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The Art of Content: Did We Lose the Plot with Blogs? · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  [upbeat music] Hey, it's Alex here. This episode of Content Briefly is brought to you by Gauge. Before I joined Superpath, I was running growth marketing at a B2B SaaS company.
• 0:17
  About a year ago, we started noticing more leads self-reporting that they found us through AI search, but all of our lead traffic from AI search was going to just one of our products. That's when we brought in Gauge.
• 0:28
  Our team had a lot on our plate.
• 0:30
  What I love most is that Gauge helped us identify the top priority actions to take, the third party sites feeding significant citation share, and the page structure tweaks that would make a difference.
• 0:41
  With limited time spent on our end, Gauge helped one of our products move from not showing up at all to the top 15 within a few months. Real MQLs started coming in.
• 0:51
  Full transparency, Gauge was actually one of the first companies I reached out to when I started doing partnerships for Superpath.
• 0:57
  I've already referred half a dozen people to them before this became official because the product just works so well for us. Reality is search is shifting. Fewer clicks, more AI answers.
• 1:06
  If you're not showing up when someone asks ChatGPT what's the best tool for X, you're invisible to a growing chunk of your audience.
• 1:13
  Gauge is offering Superpath members a free AI visibility report, basically a 30-minute assessment of where you currently stand, plus 50% off your first three months. You can book that in the show notes below.
• 1:25
  Thanks so much and enjoy Content Briefly. Today's guest is Rachel Beacha, longtime Superpath Pro member, frequent contributor on Content Briefly, and the founder of a new microblog called The Art of Content.
• 1:38
  The Art of Content brings on content marketers to talk a little bit more about content philosophy, and ever since Rachel launched it about a month ago, I have loved every article that I've seen coming out of it.
• 1:51
  So I brought Rachel on today to talk about her first post for The Art of Content, and also The Art of Content generally and what she's trying to do with this microblog.
• 2:02
  It's a really fun conversation and likely the start of a series where we're going to bring on authors from The Art of Content and talk to them a little bit about their pieces.
• 2:14
  Really excited for this conversation and hope you enjoy. All right. Welcome to Content Briefly, Rachel. Thank you. Super excited to have you.
• 2:22
  Rachel just launched The Art of Content, a collective microblog dedicated to bringing together content marketers to share thoughts on practice and theory.
• 2:31
  Want to start off just with some questions about you, Rachel, before we dive into the discussion. Yeah, definitely. Are you in-house, agency, or freelance? I am freelance. Awesome. What's your favorite part of your job?
• 2:42
  I love getting to work with different clients, so I feel like every day I'm, like, writing about and thinking about something different. That variety is, like, peak to me. Awesome.
• 2:52
  What would you be doing if you weren't in content? [laughs] Ideally, I would be working at, like, a bookstore coffee shop hybrid, but realistically I'd probably be teaching.
• 3:02
  I feel like this is gonna be really interesting to collect over time. Yeah. I feel like we're gonna get a lot of those sorts of answers here. [laughs] We'll see how it goes. I think so. Awesome.
• 3:11
  So you kicked off this microblog, it's about a month ago now. Mm-hmm.
• 3:15
  And your first post, which is the post that we're gonna be covering today, was a short one, and the title here was I Think We Lost the Plot About Blogging.
• 3:25
  Could you share kind of in one sentence what the main thesis is of this post? Yeah.
• 3:30
  My thesis is basically, like, old school blogs where the goal is sharing real ideas, learning, and connecting with people are the best ways to both meet the demands of the internet as a forum and our readers, and more of us should be writing them.
• 3:46
  Cool. Your piece, and I've read it a few times now, it begins with a pretty provocative question of, when's the last time you read something that was longer than 1,500 words online without skimming? Yeah.
• 3:59
  And I will say that stuck with me. I will be the first to admit, you know, obviously we all skim some, but I have had a much harder time lately. I'd say even, like, you know, it's gotten worse over time. Mm-hmm.
• 4:12
  But, like, I think especially in the past couple years I've had a harder time reading long form online, and I'm trying to...
• 4:20
  Like, before I read your post, like, I'd been thinking about this a lot myself, and I think there's kind of, like, two things I was looking at here. Okay.
• 4:27
  One is, like, I do feel like I've somewhat lost trust in the content here, but it's also, like, my own focus as well, and I think especially, like, I think a lot about, like, in the context of looking at my laptop, like, I'm really bad at staying focused there.
• 4:42
  Mm-hmm. And maybe, like, if I'm reading print, it's a very different thing. And so I've wondered a lot about, like, is it the content that's changing? Is it my focus and the way I engage with the content that's changing?
• 4:52
  And so I kinda wanna turn that question over to you. I think you've got a little bit of answer here in the post, but, like, what I'd put out to you is, is it the writing?
• 5:00
  Is it the context of the internet that's changing? Is it our focus, or are we kind of, like, remembering, you know, we're in our kind of AI world and we're like, "Oh, back in the day-" [laughs] "...
• 5:11
  blogs used to be amazing. They were this golden age." Like, maybe we're looking at that with, like, maybe rose-tinted glasses there. Curious, like, how you think about what might be causing that. Yeah.
• 5:21
  I mean, I think you're hitting on a lot of, a lot of it. I think, you know, all of those things are playing a factor. I'm not a huge believer in, like, oh, nobody can focus anymore. We've just all lost our ability.
• 5:34
  We just need TikToks all the time. Like, I think we all kinda know that's not true, 'cause, like, I can... A lot of us, like, we can sit down and read a book for an hour before bed.
• 5:43
  We can go to a movie theater and watch a two-hour, three-hour movie. Like, we can focus, [laughs] right? Yeah. So I don't think that's actually the biggest problem.
• 5:53
  I think, like, what you said about losing trust in kind of long form in general is a huge piece of the puzzle.I, I don't know that there was necessarily, like, a golden age, but I definitely used to read, like, when I was in high school and college, I would read five, 10, like, a dozen blogs daily.
• 6:14
  So that's like, you know, five, 10,000 words of online content every day that was like, oh, no big deal, just reading my blog roll.
• 6:23
  But I think over time, you know, and we can get into this, but for many factors, our expectation of what we could receive from, or what we would receive from that long form content has degraded.
• 6:37
  And so we're also bringing, like, a degraded focus and effort to it because we know that we're not going to get, like, a good payoff for our cognitive effort, basically.
• 6:48
  And I think that has been, like, a self-fulfilling doom loop where, like, the shallower the content gets, the more we skim, and then we're like, "Well, people only skim online," so then we make the content really skimmable, you know?
• 7:03
  And then it just- Mm-hmm.
• 7:04
  But I also think that contributes and is caused by a broader idea of, like, the context of the internet, which you pointed out as well, is that the internet maybe always, but definitely has become a place that is not, like, for critical thinking and, like, creating memory structures and diving into a really deep topic.
• 7:30
  Like, that's what the format of, like, a book is for. And I, I think we kind of thought at one point, like, oh, the internet will become that, but it didn't.
• 7:40
  And so we can bring that energy to a book, but somehow it's really hard to bring that energy to the internet, even if we want to, because intuitively we know, like, that's not what internet content does.
• 7:54
  And so our brains just kind of, like, automatically calibrate for this format or this context that we're in, and it's really hard to override that. Yeah.
• 8:05
  One thing I really appreciate across our conversations is how much you focus on the context of what a piece of writing sits in, and I think- Totally... that's so important.
• 8:13
  I mean, even as I think to, like, my own case for my focus being a problem, it's like when I think about the newsletters that I'm reading- Mm-hmm... online, it's, like, newsletters, they're sitting in my email inbox.
• 8:24
  Mm-hmm. And it's like my email inbox is not a place of focus. It's a place of, like, bouncing around between a lot of stuff. It's complete disarray. Maybe that's just me.
• 8:31
  [laughs] 'Cause even as you were just saying that, I was thinking, like, okay, what are, is long form, like, I can read a long form, like, article on The New York Times, like, online, and actually, like, that's a very different...
• 8:43
  'Cause I go there, and there's some trust built in. Right. And I, like, know what I'm getting into, and if it's, like, a particular journalist, like, I am ready, and I can get in that mindset. And that is online.
• 8:53
  So I think that's really interesting. Even turning our attention more specifically to the blog. Mm-hmm. I think that's an interesting format in itself because we've seen this transition.
• 9:02
  Like, we can talk to maybe an earlier time where people were just, like, sharing their thoughts in blogs. Blogs, obviously, like, we're talking to content marketers here. We know that blogs became- [laughs]...
• 9:13
  a marketing function- Mm-hmm... over the past, you know, 15 to 20 years, and it went from, like, sharing thoughts to, like, companies sharing thoughts.
• 9:20
  And not to, this isn't to discount any of that 'cause I think there was a lot of interesting stuff going. Like, you know- Yeah, yeah... I still remember the days- No, absolutely...
• 9:27
  of, like, reading company blogs where I'm like, this is really interesting philosophical stuff. But, like, over time, it just, like...
• 9:34
  And we can maybe speak to, like, the different stages of this, but, like, the role that SEO played and the role that eventually AI played in, like, eroding that trust in the format.
• 9:45
  I'm curious, like, what you think about the kinda key moments in that time period. Yeah. I mean, so I didn't get into content marketing until, like, 2017, so that was, like, peak skyscraper era.
• 10:00
  But I think, like, you're right to point out, like, I think of early blogging as connection.
• 10:05
  Like, the goal was, like, a person had ideas they really cared about, and the internet was a place where they could find other people who cared about those often very niche ideas.
• 10:15
  And so blogs were kind of the channel where you would put out yourself and your ideas, and other people would find you.
• 10:22
  And then in time, like, companies started doing that, and it started being really monetizable, and we got Google Search and the blue links, and skyscraper technique, I think, was an inflection point where it stopped.
• 10:38
  I write about this a little bit in this piece, that, like, the goal stopped being, or transitioned from being having something interesting to say to, like, get people on my website.
• 10:51
  And for those that don't know, could you explain what skyscraper is? Yeah.
• 10:55
  So skyscraper technique is the idea that, like, if somebody has a blog post that's ranking number one in Google, you are gonna wanna look at that blog post, and then you're just gonna wanna expand it.
• 11:05
  You're gonna wanna grow the skyscraper, right? You add to it. You add some more content. You add some FAQs at the bottom, and then your post outranks theirs. And there was a period of time where that actually worked.
• 11:17
  Like, the technique became popular because it was effective. So there was this idea that, like, that was how you made content that worked from a business angle, and I talk about this a bit, too.
• 11:32
  That created blog posts that got longer and longer and longer and longer, but they didn't have the ideas or the structure to back up that length. Like, there wasn't anything that fulfilled that demand.
• 11:46
  They didn't have tons of ideas. They weren't super amazing. They were just long, and I think that started the process of eroding that trust and connection that we had previously maybe been able to expect from blogs.
• 11:58
  Yeah. There's something you say there. You're like, it got longer and longer, but they didn't become New Yorker essays. [laughs] Right. Because- Yeah...
• 12:04
  I think a lot of times we, like, we look back on this, and we say, like, "Oh, the problem is the length."And it's like, well, almost, not quite, 'cause we will read something long. Like, we'll read very long things.
• 12:19
  Some of the most popular novels and book series right now are, like, these enormous, like, 500-page, eight-volume book series, and everybody's reading them.
• 12:32
  So it's not about the length, but the content has to fulfill the demand that that length asks or else no one's gonna read it. Right. Kind of moving forward to the AI era, like, I'm a- Mm-hmm...
• 12:46
  I'm a pretty big believer that a lot of the foundational issues started a lot earlier on in the kind of like- Yeah...
• 12:52
  when we switched from, like, trying to be like, "I'm going to share my thoughts online and create community," to, like,
• 12:58
  uh, you know, the second we started putting CTAs on there and reporting metrics of, like, how many visitors did I get to, like...
• 13:05
  That was the beginning of it, where you're not optimizing, uh, you know, you can still optimize for the reader, but, like, also the kinda key bottom line- There was this whole, like, gamified side of things. Yeah. Yeah.
• 13:16
  And so, I mean, I think that's, like, that's a big separation that I think I don't ever wanna, like, totally overlook. But then there's this other big moment where AI comes into it. Mm-hmm. And the way I'll...
• 13:27
  So the way I think about it is, and I think AI's played a big role in my own kind of mistrust in the past couple years, is that you can, no matter what I was reading before two years ago, I'm like, "Somebody wrote this, and somebody, like, thought about what they were writing, and, like, maybe they did a good a, a good job with it.
• 13:47
  Maybe they were optimizing for something else. But, like, I know somebody put the thought into the words that were going onto this page." Mm.
• 13:53
  And, like, I don't trust that anymore in most contexts unless it's, like, somebody, like, an author that I really know- Mm-hmm...
• 14:02
  or somebody that's, like, committed to, like, not, like, writing, like, using AI to create copy.
• 14:08
  But I found myself just, like, disengaging more because it's always like, "Did somebody actually put the thought into this?" Mm-hmm.
• 14:13
  "Or did they just throw something into a prompt, and, like, these paragraphs that I'm reading, they haven't even, like, considered what they're saying here," right?
• 14:20
  And so I'm curious what role you think AI plays in that today. Yeah. I mean, that's such a huge question.
• 14:27
  And I think you're spot on in that, like, we used to have this implicit contract that, like, words were written by a person who had something to say.
• 14:38
  And sloppy content has been a problem long before AI came on the scene. You could hire a ghostwriter or you could just, like, slop out a bunch of bad ideas and not really care about how you communicated them.
• 14:51
  That's always been a problem. But I think before, there was this distinction of, like, sloppy content versus good content, so to speak.
• 15:01
  And now that we've brought AI into this process, we've kind of broken the implicit trust that, like, somebody wanted to communicate something and not just use this content as a means to an end.
• 15:17
  And now even when we see something that might, like, look interesting or look good on the surface, there's a piece of us inside that's wondering, like, "Can I trust this social contract?" Mm-hmm.
• 15:30
  Like, it looks like someone wrote it and it seems like someone cared about it, but did someone really care about it or am I being duped? Like, am I just reading a- Yeah...
• 15:38
  fancy ad right now and I'm thinking, like, "Oh, me and this person both care about this," and on the other end is just a robot that's writing this because the person wants to optimize my attention?
• 15:50
  Like, that feels gross, and even if we're not consciously thinking all of that, I think we feel it a little bit, and that- Mm-hmm... makes us pull away because it's like self-protection a little bit. That's like a...
• 16:04
  I don't know. It sounds very, like, psychological, but content is psychological. Marketing is psychological. Yeah. I mean, all of this is about trust building, right, like, at the end of the day. Yeah.
• 16:13
  And that's the most important piece of it and, like, how you, like, get somebody coming back over and over. So I kinda wanna turn this a little bit more meta here in- Mm-hmm... our initial interview.
• 16:24
  But l- let's talk about, like, do you think the blog can make a comeback in, as an art form?
• 16:29
  And just curious, like, to have you talk a little bit more about what you're hoping to do with this new microblog that you've launched. Yeah. I mean, I've obviously launched several microblogs in the past few years.
• 16:40
  This is kind of, like, the one that has caught on the most. So I think yes, we can bring it back. I at least hope so.
• 16:47
  But I think it will require us, like, being okay with some of the, like, drawbacks or downsides of the form, right? Like, a drawback of writing books is they take a freaking long time, you know?
• 17:02
  [laughs] A downside of writing, like, a really honest, thoughtful, authentic microblog is that you can't outsource it to AI, and it's not always going to be profitable, and, you know, it has these other downsides.
• 17:17
  I think culturally, like, we're very obsessed with making all of our hobbies side hustles, and everything in our life has to be profitable.
• 17:26
  Like, we live in a really capitalistic culture, and that can have some benefits and it can also have some drawbacks.
• 17:33
  But yeah, I think we can bring it back, and I hope that I can be, like, you know, somebody who's saying, like, "Hey, this kind of content matters and more of us should do it, and I'm gonna do it, and other people should too."
• 17:46
  And I think sometimes we just need someone to be like, "Hey, I'm doing this," and then other people feel like, "Oh yeah, I wanna do that too." But we need someone else to go first sometimes. Yeah.
• 17:55
  I wanna touch on one particular decision you made. Sure.
• 17:58
  Um, so it's right now in this current moment we're seeing a lot of newsletters, like, that is, like, the medium of choice, and we've even on this podcast talked a lot about, like, if we're starting from scratch for a company, like, would we have a blog or would we have a newsletter?
• 18:12
  And there's- Right. A Substack or yeah. Substack, Beehiiv, using a newsletter platform and just doing that. You chose very specifically- Mm-hmm... to make a blog instead of a newsletter.
• 18:22
  Could you explain just a little bit of that or if there's any...?Yeah, it's such a good question, and I think again, it comes back to some of these, like subconscious contexts.
• 18:33
  And a lot of the choices that we make as writers or readers are not being made consciously, but they're being informed by the medium that we're working with. So like right now, newsletters are so hot.
• 18:46
  They're super trendy. Everybody's got one. It's the latest podcast, and they also come with this expectation of, like, I'm gonna monetize this. Mm-hmm. I'm gonna write at a specific cadence.
• 18:59
  It's gonna show up in your inbox. You're gonna collect hundreds of unread newsletters. I'm competing against all the hundreds of other newsletters you have to try to earn a space on your regular reading rota.
• 19:11
  Like, there's all of these expectations, and I think, like, mostly I think I wanted to step outside of that context and say, like, there's not an expectation this is gonna be monetized.
• 19:24
  There's not an expectation that I'm gonna fight for space in your inbox.
• 19:29
  I think, you know, I really wanted this blog to be a place where people come to, and they feel like they can kind of poke around and find something interesting. And people can subscribe.
• 19:41
  They can sign up and get it delivered to them via email, and many people have, which is awesome, but they don't have to.
• 19:47
  Like, you could just come back a month later and poke around and see what you missed and kind of catch up. Mm-hmm.
• 19:53
  And I think, like, something that has been really interesting to me is we've only been live for a month, but over the past month, our, like, average page views per visitor has been between, like, two and a half, three and a half.
• 20:05
  Which means when people come, they are doing that. They are poking- Mm-hmm... around and seeing what they missed and seeing what there is to catch up on.
• 20:13
  And yeah, it just creates, like, a different cognitive context, and I think that was the space that I wanted and not, like, what a newsletter offers. Nothing wrong with newsletters. Yeah. I have them and love them, too.
• 20:25
  [laughs] What's interesting is I think it's been my own experience reading it. It's nice that when I have something come into my inbox- Mm-hmm...
• 20:34
  and it's like, "Oh, this is a really good one," it goes, it becomes a task. Yes. So like, and it's like, I gotta, like, I'm not gonna clear it out of my inbox- Yeah... until I read it, and then it becomes a, a task.
• 20:43
  And then it's got this, like, negative, a little bit negative energy tied to it that's, like, not the fault of the person that wrote it. No. But it's the context of, like, in order to get to inbox zero- Mm-hmm...
• 20:52
  I have to dedicate time to this. And it's just been so fun to just go in and see what's new. Like- Yeah... I've been one of those people that's gone in, and I usually, like- Totally...
• 21:00
  miss a few of them, go back and, and check 'em out. Yeah. But it doesn't, it doesn't have that same, like, cognitive energy. So very excited to see where it goes.
• 21:08
  Want to close out with just a few rapid fire Q&As for you- Let's do it... about your own kind of content consumption journey. Okay. [laughs] What do you think the ideal blog post length is?
• 21:19
  I think whatever the idea actually justifies. Like, I will read something very long or very short, but don't make it very long if it should have just been a tweet. That wasn't rapid fire.
• 21:30
  [laughs] How many newsletters do you think you subscribe to? Oh my gosh. And how many do you actually read? This is so embarrassing. I probably subscribe to at least, like, 60 to 80 that come to my inbox.
• 21:42
  I probably read, like, five to 10 regularly. The rest, I dip into at least, like, 50%, but there are some that I rarely ever read, but I stay subscribed to. Yeah. [laughs] My emotional support newsletters. Yeah.
• 21:55
  What's the last blog post that earned space in your brain? It was a post called The Case for Gatekeeping, and I saw it on LinkedIn. It was really good. And what are the best blogs on the internet right now? Oh my gosh.
• 22:09
  Uh, so impossible. The ones I read all the time are Austin Kleon's, Brendan Leonard's, Tom Critchlow, who writes super irregularly. A Working Library, I think someone named Mandy Brown.
• 22:20
  There's probably a few others, but those are the ones that I, right off the top, read all the time. Awesome. Okay, and last question.
• 22:27
  What's one skill content marketers should be building right now to prepare for the future? Empathy. I like it. Awesome. Thanks so much for coming on, Rachel. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me.
• 22:41
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