I’ve been blogging since 2009. I’ve read thousands of blog posts and written hundreds myself.
I’ve experimented with different formats and found a lot of success in my career thanks to the practice of blogging. If it wasn’t for my “blog,” I wouldn’t be living my dream of becoming an author and professional speaker.
This month I’m running an experiment for NaNoBlogMo to blog every day. It made me realize that up to this point I’ve only practiced one form of blogging (The Evergreen Blogger) and I’ve been missing out on the benefits of another form of blogging (The Everyday Blogger).
Here’s the difference:
1. The Evergreen Blogger
Examples: Pat Flynn (Smart Passive Income), Bryan Harris (Videofruit), Brian Dean (Backlinko), Jared Dees (The Religion Teacher)
The Evergreen Blogger attempts to create the single best piece of content about a specific topic. They seek to rank #1 in Google for a specific keyword. They create something they want to go viral with lots of shares and links from other websites.
The Evergreen Blogger spends anywhere between 2 and 12 hours on a single article. They do in-depth research and include lots of screenshots to help the reader use and reference the post again and again. They include highly-optimized images and embed videos to supplement the article. They create customized content upgrades with post-specific downloads for readers.
They do a lot of work after an article is published to promote the post and get links, shares, and search engine rankings.
2. The Everyday Blogger
Examples: Seth Godin, Fred Wilson, Austin Kleon, Alan Jacobs, Yann Girard, Jonas Ellison
The Everyday Blogger isn’t worried about search engine optimization (SEO) or really any kind of optimization. For them, blogging is a practice. They see the act of writing and publishing as an end in itself. They set out to clarify their thinking about various topics by writing about them. What they write today may not be the single best article on a given topic, in fact, it may not even be their best piece of content about a topic.
The Everyday Blogger spends anywhere between a few minutes and an hour on a single article, sometimes more. Their blog is more of personal daily practice than an attempt to convert visitors into buyers. They mostly ignore their website analytics and focus instead on improving their their craft and their thinking.
Their blog posts tend to be text-only. If they have images in their posts, they aren’t highly optimized for Pinterest. Those kinds of activities take away from the time needed to develop the thinking and the writing. Their goal is to sit down, write, and pump out another post every day.
The Best of Both
There are benefits to both forms of blogging and writers have found success doing either one.
Whether you are an Evergreen Blogger or an Everyday Blogger, you could certainly maintain the best part of each approach:
- Improve your writing and thinking with every post.
- Take action and share what you learned.
- Share something useful for a reader not an algorithm (search or social).
- Promote what you post or no one will ever benefit from your hard work.
- Be prolific.
- Be yourself.
