Forward-thinking Marketing is equal parts engaging, empowering, and satisfying customers. As Businesses contemplate a clear path of strategy across these frontiers, elevating blogging efforts is indispensable.
Is a Blog Even Required in 2022?
A blog is an essential node in your content and SEO engine.
Over time, the purpose, and dynamism of blogging have changed, but there is no denying that a blog is central to connecting with an audience.
Here is how the Blogging Landscape is stacked currently:
Per OrbitMedia ⟶
There are 600+ million blogs in the Digital Space.
77% of bloggers report that blogging drives results.
Bloggers spent 67% more time per post in 2021 than in 2014.
Per SemRush ⟶
Users produce around 70 million new posts and 77 million new comments each month.
75% of people prefer reading articles under 1,000 words.
Blogs that earn over $50,000 per year say their most popular posts are 2,424 words long. That’s an entire 83% longer than those of low-income bloggers!
46% of people take recommendations from bloggers/vloggers into account.
Unlike traditional celebrities, vloggers feel more relatable, accessible, and authentic to users.
More than one-third of high-earning bloggers (those who make over $50,000 annually) say the demand for high-quality content is higher than ever.
Bloggers who utilize blogging for marketing purposes see 13 times the ROI of businesses that don’t.
On average, companies who blog produce 67% more leads per month.
Per Backlinko ⟶
The Mean Word Count of a Google First Page Result Is 1,447 Words
Benchmarking the Frequency of Postings
While it is easier to establish the importance of blogging in 2022, how can one strengthen their blogging efforts? Enter, the Wikipedia Effect.
What is The Wikipedia Effect?
Wikipedia is your friendly neighborhood online encyclopedia. It is an open, public project that allows easy access to information. Wikipedia is not only deeply insightful about the search query but also has links to essential as well as peripheral topics that may be of importance to the reader.
Favorite Wikipedia UI trick: When hovering over certain links, a quick popup shows the definition of the word or phrase, ensuring no disruption in the User Experience and allowing the learner to grasp the topic thoroughly.
But these links are not just web-shooters that will sling you all over the internet but are several other Wikipedia Pages. That is the Wikipedia Effect in action.
Urban Dictionary summarizes ‘The Wikipedia Effect’ as:
The Wikipedia Effect is the tendency for inquisitive people to become caught in an endless series of pages on the popular open-encyclopedia, “Wikipedia”, to which they are forced to read every single page they’ve opened.
For the curious cats, interlinking of these pages is a great trove of knowledge, and many individuals end up getting lost across the sheer vastness of the information – just as many individuals on Instagram and TikTok end up spending many hours mindlessly scrolling.
What is Zombie Scrolling?
With the rising popularity of TikTok and Instagram Reels, many individuals end up spending several hours each day on these platforms. But why exactly is that?
The Algorithm is designed in such a way that individuals end up going down a bottomless pit of content. That is called Zombie Scrolling. The term was coined by McAfee Security in 2016 and is defined as
Mindless scrolling out of habit, with no real destination or benefit.
There could be many reasons why individuals zombie scroll, but the bottom line is- Zombie Scrolling activates the reward system of our brain.
Our brains are primed to respond to social media because it’s a type of variable reward system, explains Don Grant, Ph.D., Newport’s Director of Outpatient Services in Santa Monica. Like mice in a lab, constantly pulling a lever in hopes of receiving a treat that appears unpredictably, we keep scrolling in search of an online experience that will trigger a pleasurable release of dopamine.
The ick most certainly fills a void instantly but creates a vortex that gets difficult to portal out of.
Unlike Zombie Scrolling, However
Zombie Scrolling and its big bad brother Doom Scrolling have a bad rep, but The Wikipedia Effect may be the beloved of the family.
The Wikipedia Effect helps bring relevant information under the Owned Media umbrella, thus reducing Outbound Links. Furthermore, The Wikipedia Effect gets individuals to spend more time on site. So, if metrics like ‘Avg time on Page’, ‘Avg Session Duration’, ‘Pages/Session’ are of importance to you, The Wikipedia Effect can be a powerful tool in your arsenal.
