Malcolm Gladwell made famous the notion that you require 10,000 hours of practice to become good at something. With the rising popularity of content marketing, does the same apply to blogging? Does the more you do it equate to the success you see in it?
A new Australian study might shed a bit of light on the matter. It didn’t look at blogging per se, but rather how academics gain status and prestige, and the role of publishing in that rise to the top.
“For reasons that are not totally clear, some people just ‘get’ the publishing game early in their careers, and it’s these scientists who are most likely to keep on publishing strong research,” said Professor Corey Bradshaw, Director, Ecological Modelling of the University of Adelaide’s Environment Institute.
“We were really surprised,” said Professor William Laurance of James Cook University in Cairns, Australia, who led the study.
“It doesn’t matter if you go to Harvard or a low-ranked university. If you begin publishing scientific articles when you’re still a graduate student, you are far more likely to succeed in the long run.”
So, in other words, those that published more frequently achieved greater success. What’s more, those that published most frequently typically started at an early age. This potency outweighed any advantages or disadvantages given by the university that each academic gained their PhD through.
Does the same apply to publishing in an online sense? Are the most successful bloggers those that produce the most content? Whilst I’m sure there are many outliers that we can think of that disprove this hypothesis, maybe it has some legs. Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
I think ubiquity plays a part. If you see someone writing on a topic an awful lot then it's natural to believe they know their shizzle. You'd like to think quality does play a part though as well though.
I absolutely believe in frequency, and I have walked the talk in the past year. I regulary post on a weekly basis, while continuing to do the usual social media promotion, i.e. tweeting, facebook, sharing on Triberr, etc. The more you are active, with occasional guest posts and perhaps some blog republishing through syndication, it all helps getting the word out about your content which, in turn, leads to more traffic, visibility and awareness. I agree this study has some legs, as it confirms what many other specialists have found in the past couple of year on the web.
Cheers,
Frederic
Do you find that the more you blog, the better you get at it Frederic?
Totally! I sometimes link back to older content in recent posts, which forces me to go back in time and read some earlier stuff. Yikes! I really believe we get better with time, find our own style and comfort zone. We also learn from reading other bloggers, seeing what works, and so on.
I agree. I think the more you publish, the more your name gets out there. I really need to practice what I preach, though! I also think that guest blogging is so important for all bloggers. It increases your social reach as well. So I would say, frequency counts but not at the expense of quality and of-course being found easily in search.
Thanks Gazalla, I suppose that's arguably the main lesson from the research because it's not easy to churn out poor quality research, but it probably is easy to churn out poor quality blogs. The key is to overlook that temptation.
I find that in order to blog regularly, the more research and study I have to do in this area, which in turn helps the quality both of my blogging and the work I do for clients. It's a virtuous circle in many ways.
I think there is definitely some merit in posting often, as long as you can keep up the quality of your content instead of phoning it in. Looking at our stats, days that we don't post always show the most dramatic drop in traffic. I think, though, that in a study like the one you mentioned (and possibly even in blogging?) there is a certain type of person more likely to achieve success in publishing, and that's the one who is self-starting and just goes out there and gets it done. I don't think they worried about frequency. I think they just did what they did – they were experts and they made it clear.
I agree with everyone here and that includes you, Adi, thanks for the post. My own experience shows that if I blog 5 times a week, my traffic steadily rises. If I drop down to one or two (as I used to do when I started 3 years ago), then, well, nothing much happens, the blog sort of sits there.
But other things matter too. Like the look of your blog, the fact that you've got share buttons etc and indeed, that you're active in SM, mainly on Facebook Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon. Based on my experience, these are the most important sites…What's your take?
Depends very much on your market imo Claude. I've personally found Twitter and LinkedIn to be effective as they both have allowed me to build relationships with people in my industry.
I think there's a lot to be said for doing something regularly, and therefore getting better at it. Practice makes perfect.
I believe that Google values fresh content as well as quality more than ever, so it's the key but not the only one.