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<\/a><\/p>\nWhat changed for me around\u00a0June or July 2015, was that I discovered Brian Dean\u2019s blog on the Skyscraper Technique<\/a>.<\/p>\n I felt ashamed.<\/p>\n In 2003, I was someone who was pretty good at SEO and content, and had even written a book on it.<\/p>\n Of course, SEO back in 2003 was a very different beast. It was much easier to game Google. Content marketing as a term did not even exist back then.<\/p>\n I bought BlogBrandz.com in 2004, started blogging using the Blogger software, and became pretty good at it.<\/p>\n But it was 2015, and I had to admit to myself that I was not a good blogger.<\/p>\n I had gotten lazy.<\/p>\n My 500 to 700 word posts were just not going to cut it anymore.<\/p>\n No more \u201cfluffy\u201d content.<\/p>\n No more \u201cpost and pray.\u201d<\/p>\n I was done with that.<\/p>\n From now on, I would make an attempt to write well-researched and detailed posts of at least 1500 words, if not more.<\/p>\n I would try to write content that was the best in its category.<\/p>\n I decided that, if I was at all serious about growing my business, I had to stop hiding in the shadows of mediocrity and start giving some love to my own blog.<\/p>\n In this case study, I show how using Brian Dean’s Expanded List Post (ELP) Technique help me grow my blog traffic by over 700% in just a few months.<\/strong><\/p>\n On 17th July 2015, I published the huge list post below \u2013 or, as Brian Dean calls it, an Expanded List Post (ELP) – that ran over 4000 words.<\/p>\n 50 Ways To Increase Social Media Engagement<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n I spent a couple of days working on this post.<\/p>\n However, at this time I was syndicating my blog to an aggregator site called Business2Community<\/a>, which picked up the post the day after it was published on my site.<\/p>\n The result was that my post on Business2Community got a top 3 ranking for the keywords \u201cincrease social media engagement\u201d while my own domain was nowhere to be seen.<\/p>\n Google probably thought it was duplicate content and omitted the post on my domain from the search results pages. Ouch!<\/p>\n Still, my article did\u00a0have\u00a0a top 3 ranking, and the ELP on my site did get about 10 times the number of shares that my other posts had got till now. That was some consolation.<\/p>\n So, I continued working on my blog, aiming to write posts of over 1000 words minimum, but no more ELPs. Sometimes the posts worked, most times they didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n In July, my traffic stats looked like this.<\/p>\n The expanded list post had given me a little bump in traffic, but not much more.<\/p>\n Thanks, largely, to the fact that I was syndicating my RSS feed to another site with more domain authority than mine.<\/p>\n To be fair, content syndication on Business2Community worked great for boosting my reach and branding, especially with a small blog like mine. It helped me get published on Yahoo Small Business (now called Aabaco Small Business)\u00a0and Monster.com and also gets me some referral traffic from their site.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s lousy for SEO.<\/strong><\/p>\n Then in September 2015, I gave a talk at WordCamp Pune, wrote up an ELP of almost 3000 words based on my talk, created an infographic for it, and published it here.<\/p>\n Blog Content Creation And Promotion In 2015 and Beyond [Infographic]<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n A couple of days later, the Moz+BuzzSumo Report on Analyzing 1 Million Articles<\/a> came out.<\/p>\n Inspired, I wrote up another ELP of just over 1600 words and published it.<\/p>\n Journalism Ethics Guidelines To Make You An A-List Blogger<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n These two posts went on to rank among the most popular posts on the blog. But I was still syndicating my content to Business2Community, so the search engine traffic wasn\u2019t exactly rolling in.<\/p>\n In September 2015, my traffic stats looked like this.<\/p>\n This jump constituted a seven-fold (700%) increase in the number of sessions since January 2015.<\/strong><\/p>\n Even though my posts did not go viral or get an insane amount of traffic, the comments, shares and traffic on my blog had increased many times over since I started using the Expanded List Post (ELP) Technique.<\/p>\n In October, my traffic dipped slightly because I did not blog much.<\/p>\n But my pageviews had gone up from 675 in January, to 5,443 in October \u2013 an eight-fold (800%) increase.<\/strong><\/p>\n The number of Pages\/Session had increased from 2.18 to 3.21, and the average session duration went from 00.37 to 2.30.<\/p>\n You can see the increase in traffic from January 2015 till now.<\/p>\n The significant spikes in traffic are a direct result of publishing the Expanded List Posts. Readers were also spending more time on the blog and reading more of the content.<\/p>\n I finally decided to stop syndicating my content, and on 22nd October, I published an ELP of over 6000 words on my blog.<\/p>\n Blog Promotion Tips \u2013 The Always Updated List<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n As it was partly a collaborative effort, with contributions from a number of members at MyBlogU<\/a>, the bloggers who had contributed to the post shared it on social media, and some of them linked to it from their own blogs.<\/p>\n A number of readers also bookmarked it, because it\u2019s an \u2018always updated\u2019 post. I\u2019ve constantly updated it since, and shared about the updates on social media.<\/p>\n Right now, it\u2019s the most popular post on the blog and, thanks to a little Facebook boost, also has over 1.1k likes\/shares.<\/p>\n I must mention here, that I did not use any advanced link building strategies, such as broken link building<\/a>\u00a0to promote any of my Expanded List Posts.<\/p>\n The only influencer outreach I did was to reach out to those bloggers whose articles I had linked to in my blog posts and give them a heads-up about it. Many of them shared the posts with their social media followers.<\/p>\n I have no doubt that, had I spent more time on some advanced link building, the results would have been much better. But here are some of the lessons I learned using Brian Dean\u2019s Expanded List Post Technique<\/strong> to boost my traffic.<\/p>\n A number of studies have shown that long-form content (over 1500) words is what helps to get your content to stand out from the clutter today. I learned for myself that this is true and that it can work very well even for small blogs like mine.<\/p>\n ELPs get a lot of shares and more links than your average post. A well-written and updated ELP can even get people bookmarking your posts. They also got a lot of comments from people who were happy with their usefulness.<\/p>\n The effort you spend in writing your ELP pays off in spades. All those shares and links tell search engines that your content is valuable.<\/p>\n On the 8th of November, my Blog Promotion Tips ELP ranked #3 on Bing for the keyword\u00a0\u201cblog promotion tips<\/em>,\u201d ahead of sites like Problogger.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n1. Long form content does work<\/h3>\n
2. Expanded List Posts are very popular<\/h3>\n
3. ELPs get better search rankings<\/h3>\n