13 reasons to create ‘long form’ content for your business world
Over the calendar year, my writing ebbs and flows.
I focus on other things, or I get distracted. So, around September, I force a kind of "berserk" writing period, and do around thirty days of ~3000 words per day.
I wake up, get myself caffeinated, and hole up in my lair.
The sprint helps get my mind right again.
And also ‘build out’ new parts of the Creator Club world.
Whether that’s a book, a course, or in this case, a new article vault to bring a bunch more value to the Creator Club website.
Anyway, one thing that happens if you do this is it ‘forces’ a shift to long form content. You can’t do this exercise with Tik Tok or Instagram reels, or Pinterest posts. You have to come up with an idea, and write it as an article, or record it as film or audio. Which opens up the age-old debate of long form vs. short form for content marketing for business.
Or long form vs. 'pop-corn' platforms.
And it's an important debate.
And maybe something you’ve thought about yourself with your marketing.
Because as a creator, you now have endless options and access. You can tweet, post, write, record and film yourself silly. So it's important to be clear on where to focus your energy.
Now, in my humble opinion, long form will always dominate short-form popcorn platforms over time.
Even though short form platforms attract much more attention from the masses.
There are many reasons for my contrarian views.
Here are thirteen of them, that are worth considering as you build out your own business world:
REASON 1 - With most short form platforms, you don’t ‘own’ diddly. You don’t own your audience. You are “borrowing” the data from Meta, or Google et cetera. That’s generous of the platform hosts… but, technically means you don’t own your business if that is your only platform (!). That’s right. If you don’t own direct access to your audience or market (the core of your business,) then you don’t own the business.
REASON 2 - Short form platforms are at risk. First is the risk of having your account hacked, or taken down (this happened to my Facebook circa 2020, and I’ve seen it happen to many others for no reason. Yes, it can happen to you). Then there's the risk of ‘pollution.’ Bots, attention seeking false information, bandwagon effect now makes up the core of the content.
REASON 3 - Short form metrics are becoming ‘false’. Now, this is tough to prove, but it’s certainly been my experience - to keep the masses addicted to the platforms, they reward users with false metrics. Try this experiment: put out a few videos - wait for one to go semi viral. Now look at the accounts that engaged. Many will be bots. I’m not big on social media, but the other day I put one video out, in an hour or so it had over 40k views, and hundreds of shares out of the blue. Most were not real people.
REASON 4 - Long form content is the only way to have a body of work. Recently I printed out Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays. Over 300 pages of work, and it’s as if he wrote it yesterday. This is the same for any book, or even long form video or audio. You can publish the audios to a podcast, then you can also store the files in an archive, have them on a USB. You can “hold” your timeless body of work.
REASON 5 - Long form is the fastest way to build your voice. If you focus on one idea for a period of time, or recording a series of videos or podcasts, you can figure out what you want to say. This is very tough on social media. There’s so much information, that your mind is pounded by everyone else's voice.
REASON 6 - Long form helps you to build your world. To steal from literature, J.R.R Tolkien was a master world builder. But a lot of people don’t realise the extent of what he did. Over his career he ‘constructed’ the grammar and vocabulary of at least fifteen languages and dialects. This isn't possible on twitter. Sure world building is possible on popcorn platforms, but it’s hard to get the detail to go deep.
REASON 7 - You can relax and think for yourself. Everyone knows the story of Joe Rogan selling the rights to his podcast to Spotify. The deal was worth around $110M. One of the things about Rogan’s work was that he had these in-depth, relaxed conversations with people. On longer form platforms, you don’t need to chase attention every single moment. You can relax, and let the full character play out. Podcasts are great for this, but so are books or articles.
REASON 8 - Long form content marketing can become short form. What do I mean by this? If you write a book, you can take sections of the book, and bring them over to short form. It may not be what the platforms were designed for, but it can work. Now, the other way can work to develop ideas, but it's totally different.
REASON 9 - Short form is great for documenting the journey. But what is the journey? What is the bigger thing that you are creating? Speaking gigs? Workshops? Events? What is the journey that you want to document? That will probably be something long form. One of the best people I’ve seen at this is Austin Kleon, who is also known as the writer who draws. He writes books, but uses twitter and insta to ‘document’ his work. His audience gets to come along with him for the journey.
REASON 10 - Your long form content can intertwine with your program modules or structure. This is something I do a lot in Creator Club. Example: next month we're doing a topic on delivery and innovation, with a particular focus on communication. We are running a challenge on communication, and today I’m writing this article on long form content. It's all related. This is because my mind is focused on the work that we are doing with business owners, which allows me to create long form content around this.
REASON 11 - You can sell your long form content. I came across someone on Instagram a little while back, and they posted a lot of health advice. But they also with-held some content, and the message was, "Join my Patreon (a pay wall), and you’ll get access to all my posts." But the posts weren’t anything longer, they were just more short form content. Personally I think this is garbage. When we pay to go to a concert, or go out for a meal, or even buy an album, we are paying do go ‘deeper’ with the creator. We naturally expect longer form content. And conversely, if you create longer form content, people will buy it. We have business owners in Creator Club who are bringing in thousands each month selling ebooks and courses.
REASON 12 - You stand out. Have a look around your industry right now. How many people in your market are on Instagram? Now, how many people are creating long form, high-value content over time? The pool gets a lot smaller, quickly. The thing is, most people who start up a business want to get their ‘marketing’ going as fast as possible. They don't have patience. So, they start creating content where they focus most of their own attention - social media. The problem is, this can lend itself to copy and paste content, or ‘safe’ content that isn’t saying much. If you bring in long form content, you can go much, much deeper, and build a body of work that nobody else has in your field.
REASON 13 - You have a talking point. A few years back I put out an eBook on health and training. It was around one hundred pages long, and went into various “pillars” of health - or, my views on health at the time. After I put it out, I had a bunch of people email me. One guy even took me out to breakfast, and brought along a printed version of this eBook, so he could talk through it all. It’s the same with a book. If you put a book together and have it published, you’ve got something to hold. You can do speaking events, or podcast interviews around the book.
Now, before the insta-growth gurus start yelling at me…
None of this is to take away from short form content marketing.
I mentioned Tolkien earlier - he pounded out tens of thousands of pages if you stacked up all his work. The epitome of long form. But he surely would have had a minion helping him run an insta account so he could troll C.S. Lewis.
And in fact, long form can be cut to short form very easily.
Or, short form could be used for a different reason altogether...
And more:
My guess is the social media popcorn platforms will hang around: Mind control is in full swing and the thirst for quick hits of dopamine is at all time highs.
But it's all something to think about anyway.
Both to secure your business, and build your work.