10 Years of Content: How My Approach Has Changed from 2009 to 2019

It’s hard to believe I’ve been consistently publishing content for more than 10 years – and it’s even harder not to be nostalgic about how easy it used to be to drive results with content.

At the risk of becoming one of those marketers who complains about how easy the “good old days” used to be, it’s true that requirements for content quality have evolved dramatically in the past decade.

In 2009, all it took to get lots of traffic was publishing a lot of content. And volume is still important, but in 2019, content marketing is all about getting through to your customers, speaking to the root causes of their problems, identifying high intent and nurturing them as necessary. It’s still possible to succeed with content, but getting there looks a lot different than it used to.

What You Need for Content Success in 2019

I’m going to get deeper into my specific recommendations in a minute, but I want to start with the one thing no one wants to hear: content requires more work to be successful these days. There are no “hacks” that are going to get you around that simple fact, and no secret formulas the experts are using to get better results than you, in less time.

For evidence, take Brian Dean’s latest research, which found that long-form content generates more backlinks than shorter pieces:

Image Source: Backlinko

He also notes that longer content tends to get more social shares, though he reports seeing diminishing returns after around the 2,000-word mark. That makes 1,500-2,000 words the sweet spot you should be aiming for with most content pieces you create – and that’s 2-3X longer than the content most of us were producing in 2009.

It’s not just length requirements that have increased. In 2009, creating content meant writing something and tossing it up on a blog. Now, to keep up with the game of content marketing, you have to:

• Understand SEO and keyword intent (which I’ll talk more about in a minute)
• Know how to build an audience and promote your content with blogger outreach.
• Be able to use analytics to measure which of your content pieces are producing the biggest impact and to determine how these results should influence your future strategy
• Either be able to design yourself or have the art directing skills needed to manage freelance designers

These days, when I write a post, I’m not just writing. I’m not a “blogger.” I’m a content marketer. I’m reading expert sources so that their research can shape what I share. I’m reaching out to friends and contacts for quotes. I’m mapping out what I want to say relative to the goals I’ve set, so that every article contributes to my overarching business objectives in some way. It’s more work for sure, but it’s necessary these days.

If you aren’t working at this level yet, the following tips should help make sure outdated blogging best practices aren’t keeping you from being successful with content in 2019.

A Complete Understanding of Your Ideal Customer Personas

Content is crowded. Even creating stellar content doesn’t automatically get your brand out there. And while it used to be all about getting the right keywords into your content, it’s now all about your ideal customer personas (ICPs).

I’ve got a few resources you can use to map out your ICPs if you haven’t done this before, but at a minimum, you need to understand the problems your target customers are facing and the pain those problems cause them. Once you’ve identified their pain points, you can start brainstorming keywords that are relevant to them to build your content around.

Research Into Your Target Customers’ Keyword Intent

Here’s where we take that keyword research to a higher level than ever before. Nobody was talking about keyword intent in 2009. But now it’s necessary, since content isn’t just about traffic. It’s also about conversions – and content built around keywords that demonstrate zero intent ultimately doesn’t work.

At Mailshake, we have a couple blog posts that drive tens of thousands of visitors a month because we wrote them back when we first started in 2015-2016, and they’ve aged well. But the intent isn’t there, because it’s not something we intentionally did. So even though they drive lots of traffic, they don’t convert because there’s zero intent. They hit the ICP, they hit our customers’ pain points, and the keywords themselves have high volume, but the fact that there’s zero intent means they still don’t work.

I wrote more on this in a recent article, but keep the following excerpt in mind as a refresher on what intent actually is:

“Sometimes you’re on a fact-finding mission, sometimes you’re looking for answers, sometimes you’re hoping to make a purchase that fits a need or want you have right then and there. That’s intent. And just like keywords themselves, it comes in different flavors.”

You’ll get the best results from content when it’s built around keywords that demonstrate high purchase intent. That requires two things: knowing your customer personas well enough to understand their intent, and then creating content around the highest priority phrases.

As a bonus tip, start thinking about keywords not as short snippets or phrases, but as full sentences. Not only is natural language increasingly becoming the way users search – especially for high purchase intent phrases – its usage is growing in importance for SEO and becoming a powerful voice search ranking factor (which you’ll want to target, since 50% of all searches will be voice searches by 2020, according to comScore).

Using Content to Power Nurturing Sequences

Thinking about content in terms of conversions also means recognizing the important role it plays in nurturing sequences. When you’re using content to drive traffic, you probably won’t be able to turn all of those visitors into customers right away – especially not your low intent visitors.

So now you have to think about using content not just to get people to your website, but to get them onto your email list and into your funnel. That might mean creating a drip campaign or launching an ebook that people can download – whatever it is, it’s something you can use to turn a visitor with low intent into a lead, and then into a customer.

Again, content marketing in 2019 is really about getting through to your customer and the root causes of their problems. In 2009, it was about building content and getting lots of traffic. And that’s still the same, but it’s now 10-20% of the impact it used to have. Before, it was 100% of the reason.

Content Age and Freshness Distance

The age of your content has always been a factor in its performance, but it’s a bigger factor today than it used to be.  

Essentially, for some keywords, the date of the last update is very, very important. Ross Hudgens, founder of Siege Media, calls this “freshness distance,” which he defines as “the idea of when you look at the first page of a search result, what is the distance between the most recently updated post and the oldest post?” He has a great video on the topic here that’s worth checking out.

Imagine that you searched for a keyword like “fishing rod review,” and you looked at the dates when each piece of content that ranked was last updated. If you see dates that were in the last 3-4 months, that shows you that you probably need to update your content every couple months as well to increase your odds of ranking.

So it’s not only about creating new content. It’s about expanding, evolving, and beefing up your old content. Most of my traffic in 2019, especially to this site, has increased not from creating new content, but from updating and expanding old content. My new content maybe gets 20% of the views, compared to what my older posts get. That’s a big factor, and it really points to the fact that it’s easier now to scale up what’s working than it is to start from scratch.

The Ability to Form Partnerships with Experts

Partnering with experts on your content does two things for you. When you work with them, your content becomes more unique and powerful because you’re drawing on the expertise of others. But it also lets you tap into their networks once you’ve published your content, which can be huge if you’re struggling to get eyes on it.

When we created the Mailshake Cold Email Academy, for example, we partnered with Inbox Attack. We’ve got the brand, and they’ve got the deep expertise in all things email. So even though it’s our branded content, we’re not the originators of the content. We’ve done this with webinars as well, where we’ve brought on partners like Intercom, HubSpot and GTmetrix to be able to target their audience.

If you don’t have a network you can draw on, get to work. One of my best suggestions is to start guest posting. I’ve made a lot of connections with the experts I reach out to now because they see me on different industry sites. Joining Slack marketing groups has also been a great way for me to tap into a pool of people I can reach out to when I’m trying to make connections.

Promotion, Promotion, Promotion

Content promotion, obviously, is a big, big part of content success in 2019. You can’t just write a piece of content. That’s only a blip of the work. You have to promote it. You have to figure out all the different angles you can use, which also ties back to building your email list and growing your audience.

If you take one tip away from this article, it should be this one. Promotion should actually be your main job as a content marketer – I totally agree with Derek Halpern’s suggestion to spend 80% of your time promoting and only 20% of your time creating.

If you haven’t done much promotion, check out my articles on the subject. Start with a few tactics and add more as you start seeing results.

What Hasn’t Changed in Content Marketing

Content has changed a lot, but there are still some fundamentals that matter as much today in 2019 as they did in 2009. Link building, for example, still matters if you want to drive the greatest possible impact from your content. The overall quality of your content might matter more today than it did in 2009, but it’s always been an important factor for success.

My process these days may be more intense, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The fact that these higher barriers to entry exist forces marketers to produce better quality content – and that’s a win for everyone. But it does require that you be smart about how you allocate your content creation resources and execute your creative work if you want the pieces you create to have an impact.

Keep your customers and their problems top-of-mind. Bring partners into your content, and then promote the hell out of it. Pay attention to content age, and stay tuned – even more changes will be coming before 2029.

What other trends are you seeing? How has content changed for you, whether over the past 10 years or some shorter window? Leave me a note in the comments below with your thoughts:

Image: Pixabay