PB043: How to Create Great Content For Your Blog – Q&A, Part 2

Note: you can listen to this episode above or load it up in iTunes. We Answer Your Questions About How to Create Great Blog Content Today's episode is all about answering your questions about how to create great content for your blog. We've had so many questions on this topic that we've had to split the answers into two episodes. This is part 2. You can listen to part 1 here. Don't be shy about asking us questions in the comments below! Your question could be featured next time. Question Mark by Dejan Krsmanovic on 500px In This Episode You can listen to today's episode above or in iTunes or Stitcher (where we'd also LOVE to get your reviews on those platforms if you have a moment). Today we answer these listener questions: What are your 3 best blog posts ever and why did they work? What type of content do you find most resonates with your audience? Is video or the written word more important and why? When you first started taking on paid writers, how did you recruit them? How did you include them in your schedule? What are the pros and cons of outsourcing blog content? Is there an optimal length or word count for a blog? Further Reading and Resources for Creating Great Blog Content 5 First Year Posts that Led to Over 6 Million Views ProBlogger Jobs Board Our 3 most popular blog posts ever: How to Hold a Camera 10 Ways to Take Stunning Portraits (and the follow-up post: 10 More Tips for Stunning Portrait Photography) Long Exposure Photography: 15 Stunning Examples Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there and welcome to episode 43 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and today, I want to continue our question and answer on the topic of content creation that I started a couple of episodes ago in episode 41. I got so many questions on the creation of content, I couldn't possibly fit them into a single episode. If you want to go back and listen to that when I do tackle about seven different questions there. Today, I've got another five for you that all center around content creation. You can find today's show notes at problogger.com/podcast/43 where I'll include some further reading and you can also let us know what you think about today's episode. I'd also love to get your feedback on the podcast in general with a review on iTunes, Stitcher, or whatever other medium that you are listening to this on. Those reviews certainly help us to shape this show but also help us to find new listeners which I do appreciate. Let's get into today's questions.  The first question I want to tackle today is a fun one, it's from Samantha who asks, "Tell us about three of your best posts ever and why they worked." This is actually something I've done before on ProBlogger and I'll give you a link in the show notes to a post I wrote almost on the identical topic. In it, I actually talked about five different posts that I wrote in the first year of Digital Photography School, that led to a combination of over six million visitors to those five posts. I'm going to actually three different posts today because I don't want to replicate that. You can go and check out that post. That does give a whole heap of information, but I want to just talk about three and these all do come from Digital Photography School which is my main blog.  The first one is probably a post that I almost didn't publish at all. I thought it was too basic to really be published. It's on the topic of How to Hold a Digital Camera and I will link to all of these posts in today's show notes. As I said, this is a post that I almost didn't publish because it is just so basic; how to hold a camera. I mean, everyone knows how to hold a camera, don't they? Well, the reality is they don't. The reason that I did write this post and hit publish on it was I could tell that among...