Writing in his latest Alertbox column, Jakob Nielsen says:
“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.”
– Jakob Nielsen (July 9, 2007)
Hmmm… yes and no. Blog entries don’t all have to be like this one.
The best blogging strategy (the one that reaps the most rewards as far as establishing yourself as a thought leader) is to mix up your blog posts. Some should be short and reference another article / site / blog.
Others should be longer. Call them blog essays, call them articles. They’ll be more “findable” by Google by virtue of being posted to a blog. And what about the great feedback you get from readers on a blog?
Be sure to read Nielsen’s loooong article (complete with histograms and a chart). It’s provocative: Write Articles, Not Blog Postings. He gets into paid vs. free content and makes the point that you shouldn’t care about 90 percent of your readers anyway because they’ll never buy anything from you. Yup, that’s probably true.
Thanks to Jon Greer for the pointer.
Useful Link
See Robert Scoble’s post about Nielsen’s column (and the 89 comments in response)