What We Learned From Publishing (and Analyzing) 1,000 Blog Posts
It was a normal day in mid-February, when something wonderful happened here at Uberflip…
We officially published 1,000 blog posts!
That is, the number of items in our “Uberflip Blog” stream in our Hub officially hit 1,000. So, we celebrated as any normal B2B organization would. We popped champagne on a private jet analyzed our blog post performance to see if we could a) define any trends within our content, and b) discover any insights that could improve the performance of our content moving forward.
Before we dive into some of our insights, here’s some good-to-know info about the data we collected:
- It took us ~three years to reach our 1,000 posts milestone. The data gathered is from the beginning of our Content Hub in 2013 through to early 2016.
- Our blogging strategy remained roughly the same over the past three years. We publish new blog content approximately once every weekday.
- All data collected is from blog content only. Those who are subscribed to our Hub know that we also create a lot of other content (webinars, podcasts, SlideShares, etc.); however, our 1,000 post milestone incorporates anything that has been published as a “blog”. As such, this data also includes infographics since they technically live in a blog post format.
So, what did we learn?
Tuesday is our day
As previously mentioned, we’ve been relatively consistent about publishing new content every Monday through Friday for the past three years. There’s not a huge difference in the actual number of posts published on Monday vs. Wednesday.
We did notice that posts published on Tuesday received more views and more social shares than blogs published on any other day.
Posts published on Monday also did pretty well in the TOFU-metric department. After Tuesday, there’s a pretty significant drop in the number of views and shares of posts published in the latter half of the week.
Lesson: It’s probably not a great idea to publish anything too important on a Friday. If we want to give a key blog post a boost, it might help to have it go out… on a Tuesday.
Listicles and “How To” posts aren’t *all that*
Anyone who’s spent any time on the Internet has probably fallen victim to clickbait. While having a compelling headline is important, going the Buzzfeed route might not necessarily be a winning strategy for us.
Of our top 100 most viewed posts, only 41% are lists (where the headline formula included a number – e.g. “X Ways to do…” or “X Tips for…”), and only 11% are “How To” posts (including “How To” in the title).
It gets even more interesting – of our top 100 most shared posts, 33% are lists, and only 14% are “How To” posts. This goes against industry trends, since “How To” posts are regarded as one of the top three most shared content formats.
Most of our most viewed and shared posts had compelling headlines, but they didn’t necessarily follow a formula. A few examples:
- Beyond You’re vs. Your: A Grammar Cheat Sheet Even the Pros Can Use
- B2B Content Marketing Trends for 2015
- Portrait of a Content Marketer: More Than a Marketer [Infographic]
Lesson: This is definitely not to say that listicles and “How To” posts don’t work. Some of our “How To” and listicle posts still performed excellently; they just don’t seem to have as profound an impact on our audience as they might for other audiences. I’m going to draw the conclusion that going with the most compelling headline for a particular blog post (regardless of formula) is the best way to go.
Providing context promotes discoverability
The Uberflip Hub allows for content to be organized in “Marketing Streams”, which means that our blog posts aren’t forced to only live among other blog posts in a “blogs only” stream of content. They can also live in a marketing stream of content that provides more tailored content experience.
For example, a blog post called “10 Awesome HubSpot Hacks” isn’t limited to living only in the Uberflip Blog Stream, it could also live in our HubSpot Marketing Stream, which would add more context and make the post more easily discoverable for those interested in reading HubSpot content.
Some of our blog posts only live in the Uberflip Blog stream, while others live in additional streams. We found that blog posts that live in two or more streams receive 53% more views than those that only live in the Uberflip blog stream.
Lesson: Providing context promotes content discoverability, which means it’s optimization time for our content team. As far as our Hub is concerned, it’s a best practice for every blog post to live in at least two streams so there are more paths leading to the discovery of that content.
Turn your blog insight out
Our findings from our 1,000 blog post analysis are definitely not universal. We have a unique audience and a unique blogging history. What works for us isn’t necessarily going to work for you.