The Truth about Long-form Articles, and De-anonymizing Web Traffic (Marketing 101 Dec 2023 Week 2)

All right, so we are going to talk about, Neil, you pick the first one.

We're going to talk about, does writing long-form content get you more backlinks? You know, I remember back in the day, everyone's like, yeah, to rank well on Google, you need 2,300 words. And of course, over time it's changed, but everyone's like, if you have more in-depth articles, you're going to get way more backlinks. So what we did is we looked at 10,000 popular articles that had both a ton of organic search traffic and social shares. And we looked at, you know, all right, what was the length of these articles? And as well as how many backlinks were they generating?

Wait, can you better define popular? Like what kind, how much search traffic, how much social shares?

We were actually generating it on the articles that were generating the most search traffic from Google. Because we have a whole—

Like your articles?

No, not my articles. Ubersuggest's whole index of Google.

Oh, got it, got it, got it. Okay, that makes sense. Keep going.

Right? But we also have social share data because we pay for scraping social sharing data as well.

Yep.

So, and then, so we're using a combination of both of them. We also have backlink data. So we're taking the most popular 10,000 articles in different categories and we're seeing what is actually driving the most backlinks. Like what's the article length? And as you can see from the graph, if you have really, really long-form articles, like 4,000+ words, they actually didn't generate the most amount of backlinks. Those average were 494. Articles that were 1,100 to 1,500 generated 1,750 backlinks on average. Again, these are for the 10,000 most popular articles. 1,500 to 2,000-word articles was 1,798. So a little bit more. And then it skips to the next big one was 3,001 words to 3,500. It was 1,714. But what we saw is if your articles were over 3,500 words or even 4,000 words or too short, like 0 to 500 or 500 to 1,000, they just didn't generate that many backlinks. And the worst category, the articles that generated the least amount of backlinks were the ones that were 4,000+ words.

Dude, I'm just looking at this. This is really good data. I'm just like, man, I bet you if you keep testing these hooks, you're going to get more play on these.

Yeah. This is good data. That one, we used 2 different hooks on there. I think I deleted the original one. I used to just go and edit, but then Twitter readjusts the number.

Yeah, they don't like that.

Yeah, so I just delete and I repost. But, you know, longer isn't necessarily better, which funny enough, you know, it's also why we're seeing like word count go down. You know, it used to be where it was 2,300 words was average on page 1. And then Brian Dean wrote an article with like Ahrefs. I think, I forgot what the number was.

It went down a lot more.

Yeah, it was like 1,700 or something like that. And then we started looking at the numbers again. It's somewhere on my Twitter, but it went down even more.

Yeah, I think, look, look at it this way. I think it's like, look, if you can get the point across, you know, our writer guidelines, I don't know about you, Neil, but we used to be 2,000 or 2,500 words or so. Now we're at like 1,250 or something like that. So times change, you got to adapt with the times, right? And the other thing too is like, I feel like if you want to get the most backlinks in addition to writing really good content too, like take a playbook. Like can you go buy something out there that already has a lot of backlinks or a tool that can get a lot of backlinks? Or even like there's calculators out there that you can make and ChatGPT will just make it for you now, right? And you can have your coder build on top of it.

All right. I just shared the link with you for a link on Twitter, but it's another chart. When you look at average word count, it used to be 2,300 words, then it dropped down to 1,447. And then you see a chart based on the popular articles all over the web, the same 10,000, and it breaks down the average word count.

Is this, this is average word count? Which ones do you have backlinks here?

No, this is just average word count of really popular articles that are getting search traffic.

Okay, yeah, so it's industry dependent as well. Yes.

So you're seeing that people are starting to create shorter and shorter content, but I blame the TikTok world for that because so many of them—

TikTokification.

Yes. So many of these users are short-form videos and it's not just TikTok, it's TikTok, it's Instagram, it's Facebook. Man, you even have like short stories on WhatsApp, which I don't know why people use that. I've never used that. Maybe in the US it's not a thing, but everywhere, Snap, YouTube, LinkedIn, everyone's posting short-form content everywhere.

The average TikTok user spends 95 minutes a day on it? Really?

Yep.

So YouTube is about 20 minutes or so, and that's like a lot. 95 minutes is insane.

I also think it's because of the category, or not category. I think it's also because of the age demographic that TikTok Yeah, it's a blended average.

So there you go. So, okay, let's move on to the next one. I'm going to keep this one simple. And this is, the phrase here is, what is brandformance? And brandformance, it's very simple. So let's say from this podcast recording, this session, there's a couple episodes where— episodes, there's a couple of lines where Neil might have some zingers and I might have some zingers. The idea here is that we're going to post them to Reels, to TikToks, to Shorts, and we're just going to find the ones that work really well. And the ones that are outliers, let's say we get an average of 10,000 views a post or whatever, and then we have a video that gets 100,000 views. Well, if we're looking to drive— if you're looking to drive more conversions, as an example, let's just use our business, right? We'll take one of those videos where we're sharing a really cool marketing insight. We'll just slap a CTA at the end of it because it has proven already to work on social. So why don't we just add a CTA? They can either join our email list or go get a free marketing plan or whatever it is exactly. And that is known as brandformance because there's the brand aspect of it where it's working organic social and the formance side is where you're trying to drive performance.

Yeah, this is cool. Funny enough, I've never heard of brandformance before, but I have now.

New phrase. I think, you know who I first heard it from? I think I first heard it from Gary Vee.

Huh.

Yeah. So I mean, have you done anything like that yet?

We don't do a ton of stuff like that, but I know you do more of that.

We're trying. We're starting to. We just got the ads up. We're driving. We're basically going to drive it to our email list because we're really happy with our email product. So, we're just— because our guy, our copywriter was like, dude, I think we're going to run out of creative. I was like, now that you have the brand formats thing, you'll never run out of creative. Because if it's a marketing newsletter, then we're just going to keep coming up with marketing tactics. And it just makes sense that, hey, if you want more stuff like this, Go to this newsletter.

Yes. And it's just like you end up recycling and getting more content of the content you're also creating, which just makes it easier as well.

Yep. All right, what do you got?

So funny enough, speaking of brandformance or branding, you know, I did an experiment or more so I shared the stats of my personal brand versus my corporate brand and which one's more effective. On X, I have roughly 450,000 followers, Instagram 467,000, Facebook 1 million, YouTube 1 million, TikTok 120,000. LinkedIn, 500,000+ podcast monthly listeners, 1.6 million blog, over 3 million visitors a month just to the blog. But on my corporate side, Twitter, 2,602 followers. Instagram, 1,290.

Wow.

Facebook, 6,200. LinkedIn, 68,000. Website, 21,473 visitors. Now with my, bless you, with my personal brand and corporate brand, I promote both my ad agency, NP Digital. Now, if you look at the business, the first 3 years we were in business, the business has now been around for almost 6 years. We'll come out 6 years at the end of December. But let's just look at the first 3 years. The data after that, it pretty much stays, you know, the same on what the personal brand drives. So in the first year, we generated $5.1 million in revenue. In year 2, $18.8 million in revenue. Year 3, $33.7 million in revenue. In year 1, Eric, you want to guess how much of that revenue came from my brand? Now you're seeing it on the screen.

All of it?

All of it. In year 2, $10 million of roughly the $18 came from my personal brand. And in year 3, $10 million still only came from my personal brand, even though the The corporation ended up growing to 30, what was it, 36 or 37? I forgot what the number was. I can't see, but oh, you have it right there.

33.7.

33.7. So the personal brand, even after that, as we kept growing the corporate revenue, just stopped driving leads. And what we found out is for us in our experience, personal branding can do really, really well for you And it can drive a lot of revenue. And I don't think the company would be here and even generate anywhere near the revenue if it wasn't for the kickstart from the personal brand. But it doesn't make the biggest world in the difference. I still believe whether it's consumer or B2B, a personal brand is just not as effective as a corporate brand. If you look at the biggest corporations in the world, whether they're consumer or B2C, I mean, or B2B, the corporate brand is much better. And I'll give you a prime example of this. Have you heard of e.l.f. Beauty?

No, no. Okay.

e.l.f.? E-A-L-F? E-A-L-F. Look at e.l.f.'s stock. e.l.f. Beauty stock is $7 billion market cap, right? You haven't heard of that. Have you heard of Kylie Cosmetics?

Yep.

All right. Much, much smaller.

They're not public.

They're not public. Well, they got bought out by a publicly traded company, if I'm not mistaken, but they weren't doing as well. You know, I have a lot of friends who are investing in— investors in Fenty, you know, Rihanna's company. It's not doing as well as they would like. And a lot of the growth has started to flatline. But all I'm getting at, or like even Skims from Kim Kardashian, a lot of people are now starting to buy this stuff on Amazon and places like that. Have you seen all the TikTok videos of people comparing Skims And other products that are like 1/4 the cost, but it's exactly identical. It just doesn't have the Skims brands. Like there's no difference. And they're like, yes, we will save 1/4. We'll take the 75% off, you know? That's funny. But like all I'm getting at is like, yeah, building a corporate brand is much more powerful in the long run than a personal brand. And ideally, I'm not saying one is better than the other, or technically I'm saying the corporate brand is better, But what I'm really getting at is you should ideally build both, but of course put more emphasis on the corporate brand.

Dude, look at this. They just like shot up in 2022.

Yeah.

I don't know what happened here, but you know what's interesting? I think another takeaway, and you can feel free to disagree with me here, it's like if you have an agency, basically your personal brand caps out at $10 million.

Yeah. Dude, look at Fashion Nova. That's a prime example of someone who leveraged influencers to build a corporate brand. And Fashion Nova, the last time I checked, is more searched on Google Trends than Gucci. And he built a multi, multi-billion dollar company and is on the Forbes list.

Yep. All right, so let's move on. I got one over here on, do you know what an identity layer is, Neil?

No.

It's all these new phrases, but you know what I'm going to talk about when I say it. But I heard about this, it's like, oh, you're calling it identity layer? I was like, okay, cool. So an identity layer is like, let's say, On the Single Grain site, we get, let's say we, I'll give you a round number. Let's say we get 100,000 visitors a month or whatever it is, right? An identity layer allows you to deanonymize the IP addresses that are visiting your website. And so right now, the CEO of retention.com, he's giving me a B2B export. I just installed a snippet on my site. And each day, I basically get 30 to 50 LinkedIn URLs. And you can see the size of the company, how many people they have as well, the title of the company. And I looked at some of the lists and it's like a lot of it's like, okay, people that probably aren't a fit. But I was looking, I was like, oh, Shopify director of marketing and I have their LinkedIn. And with these identity layers, there's another one called warmly.ai and they'll automatically put things into like a LinkedIn sequence for you, I think, or automatically reach out to people. I think when you combine this with the AI tools that are out there, you're going to be able to reach out to people at scale and you can do it tastefully too. So imagine we're putting out all this Marketing School content. I'll say, hey, Based on the page that they visited and based on their interests, send them content around what I put out related to this in the last 90 days or so. And we'll just keep sending them links every month or so. Hey, I know you're interested in this. Hope you enjoyed it. If you want to book a call, you can book it over here. So you're going to be a lot more tasteful.

So pretty much what you're doing is someone comes to your website, depending on the software solution you're using, it'll identify a portion of those people, not just tell you what corporation they're coming from because that's been out forever, But also tell you some of the people that are actually visiting.

Correct.

And you're going to go and message them on LinkedIn because you may not have their email address, et cetera, and try to build a relationship after they visited your website.

And it'll also give their email addresses in some cases too. And Warmly does that too.

Yeah, I think this is an amazing marketing strategy for B2B. B2C, I think it's a waste of time. B2B, it's an amazing strategy, especially if you're B2B enterprise. B2B SMB, not so much, but B2B enterprise, I think it is an amazing strategy and a great way to—

You know what's interesting, Neil? Remember, I think it was a year ago or so, we talked about retention.com and they were focused on B2C and they would basically just de-anonymize people that are visiting like your Shopify site, right? But now they're switching to B2B now. So it's like they're trying to make sure that their business model doesn't disappear, I believe.

Yes, because spending money on this technology when someone buys something for you for $10, $20, It doesn't matter too much, but when someone's spending $1 million with you a year, knowing the person is really important because, and especially if they're high up, you really want to build a relationship if they're visiting your website. That's how you make money.

Look, the way I look at this is you're looking to just ultimately give your SDRs more leads to work with. And this is a, I wouldn't say this is warm outbound. They're not necessarily warm, but it is warmer outbound for sure. And that's how you can look at this. And then you can Put them into your sequences or whatever. But that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe. Check out this next video over here if you're on YouTube. And if you're not subscribed to us on YouTube, please subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.

Bye.