On the web, in-depth content is king
Pardon the irony of me using a quick blog post to link to a well-written essay detailing why well thought out, in-depth essays are much more successful than quick blog posts. Just to be really lazy, I’ll use the same quote from the article that Slashdot picked up on:
“Blog postings will always be commodity content: there’s a limit to the value you can provide with a short comment on somebody else’s comments. Such postings are good for generating controversy and short-term traffic, and they’re definitely easy to write. But they don’t build sustainable value. Think of how disappointing it feels when you’re searching for something and get directed to short postings in the middle of a debate that occurred years before, and is thus irrelevant.”
I can definitely see the truth to that. Often I’ll be searching some obscure thing and I kind of cringe when I run across blog posts, because they usually don’t contain enough information. I’ve known this guy’s advice subconsciously for awhile, but it was just today that I finally saw it written down and talked about explicitly. I have tried to write in-depth posts that will continue to be useful for long periods of time, and I think I have partially succeeded. For instance, check out my my tutorial on installing WordPress in Ubuntu (which was actually my first post of any substance on this blog). It ranks highly in Google search results and still gets people commenting on it, and thanking me for it, to this day.
Now I can compare that against ten random blog postings from a couple months ago, which in aggregate took more time to write than the tutorial, but generate a sum total of far fewer visitors. It really is worth it to invest that extra time and write up something that is really good. If you just do a typical blog post you’re lost against the background noise of the web and your efforts aren’t rewarded, but if you write up a source of information that is so good that it becomes definitive and gets linked from places like Slashdot or Digg (like the aforementioned article), then that’s a good success.
Now, to think of something like that to write about …
