In your opinion, what is the difference between copywriting and longform writing?
Simplistically, I think of copywriting as writing that’s meant to go on a product, an ad or a billboard – it’s typically short, snappy and action-oriented. Act now!
At first glance, longform writing is differentiated by its length – it’s long in form, so we call it longform. But the interesting thing is what its form implies about its function. Lengthy writing asks for a time investment from readers.
What does good longform writing look like to you?
Good longform writing makes a promise and delivers on it. The sheer volume of text is saying, “listen, I have a lot to tell you”. Good longform writing is compelling. It gets you hooked from the start and keeps you interested all the way through.
My favorite piece of longform writing online is The Information by Adam Gopnik, written for The New Yorker in 2011. It’s over 4,600 words, but every time I revisit it to pick out a quote to share with someone, I end up reading the whole thing all over again. It has several interesting things to say, and it says them all very well.
What percentage of articles out there today (in the tech industry) do you think hit this standard? Why do you think that is the case?
Ooh, that’s a tough one. I wouldn’t estimate more than 20%. Maybe 10% or less. If we got really rigorous about it, it might go down to maybe 1%, maybe even less than that.
The primary reason for this is the sheer volume of content being published all the time, often on short schedules, by relatively inexperienced writers, who are being pressed to produce lots of snackable content that’s optimized for search traffic.
There are more than a few excellent “how to do X” articles that are extremely in-depth, but I’m not entirely sure that they’d fit within the parameters of “good longform content”. It’s more like, “extremely exhaustive instruction manuals”. Which isn’t a bad thing, I think writing a very comprehensive guide or manual is something to be proud of. But I think we should have lofty standards for what “good longform content” means – and I think anything that demands a sizeable time investment shouldn’t just tell you things, but also move you in some way. Not necessarily in an *emotional* way, not every article is going to bring you to tears. But it should change your mind on something, change your position on something, or help you come to a more nuanced understanding of your existing position.
Some of the “exhaustive instruction manual” content does do this, and well. So… yeah, some instruction manuals can qualify as good longform content. 😅
What is an example of (what you think is) your best piece so far? Why did you choose this piece?
If you’re asking “of everything you’ve ever written”, I’d probably go with my Mean Girls essay. I thought introduced an interesting way of making sense of something in pop culture, and gives readers a “way of seeing” that they might not have considered.
If you’re asking about more “marketer-centric” content – looking back at my time at ReferralCandy, I think one of my favorite pieces was Minimum Viable Content. I liked several things about it – I like that it starts by painting an honest picture of what it’s like to work as a content marketer, wrangling with all the constraints and limitations that we have. I like that it talks about common mistakes, because knowing what’s wrong is often the best way to know what’s right. I like that it quoted and referenced quality material from other people, because there’s no point reinventing the wheel when other people have done it better. I like that there’s a specific story of how I tripped up, and I like that there are visuals that help explain what goes wrong.
Looking at it now several years later, I can see how I’d improve it even further. I’d add more details in the steps, for sure. But constraints are constraints, and I did what I could with what I had then. 🤓
From ideation to publishing, what does your editorial process (per article) look like, and how long does it take?
Oh, it varies so much depending on what sort of article we’re talking about. Back when I was at ReferralCandy, we were working on two blogs at once, and I was in a role where I was often managing other writers rather than working on my own content. I have a sort of “general” process that’s really just an extension of how my brain works, and then I have more specialized processes that I put together depending on the constraints of the system that I’m working in. It would vary dramatically depending on the work environment.
At ReferralCandy, where I was in the content team for several years, by the 5th year we already had an extremely exhaustive list of all the possible types of content we could’ve been publishing. So “what should we write next?” was never the bottleneck – it was more about finding and supporting writers who could produce the content we wanted at a price we were happy to pay.
If I really wanted to, right now I could probably focus for 2-3 hours and write a blogpost doing a solid marketing breakdown and analysis of some business –say, Haagen-Dazs (I have an empty cup on my desk, haha). But it wouldn’t have been a good use of my time to write content like that – far better for me to write rough outlines and directives and hand them off to freelance writers to do it for me. So when I *did* write content, it was typically focused on much more “bottom of the funnel” content that’s much more closely tied to our product.
The questions on my mind when “storyboarding” or “wireframing” the content before I get down to writing it is – who’s going to read this? What problem does it help them solve? Why would somebody share this with somebody else? I mention this in the “Minimum Viable Content” artle I linked earlier – every piece of content needs to get a specific reader X from point A to point B. If you define those three things clearly, and it makes sense that it would actually be useful to people, then you can get started. Actual writing can take several hours a day for several days, depending on how complicated the piece is, and how unfamiliar the territory is.
How long did it take for you to polish your editorial process till it reached its current state? What did you learn along the way?
I think the first 2-3 years or so of my career as a content marketer, I was mostly winging it and trying to figure things out as I went, and on hindsight and so on. Now if I were to start a new project, I would have this systematic process of figuring out what to do, what to prioritize and so on.
There are a lot of learnings along the way. For me personally, probably half of the important learnings were “internal” or “procedural” – ie more about how to manage my own time and attention, how to handle my notes and drafts and so on. Outwardly, a lot of the lessons are things that you can read about on all the various content marketing blogs – but you’ll learn it proper from experience.
I think the big one is… you gotta work backwards from the reader. It’s very easy to end having worked really long and hard on a substantial piece of content only to discover that it isn’t of any real use to anybody. So it’s very important to work backwards from “Who is this really for? What contribution does this really make to the world?”
On average, how many articles do you write per month?
At ReferralCandy, this fluctuated a lot depending on my goals for the month or quarter. I wasn’t responsible for “writing new articles” so much as I was responsible for bringing in new traffic and driving signups. So I had a lot of freedom to experiment, sometimes writing just one long piece a month, sometimes writing several short snack-y pieces a week. I think my natural cadence, if I’m not doing a bunch of things all at once, is something like maybe 1 decent article a week. But even that feels like a very sketchy thing to say. Decent for who? In what context? It really depends on what right for what I’m working on.
Are you able to apply the same standards (as you’ve outlined above) to every single piece? Why or why not?
Oh, definitely not. And it isn’t always desirable to. Sometimes your readers aren’t looking for thick chewy longform content to spend half an hour on – sometimes they want something simple and straightforward that gives them what they want.
What is the one thing you’d recommend current writers to focus on to become better at their craft?
Visa
