Investing in long-form content is important. Here’s why and how affiliate marketers can do that.

It’s hard for many affiliate marketers to generate long-form content with so many other priorities. It’s a main reason why investing in long-form content is difficult. Short-form content is popular and easier to produce. Outsourcing content is expensive. Freelancers often charge per word, making short-form content more affordable. On the other hand, long-form content can do so much for your site or brand, including:

• Drive website traffic
• Build authority on search engine results and credibility with your audience
• Add value to your website
• Generate more links
• Increase brand awareness

A recent survey showed that 57% of digital marketers felt the best way to link build was with long-form, report style content. Just another reason why investing in long-form content is important to your strategy.

Why does long-form content work?

It’s content-rich

Long form content is copy-rich and easy for Google to crawl and understand. Content like data visualizations and infographics are harder for search engines to understand. The assets used in these types of content pieces include images, data files and JavaScript that search engines have difficulty comprehending like a human would. If the search engine can’t read the content on a page, it might not get indexed and may have difficulty ranking.

There are more keyword opportunities

With long-form content, you can target a variety of keywords and topics. Keywords are still a powerful ranking factor and should be incorporated into a writing process. Long-form content can target multiple keywords related to a topic, expanding your potential for ranking and your audience. For example, the more content you have on a page, the more keyword headings you can have.

You can attract more links

Long-form content tends to draw more links from other websites. When a writer, blogger or journalist is researching for an assignment, they will look for content to reference in their writing. If your content ranks well, it increases the likelihood that writers will link to you in their pieces. You increase your link opportunities by including data points or statistics that can be referenced by other writers. Links are a very important part of SEO. The more high-quality links you get back to your site, the better your chances of ranking highly on search engines.

You can continue to expand on a topic

Long-form content tends to be evergreen, which means you can update the piece and re-release it. Long-form content is easier to update than video content, which may require production resources. Google also prefers fresh content, so an older piece that has its ranking on the SERP can regain it by being updated.

How to create long-form content

As an affiliate marketer, you may have limited content resources. You may be the only content creator for your site. If that is the case, you will need to weigh the benefit of a long-form content piece against your other content creation goals.

You can work a long-form content piece into your content calendar when it makes sense or engage a freelance writer to help you get it done sooner. There are multiple sites you can use to connect with a freelancer in your budget range. Some examples include Scripted, ClearVoice and UpWork.

Once you have the resources you need to write the piece, here’s a process for creating long-form content.

Start by deciding what you want to write about

Answer the questions below to decide what topics make sense to write on.

• What do you have the experience to talk about?
• What topics does your audience care about?
• What do you want your site to be known for?
• Is long-form the best content type for this topic?

Research what’s already been written

What is Google showing on the first page of search results? Will long-form content be able to rank on the results page or is Google prioritizing list sites, review sites, e-commerce sites, videos, etc.? Next, determine if you can produce a piece that’s better than what’s already ranking. Read what’s out there to see if you have unanswered questions. Did the writer leave something out that the audience would find useful?

Engage your resources

Now that you have a topic and understand what it takes to effectively cover that topic, you can get to writing or engage your freelancer.

Summary

Are you investing in long-form content? Long-form content can provide many benefits to your business. It will help you rank for more keywords, driving more targeted traffic to your site and offers. It can also help you gain more brand awareness and authority. It will take more time to generate than blog posts, but the impact is often far greater and typically worth the investment.

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