I Blogged Every Night for a Week. It Went Terribly.

Let's talk about this article from the wonderful Rand Fishkin. I blogged every night for a week, and it went terribly. I think there are three things here that are worth calling out that we can learn from. There is the use of a counter-narrative opinion, the use of personal experience and experimentation to validate that counter-narrative opinion, and the use of self-deprecation as well.

So, why is this article interesting to people? Why did they want to click it and read it? I think, at its crux, it all comes down to the idea and the idea is challenging a belief that we all probably share. That is heavily embedded within content marketing, and that is the belief that more is better. The more articles you publish, the greater the results you will get from that. That's thoroughly embedded in content marketing, largely as a result of SEO and SEO writing. And this argument fundamentally is designed to argue against that.

He has gone to the extremity of this belief. He has blogged every night, so publishing every day, which is obviously something that most operational publishing processes can't accommodate. And from his experience, it went terribly. So, he's arguing against the status quo, which I think is why people click. But the reason this is then satisfying is that he delivers on that counter-narrative opinion. And you have to think about this kind of Yin and Yang push and pull relationship. The more ensconced the opinion, the status quo you're arguing against, the more evidence you're going to need to convince people that your alternative is correct.

So, how does Rand make us believe? He did it by running an experiment. So, there are probably lots of different types of evidence, and you can think about evidence on a spectrum. Maybe there's rhetoric and persuasion, telling a story can sometimes be enough to persuade people. There is the collection of data, aggregating data that already exists in the world. Or you can go out and make your own data, and you can experiment. And that is exactly what Rand has done here.

And I really like this because this is something that is accessible to everyone. If you were to write a blog post about this, you could probably write a really boring version which is "Five reasons why you should slow down your publishing frequency." And although that's kind of interesting and kind of contrarian, there'd be no substantive meat to that. You could go and do a bunch of industry research and try to aggregate results across all the different blogs with all the different publishing frequencies and see how they correlated, like traffic growth. That would be hard, now on Impossible possibly, and actually not necessary.

All you have to do is publish blogs for yourself. And if you think about the magnitude of this experiment, it's not a big thing. Instead of publishing a couple of posts a week, Rand published every night for a week. So, that's well, five instead of seven here. And that is enough, I think, to be credible and to be interesting. And he has done a good job at really zooming into the actual granular performance data, which again makes us more credible. The less data you have, I think the more you have to focus on it and blow it out and make a big deal out of it to make you feel satisfying. And Rand does a great job of that.

And I think one other thing that's really important here as well with thought leadership, it's very easy to low-key shame the reader. Because what we're doing is we're saying, "Here is a belief you have. It's stupid. Here is a new belief that you should believe instead." And one way of framing that is to say, "Like, 'Oh my God, you're such an idiot. I can't believe you've been doing this stupid thing. You've been publishing all these articles all this time, and actually, you're an idiot because it doesn't work.'" That does not get people on board and on the side of that argument. That is not conducive to them buying into the new idea that we have. One clever way around that is to make yourself the idiot. Is to say, "Oh my God, I can't believe I had this stupid belief. Look at all the stupid things I did. I learned some stuff from that, and hey, maybe you can learn from my success as well." And that's what he did.

So, throughout this, self-deprecation is everywhere. "I want you to look at my Google Analytics traffic graph. It's not pretty. But sometimes we can learn more from failures than from successes. And I really love how he concludes as well, 'Maybe my failure in this post can help you too. Even if you're the only person who reads it, that would be okay. Now, I'd be a bit bummed if only one person read my blog post. But the general tone and ethos here is very much like, 'Humble, self-deprecating. I made a mistake, but you can learn from it.' And this is something I do a lot in my writing as well. Use yourself as the test case for the old way, the stupid way. And that way, people don't feel personally attacked when you dismantle that idea and suggest something new. So yeah, a lot to be learned from this. Find a truism, run an experiment to prove that it doesn't always work the way you think it does, and talk about the experiment in self-deprecating terms. 'I'm such an idiot. Don't worry, you're clever, and you'll learn from my mistakes.' That can be a great way to get people to buy into your ideas."