself a Writer

Practice and persistence are big contributors to his success, of course. However, most importantly, Neil writes in a conversational, simple way, focusing his writing on his expertise and experience, always providing plenty of examples to illustrate his points.

To sum it up…

Long-form content can deliver a very high value, but creating it can seem like a major challenge.

The pros significantly outweigh the cons of its difficulty when you consider that long-form content ranks better, gets more engagement, and ultimately gets more conversions.

Check out our recent piece of long-form content: a comprehensive guide to Lifecycle Email Marketing with 150 different examples.

The longer the content, the more energy you should invest in making it the best possible resource. Make the user experience flawless.

You want the greatest returns for your extra costly investment. As a starting point, hone in on the topics and tactics that have worked best for you in the past.

Chainlink Can Help

As content marketing experts for our clients, we help them increase their companies’ organic website traffic and overall online credibility.

We can also provide valuable insights into customer histories, interactions, preferences and purchases using our proprietary platform, the Chainlink Marketing Platform.

If you don’t have a centralized data warehouse for all of your important customer data, we’ve got you covered.

Our Chainlink Data Warehouse stores every single customer’s online interactions, so you can monitor activity at each touch point across channels.

Want to learn more about Chainlink’s technology-first, uniquely effective digital marketing services?

Reach out to us below to learn more about how we can help your business grow online. We’d love to give you a free consultation.

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