Blog less for more views?

The @MrBeast interview on the @joerogan Experience podcast is a good one. Mr. Beast's life story is interesting, but there is also a bit of marketing advice that's useful for businesses trying to produce viral content.

Here’s a link to the podcast. It’s on Spotify. You need at least a free account to listen.

Here's an excerpt on YouTube that I think covers some of the stuff discussed here: 3/

Anyway, what's the advice. It's pretty simple:

Make fewer, better videos.

Mr. Beast says he's helped several channels increase their views and earnings but mostly convincing them to make fewer videos, but spend more time on them.

Specifically, Mr. Beast emphasized having a better idea.

How do you do that? Early on, he would spend at least an hour a day thinking of ideas. He would use random word generators to plant a seed and then riff on that.

Why are ideas so important? It's the algorithm.

The YouTube algorithm optimizes for 2 things: clicks and stickiness. It's most important to get folks to click on your video, and then it's important to get them to watch the entire video.

Having a better idea helps to get those clicks. So does good titles and thumbnails.

How do you get people to watch the whole video? That seems to be the secret sauce. It involves pacing the video to keep it interesting while at the same time teasing the info coming later.

Mr. Beast talks about that some more here:

I found this concept of fewer, better videos fascinating because it goes against the advice I learned in the blogging world which used to work so well. That advice was basically post content as often as possible, and that consistency was key.

Posting a lot made sense in the early days of blogs and RSS, when a typical behavior was to visit a specific site daily to see what was new.

But no one does that anymore. The algorithms control what we see. So optimizing for the algorithm is way to go viral. Duh!

I watched a @neilpatel video this weekend too that also suggested blogging less. Less blogs, better ideas, more time to market your posts. It's a quick video, but has some good specific tips to try.

One thing I like about the old "post as often as possible" strategy is that it really forces you to produce and figure out the process and the medium. Good for starting out. But that's not really useful if you hit a plateau and your content doesn't get any better.

So the current trend, which makes sense based on the role algorithms play, is to produce fewer, better videos and blog posts focused on clicks and stickiness.

Mr. Beast posts Thursdays and Saturdays. Neil Patel posts on Tuesdays, which might be better for biz/work stuff.

Originally tweeted by Jason Coleman 🤔💡💻💾 (@jason_coleman) on March 21, 2022.