Long-distance running, slow cooking, and content marketing
Thoughts on patience, content marketing, 2020 Content Marketing Benchmarking Report and Content Management and Strategy Survey 2020
Born to Run written by Christopher Mcdougall is an ode to super athletes, the hidden tribe, and anyone who loves running. Or anyone who has taken the courage to do the first 100 meters.
The international bestseller is an ode to the human spirit. To push yourself one step at a time. That could lead you to your first 10KM, half marathon, full marathon, or even becoming an Ironman or Ironwoman.
For Ironman Ramon Arroyo, it was about running the first 100 meters after he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) in his 30s. He had a successful life, a beautiful family but all of a sudden he turned into vegetables.
With no ray of hope, one day he all of a sudden decided to run the first 100 meters. Obviously, he fails and freezes on the road. Later with his support from his father-in-law (who hated him at the core) and his wife, Ramon completes his first Ironman race: 42 km run, 3,8 km swim, and 180 km bike ride. His family runs the last 100 meters with him.
Today Ramon is a legendary MS athlete. 100 meters is a movie on Netflix that has been inspired by his book - ‘100 meters: Giving up is not an option’. The inspiring movie ends by saying that it is an ode to the spirit of the human race and people like Ramon who push themselves and others. Ramon is still battling with MS but that has not stopped him to participate in endurance races.
Earlier this week after I completed my run I met a young man. A stockbroker who comes to the HMT stadium for boxing training. He wanted to know why I run barefoot and my madness for long runs. We spoke for 10 minutes and I obviously gave him all the gyan.
As he was leaving he asked if I am preparing for any upcoming marathon. I told him not really. “I want to see how far can I push myself. That could be doing a marathon in Ladakh or even doing an ultra marathon at Basecamp of Everest. I don’t know. I am not in a hurry.”
I push myself every day, every kilometer that I run in a week. Being in no hurry doesn’t mean that I am not competitive. I follow a routine and I stick to it. I compete with myself every day. Because every run I start from zero.
One of the important benefits of running barefoot - I am substantially more aware.
Milind Soman has no role to play. The thought has lived with me for a while. The lockdown and the book Born to Run gave me the required push.
In an interesting TED talk, Christopher shares why he started barefoot running and how it solved an age-old health problem.
The older I get, am going back to age-old methods of living. If barefoot running is something I enjoy, slow cooking is another philosophy I relish. Long-distance running is all about preparing a plan, sticking to it, and doing it as any other mundane activity.
Similarly, cooking needs the same amount of practice, patience, and love.
Rosalia Chay Chuc isn’t your typical fine-dining chef, passing out from a French culinary school and dreaming of working in El Bulli. Rosalia is a housewife and a traditional Mayan chef. One of the four chefs to be featured in the Chef’s Table: BBQ.
She is known for her Cochinita Pibil recipe that uses a “pib”(an underground oven). Rosalia makes her Cochinita Pibil using a 1000-year-old recipe. The dish, which is special due to the smokiness it acquires from the way it is cooked underground, takes its name from “cochinita” (this means a baby suckling pig) and “pibil”, a Mayan word for "cooked underground".
Have you tried the Langar food in a Gurudwara? Sitting on the floor and eating langar food is about respecting food. Maah Ki Daal is common daal that will be there all around the year.
Langar or community kitchen was initially started to remove the cast and societal divides. So that everyone can sit together and enjoy the food. In the night cooks would put dal on the tandoor or on the giant cooking pits. So that it will slow cook and all you need to do is give the tadka in the morning. Ranveer Brar one of my favorite chefs shares a simple recipe of Langar wali dal.
I can’t slow cook an entire night on gas. My mother will throw me out of the house. But on Sunday’s I make Dal Makhani/ Dal Bukhara the dhabba style with a lot of patience and butter. The recipe is dead easy but the real ask is how long can you stand and keep stirring it. I have done it for two hours and it was heaven. Slow cooking is all about patience and practice.
Again every time I cook I start from zero, just like my running.
Let me reveal the connection between long-distance running, slow cooking, and content marketing. The common word in all this is “Patience.”
Before that how are we doing?
I believe that the week must be shorter with the holidays. This year I didn’t realise when Durga Puja started and ended. I am not a religious guy and I don’t find a reason anymore. Besides, there are so many people with bigger problems.
I completed “The Queen’s Gambit” and it had everything for a perfect binge-watching series. Even though it is fiction, it narrates so many hidden layers of society. A young girl who knows that she is the best in a man’s world while she is battling her own childhood traumas.
Coming back to content marketing it is also a game of patience.
“If traffic is your #1 priority, focus on organic search. For small blogs, use social, email, and community distribution to seed your organic growth.”
The above insights are from a data study done by Animalz - 2020 Content Marketing Benchmarking Report. The report analyzed 150,000,000 pageviews from September 2019 through to August 2020, for dozens of SaaS companies to produce the benchmarks.
Organic search is how blogs grow
“59.22% of All Blog Traffic Came from Organic Search. Simply put: organic search is how blogs grow. Almost 60% of all traffic to the blogs in our dataset came from organic search. Direct and referral duke it out for a distant second place, with social and email bringing up the rear.”
Earlier this week while pitching my Digital Community idea to a startup I had an interesting discussion with the entrepreneur on how a content agency works.
“With a very basic understanding of digital, I asked since we are getting good organic traffic what are the ways to increase organic traffic. All they suggested was to invest money on Facebook. After a lot of pushing they told me that do 5 posts on Quora, LinkedIn, Facebook, and do guest blogging.”
We are selling the same age-old crap in the name of content marketing. Not for once, the agency enquired about the brand and the business objective. All it was interested in mediums. That’s why I call that majority of agencies have become medium driven agencies.
I understand that an agency will push for paid media options to make money. But how long will you fool your customer? She is smarter than marketer.
Social media no more holds the attention
Animalz says: “Focus on other channels at the expense of organic, and you are always going to struggle to grow.”
The reason is simple. Organic is the only channel that compounds. Effort today will reliably result in more traffic next week, next month, next year, and years after that. Compare that to a social channel like Twitter, where the half-life of a post might be as little as 18 minutes. The ephemerality of social traffic, and even email traffic, means they aren’t sustainable channels for growth.
However smaller blogs get 11% of their traffic only from organic. So other sources play a strong role.
So how can new blogs fight this issue and keep the fire burning?
According to the report: smaller blogs can overcome this hurdle by focusing on movement-first content: sharing original perspectives and experiences to establish credibility with your target audience. This content harnesses non-search distribution channels, like Slack groups and other online communities, to “seed” the early backlinks required to gain traction in search.
The first few years for any content platform is a challenge. Sticking to the why and consistency will be the differentiator. There is no short cut and I would go back to the old school methods of distribution - email, social, and relevant free community channels.
The role of Backlinks and SEO
The report also talks about backlinks and the role it plays in SEO. “The median number of backlinks was one.”
The importance of backlinks is echoed throughout content and SEO. In SparkToro’s survey of 1,584 SEO professionals, “quality of linking sites & pages” was regarded as the second-most important ranking factor, beaten only by “relevance of overall page content.”
Links matter, and yet... articles are lucky to ever receive more than a single link.
Early last year Backlinko studied 912 million blog posts to better understand the world of content marketing. Specifically, the study looked at how factors like content format, word count, and headlines correlate with social media shares and backlinks.
The report found out that the vast majority of online content gets few social shares and backlinks. In fact, 94% of all blog posts have zero external links.
The report highlighted that when it comes to acquiring backlinks, long-form content significantly outperforms short blog posts and articles. Content longer than 3000 words gets an average of 77.2% more referring domain links than content shorter than 1000 words.
To be more precise the content creates value to readers. It ties with the way Google right now thinks about the content. The search giant no more wants a faster web but a better web. However, no one knows the secret sauce of Google algorithms.
Why is it such a challenge to obtain backlinks?
It appears that, due to the sharp rise in content produced, building links from content is harder than ever. Building links through content marketing is more challenging than ever. Only 6% of the content in our sample had at least one external link.
Content is a long game for nonprofit and profit organizations. You can’t excel if you work with a project mindset. One of the common challenges highlighted by the Content Management and Strategy Survey 2020.
43% said the typical approach to creating content in their organization is project-focused (i.e., they create content in response to internal requests). This survey was fielded in January/February 2020 in a pre-COVID world.
If you don’t have patience don’t get into the game of content marketing or building a digital community.
The irony is I am preaching about patience. Truth be told I was always called an impatient person. But one can change?
“Every saint has a past, every sinner has a future,” Oscar Wilde.
Have a good weekend ♥️
PN.