You may be tempted to publish that newest round of answers you've gotten from industry experts, but hold off — there's a better way. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains why expert roundups just aren't the best use of your time and effort, and how to pivot your strategy to create similar content that'll make the juice worth the squeeze.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to look at some better alternatives to the expert roundup-style content that's become extremely popular on the web. There are a few reasons why it's popular. So let's talk about why SEOs and content marketers do so many expert roundups, why this became a popular content format.
Why do SEOs and content marketers even use "expert roundups?"
Okay. It turns out if you've got a piece of content that's like "75 Experts Share Their Favorite Constitutional Law Cases," maybe you interviewed a bunch of constitutional laws scholars and you put together this article, there's a bunch of nice things that you actually do get from this, which is why people use this format, right?
You kind of get automatic outreach, because if you talk to these people, you've had a connection with them. You've built a little bit of a relationship. There's now something of an incentive to share for these folks and the potential for a link. All of those are sort of elements that people are looking for, well, that marketers are looking for from their content.
The nice thing is you've got this long cadre of individuals who have contributed, and they create the content, which means you don't have to, saving you a bunch of time and energy. They become your amplifier so you can kind of sit back and relax when it comes time to broadcast it out there. You just tell them it's ready, and they go and push it. They lend your content credibility. So even if you don't have any credibility with your brand or with your website, they deliver it for you. You don't have to do that.
There are a few big problems with this kind of content.
Those are all really nice things. Don't get me wrong. I understand why. But there are some big, big problems with expert roundup-style content.
1. Like many easy-to-replicate tactics, expert roundups become WAY overdone.
First one, like many of the easy to replicate tactics, expert roundup has got spam to hack. They became way, way overdone. I get emails like this. "Dear Fishkin, I roundup. You write. Do this. Then share. Okay. Bye, Spammy McSpams-A-Lot."
Look, Mr. McSpams-A-Lot, I appreciate how often you think of me. I love that every day there are a couple of offers like this in my inbox. I try to contribute to less than one every two or three weeks and only the ones that look super credible and real interesting. But jeez, can you imagine if you are truly an expert, who can lend credibility and create lots of amplification, you're getting overwhelmed with these kinds of requests, and people are probably getting very tired of reading them, especially in certain market segments where they've become way too overdone.
2. It's hard for searchers to get valuable, useful info via this format — and search engines don't like it, either.
But even if it's the case that you can get all these experts to contribute and it's not overdone in your market space, there are two other big problems. One, the content format is awful, awful for trying to get valuable and useful information. It rarely actually satisfies either searchers or engines.
If you search for constitutional law cases and you see "75 Experts Share Their Favorite Constitutional Law Cases," you might click. But my god, have you gone through those types of content? Have you tried to read a lot of those roundups? They are usually awful, just terrible.
You might get a nugget here or there, but there's a bunch of contributions that are multiple paragraphs long and try to include links back to wherever the expert is trying to get their links going. There's a bunch of them that are short and meaningless. Many of them overlap.
It's annoying. It's bad. It's not well-curated. It's not well-put together. There are exceptions. Sometimes people put real effort into them and they get good, but most of the time these are real bad things, and you rarely see them in the search results.
BuzzSumo did a great analysis of content that gets shares and gets links and gets rankings. Guess what did not fall into it — expert roundups.
3. Roundups don't earn as many links, and the traffic spike from tweets is temporary.
Number three. That's number three. The links that the creators want from these roundups, that they're hoping they're going to get, it doesn't end up there most of the time. What usually happens is you get a short traffic spike, some additional engagement, some additional activity on mostly Twitter, sometimes a little bit Facebook or LinkedIn, but it's almost all social activity, and it's a very brief spike.
5 formats to try instead
So what are some better alternatives? What are some things we can do? Well, I've got five for you.
1. Surveys
First off, if you're going to be creating content that is around a roundup, why not do almost exactly the same process, but rather than asking a single question or a set of questions that people are replying to, ask them to fill out a short survey with a few data points, because then you can create awesome graphs and visuals, which have much stronger link earning potential. It's the same outreach effort, but for much more compelling content that often does a better job of ranking, is often more newsworthy and link worthy. I really, really like surveys, and I think that they can work tremendously well if you can put them together right.
2. Aggregations of public data
Second, let's say you go, "Oh, Rand, that would be great, but I want to survey people about this thing, and they won't give me the information that I'm looking for." Never fear. You can aggregate public data.
So a lot of these pieces of information that may be interesting to your audience, that you could use to create cool visuals, the graphs and charts and all that kind of thing and trend lines, are actually available on the web. All you need to do is cite those sources, pull in that data, build it yourself, and then you can outreach to the people who are behind these companies or these organizations or these individuals, and then say, "Hey, I made this based on public data. Can you correct any errors?" Now you've got the outreach, which can lead to the incentive to share and to build a link. Very cool.
3. Experiments and case studies
So this is taking a much smaller group, saying, "I'm only going to work with this one person or these couple of people, or I'm going to do it myself. Here's what Seattle's most influential law firm found when they challenged 10 state laws." Well, there you go. Now I've got an interesting, wholly formed case study. I only had to work with one expert, but chances are good that lots and lots of people will be interested in this. It's also excellent for newsworthiness. It often can get lots of press coverage in whatever industry you're in.
4. Seeking out controversial counter-opinions on a topic
Fourth, if you're going to do a roundup-style thing and you're going to collect multiple opinions, if you can find a few points or a single subject around which multiple experts have different opinions, that could be just two people, it could be four or five, it could be seven or eight, but you're basically trying to create this controversy.
You're saying like, "Here are these people on this side of this issue. Here are these people on this side of this issue, Wil Reynolds versus Rand Fishkin on link building." I think we did a presentation like that in Minneapolis last year or a couple years ago. It was super fun. Wil and I got up on stage, and we sort of debated with each other. There were no losers in that debate. It was great.
This leverages the emotional response you're seeking of conflict. It creates more engaging content by far, and there's more incentive for the parties who participate to link and share, because they're sort of showing off their opinion and trying to make counterpoints. You can get a lot of good things.
5. Not just text!
Number five. If you've decided, "You know what? None of these formats or any others work. I really, really want to do a roundup. I think it can work for me," okay. But do me a favor and try something that is not just text, not just text.
Muzli is a newsletter I subscribe to in the design world that does lots of roundup-style content, but the roundups are all visuals. They're visuals. They're like UI interactions and GIFs and animations and illustrations. I actually really love those. Those get great engagement, and they rank, by the way. They rank quite well. Many of the ones that they link to in the newsletter do well.
You can do this with visuals. You can do it with data. You could do it with revenue numbers. You could do it with tools. You could do it with products, whatever it is.
I would suggest thinking a little more broadly than, "Dear Fishkin, I roundup. You write." I think that there's a lot more opportunity outside of the pure expert roundup space, and I hope you'll share your creative ideas with us and the successes you've seen.
We look forward to seeing you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
I cannot but making the hola when watching this video.
I think that roundup posts are good only if they have this as strategic purpose: boost the site visibility very fast.
Few things must be then present in the strategy:
1) on a tactical level, the roundup should be playing on the quality of what experts share and not on its number;
2) instead of presenting a simple list of opinions, they should be aggregated and presented in a finely curated way, which means presenting them inside bigger and personal thesis about something, so that you can present some opinions as validating your own thoughts, some contradicting them and some other offering a different point of view;
3) a roundup should not be followed by another roundup, but by other kind of posts. The purpose of the roundup is earning visibility. Thanks to that visibility (and when it is still fresh the memory of your post), you should present a totally different kind of article, more about your own discoveries, experiments et all, and that you care more about and you want people to read if you had to choose.
Another kind of content that I particularly like are in-depth interviews, like the ones that Woji Kwasi does and publish (here, for instance, the one he did to you, Rand, or the one he did to Wil Reynolds)
To conclude, Rand... the "face to face" idea reminds me that I have one I'd like to do since... 2011? A Rand vs Aaron Wall about SEOs and Google :-
Oh, thanks for the idea of the follow up post!
Thanks for checking out Whiteboard Friday this week all! Some questions for discussion to kickstart thing:
BTW - I have contributed to roundups, and plan to keep doing a small number when I have some confidence the creator's doing good work... But I think, like Andrew Chen's "law of shitty clickthrough rates," the tactic is going to be less and less effective over time.
Over the years I have used two very good alternatives which were similar to the expert-roundup post without the fuss and issues.
One way to harness people's expertise is to simply quote them. Real experts publish a lot and you just need to look up what they've written on your topic and then quote them. It's a win/win for all parties involved. It's less work and more value.
The second way is to crowdsource a post on social media. You need an audience of like-minded individuals who also deal with your topic to do that but once you have it you don't annoy anyone but people volunteer to contribute in a way. Sadly most "outreach experts" do not care for true relationships and rather send 300 messages to 300 experts at once.
I think it's a great idea to quote them - do you think it's better to then follow up with an email or social mention so that they can add more substance later?
Yeah, social mentions once it goes live are a must. Otherwise you get overlooked. Email can be difficult and ineffective here.
So, how many emails asking you to participate in a survey do you think you're going to receive over the next week? :D
One for sure by my side ;P Otherwise, I'll share this post with him in the email ;)
Haha, yeah, Rand set himself up. Although surveys are pretty fast to fill out, might not be so time consuming.
I'm not a big fan of boring roundup posts where they just list some info and nothing else that meets my eye either Rand...I also think that useful surveys where you ask people to share their tips or experience are far better, but regardless of that, there are a few regular roundups that I do enjoy.
Gini from SpinSucks has this weekly roundup named 'Gin and Topics' (which I consider to be super cool title considering her name) where she shares no more than 5 resources which made her laugh, cry or moved her in any other way. Every resource is followed by video and its screenshot - which I really like! Just like you said Rand, visuals are important to grab readers attention! ;)
Scott Monty also publishes neat roundups called "The Full Monty" which are quite extensive and much more textual, but I don't find them difficult to digest.
However, I think that in my case both of the examples I gave here, work for me because I know the people - I follow their content on a regular basis, so I don't find it hard to put a little bit of extra scrolling effort :)
That's very interesting, having a reoccurring roundup. I will have to steal this idea
I agree, I have found round-ups too difficult to read through. There's either a big disconnect in the flow of each expert's opinion or it's too difficult to gather the insight you want from that short quote.
I think someone should actually do a round-up of all round-ups ;) Essentially try to summarize and extract insights from the many round-ups floating around in the web.
I also find them very diffficult to read, mainly because it's just all text. I just scan for a few well known people, but then I close the post.
Dear Randy,
I like you very much and admire your work a lot but in this case I must disagree with you. I know that there a lot of poorly done expert roundups lately, but that's because of the authors that make them. The problem is that many roundup creators don't care about the quality of the answers. They only want as many bloggers as possible to get more shares. Bad way of thinking.
I'm freelance writer specialised in creating expert roundups and I can tell you it takes a lot of time and work to do a good roundup. Expert roundups are a very good strategy of creating great content and building relationships if executed correctly.
Coming up with the right question has a major impact on the post. To avoid getting the same answers again and again you need to choose an interesting question that doesn't have only one correct answer.
People complain that the experts from roundups aren't really experts, that they are only average bloggers not influencers or experienced bloggers. The surprising thing is that some of the biggest experts write poor answers. Not because they don't know better, because they don't have enough time. The top experts are so crazy busy that even if they accept to contribute to a roundup, they will send only a couple lines. A medium size blogger can feel very honored to be featured as an expert and that's why he or she can provide a more valuable in-depth answer than the influencer.
Sometimes, you need to be able to reject a bad answer even if it comes from top influencer. I asked James Altucher to re-write an answer he sent me because it was way too short and it didn't deserve a backlink. So he wrote an awesome answer and I put it in the first spot of the post. Other time, I had to remove Mark Schaefer from a roundup. I had to tell him that his answer was contradicting the idea of the roundup (the post was about getting traffic from G+ and his answer basically was saying that G+ is useless).
The outreach may seem spammy in the beginning but that is only a way of breaking the ice. I always follow up with the experts from my posts, become friends on social media and build authentic relationships with them.
By the way, editing and formating the post to look nice, and be easy to read, also takes a lot of time. So, dear Randy, you can't say expert roundups are a bad content strategy just because some bloggers do stupid roundups. It's like I would say that SEO is a cheating technique just because some SEOs use black hat strategy. Not true. ;)
To answer your question from the comment, these are two of my expert roundups that I'm pretty proud.
38 Blogging Experts Share How To Increase Engagement And Social Shares
38 Web Design Experts Share Their Best Tip on How to Choose the Best Web Builder
Hello Champ,
Something very interesting that should have been required to share, great work rand.
The best way (according to me) is - If your company facing technical issues or you are stuck anywhere, then ask to an expert and get the answer (rather than shooting so many questions together). And once the problem is solved, make a case study and share with public "Rand's answer help me to get my keyword in top 10". So, this might boost the traffic and most importantly, it does make sense.
PS: Rand, I am tired from sending you email's just to get the answers of my questions for an interview but you haven't answered yet lol ;P . But yeah I was still happy because you replied to me in a good way :) ..Anyways, I'll try any of above you suggested and get back to you.
Thanks !
This sounds a little risky, maybe it make the person/company look a little to ignorant?
Great WBF explaining the disadvantages of an expert roundup and better alternatives. I would suggest that a better way would be to take the experts opinion and add it within the post. Suppose you are writing on an SEO audit then you can ask experts opinion on various facets of the SEO audit and then integrate their opinion within the post. In case you wish you can even add short bios of the experts at the end of the post.
The SEMpost had one such post "Google’s Mobile First Indexing Change: Everything SEOs Need to Know" by Jennifer Slegg in which several people including myself had asked Gary Illyes of Google questions on Twitter about different aspects of mobile indexing and all the questions and Gary's answers were included in the relevant parts of the (rather detailed) post
Here in Spain there is a group of digital marketing professionals who make this tactic very often. And they are triumphing in the organic positioning of all these blog.
I do not like that tactic very much, because in addition there is much falsehood in that type of publications. They take for granted that those who collaborate with them are the best professionals of that subject.
Thanks again for your insightful and well thought-out Whiteboard Friday, Rand.
Now when looking through my social feed, using Feedly or Paper.li I don't even bother clicking on '75+ tools for...' or '51 ways to...' because 1) I don't have the time to trawl through 2) I know the content is shoddy and 3) the UX is never great and so I save the site the trouble of having an immediate bounce and avoid clicking on the content.
There are also some very creative ideas in the comments here - useful thinking that will certainly help me with my content production moving forward.
In my opinion one of the biggest problems with 'expert roundups' nowadays is that they include gurus or self proclamed experts that are not really masters or an authority in the area.
Not just blogs and the online world, but many real world entrepreneurial/ business/ marketing/ seo/ finance (include any sector here) events, so popular these days.
Hey Rand, great and timely post!
I can definitely vouch for your recommendation to see what's publicly available first. I think it saves the experts time, shows them you're not a spammer (spammers wouldn't spend that amount of time on research) and hopefully it's something they like because it's personalized to them.
I recently created an SEO personality quiz where people could see which industry expert they were most like and I found all of the information off of Twitter, bio pages, interviews, podcasts and anything else I could get my hands on. I was able to learn things like you never have owned a car (although that could be outdated) and Mike King being obsessed with Corn Pops. I think it also helps in your outreach because you end up learning more about the experts than you would have if you had just contacted them for a roundup.
We like to feature just one expert in our "roundups." We have a monthly feature called "Ask the Pit Crew," where members from our team answer a specific, common industry questions . We ask just one industry expert to join us. The result is more in-depth answers from both our in-house and outside experts and a post that is not an overwhelming list of names.
Great suggestions Rand.
However, I have seen guys getting success with Expert Round-ups, I am not a big fan of this strategy. The reason been it can backfire if your experts' views contradict each other, audience will get confused.
But recently I came through a website which creates small how-to-guides for their audience and it's huge hit in their niche.
Basically, it's a website trying to help students in mathematics by solving their problems online. For this, they publish small videos (along with its video transcription - just like Whiteboard Friday) showing how to solve complex algorithms, formulas and problems with ease.
I believe it's a great way of helping and engaging with audience.
Thanks
I haven't done an expert round since December 2015. As Rand said, it got a spike in social shares but now that post is dead in the water a year on with next to 0 traffic.
So what I did was survey our email subscribers, then put into a survey report on bad customer service (https://www.kayako.com/blog/bad-customer-service).
Rather than experts sharing what their opinion was on the topic. I sourced the data, then went to the experts and asked what they thought about it. They loved it, shared and have linked backed to the study on their sites. It's now slowly building links.
I loved your concept of Whiteboard. Its really engaging. And I agree expert roundups are not reaching their potential. It is a best way to learn everything from a expert in just few lines. but again, it creates confusion and it takes time to build trust and put the advices into action. Thanks for the amazing post!
Interesting! I never tried the expert roundup, know I why!
Thanks for writing about this, Rand. I haven't seen one in awhile, but they used to be everywhere! And if I'm remembering correctly, I've found exactly zero of them useful. I remember one in particular, which was a list of 100 "experts" sharing their top three favorite Wordpress plugins. First of all, 100 people sharing their opinion on anything makes for a ridiculously long post. Second, even though I read blogs in the content marketing and blogging niches often, I had only heard of about ten of these so-called experts. And third, when I got to the end of the post, I couldn't help but think, "So what? What can I do with this information?" The author made no attempt to summarize the data.
I've kinda stayed off any type of roundup post for the reasons mentioned, but I never really thought about replacing them with something slightly altered.
What I've seen a lot of lately is full posts, 10x style content, followed up by a few industry leaders at the end after clearly having read the article.
Expert Rounds up strategy works great and even better than other tactics in content marketing.
I agree, these can be effective if they are also Hyper-Local focused and not so very broad. If they represent a community topic / issues it could get allot of traction. The video roundup is one that I have not seen much of.
I could not agree more Rand: "Expert Roundup" is an awful content format that is not human-friendly at all.
As you said, there are plenty of better alternatives.
I personally think that a lot of people are just trying desperately to pump out any sort of content they can to keep up with their required output levels. It may not necessarily be the most effective type of content or the most interesting bit of stuff, but as long as you've pushed something out there, at least you've done something to quell your hoards of viewers and readers for the time being. At least until the next time...
Great WBF, as usual! I think when asking the experts for their opinions and contributions - it is best to make the request highly personlized. Start with a compliment that resonates with the request.
Hey Rand,
Phenomenal and very timely post indeed. We're seeing so much saturation with this grossly overdone content, and I'm really happy that you called out the elephant in the room while offering some great alternatives.
By the way... "Spammy McSpamsalot" = hilarious.
So here's another interesting alternative that folks can implement as well. Instead of "Expert Roundups" try asking your customers or audience about what they think about a given topic. We did this at Sales Hacker, and turns out that people within our community love getting involved, perhaps more-so than influencers who are getting hammered with requests for this stuff every day.
I recently published the results of UX Survey I did at Sales Hacker with lots of data visualization and transparency behind my process, which yielded lots of engagement and traffic, as well as some links and social shares.
You guys can check it out here if you're interested -> https://www.saleshacker.com/ux-research-case-study...
Would love some feedback from whoever reads it!
Not the most mic friendly garment you have ever worn Rand
That being said, I really appreciate trying to elevate the game on round ups. They work, but exactly as you said, they are just so spammed out. I think the solution is to weave in expert opinions well but actually do some serious content creation. A great example of that is ConversionXL, I always notice they use a ton of expert opinion and quotes in their articles but weave into into valuable and actionable content. They are not just using it so they don't need to do work.
Hi Rand,
You mentioned a BuzzSumo analysis on content. I'm going to have a look for it online, but wondering if you have the link to hand and if you would mind sharing it?
Actually, just found something which looks like what you were speaking about, is it the below link?
https://buzzsumo.com/blog/magical-content-gets-links-shares-new-research-buzzsumo-majestic/
Hey Hipster Viking, thanks for sharing.
Thanks a lot for the information. I am a noob on this term
Hey @Rand, I have seen you at Mention's Youtube Chanel where you along with multiple people do shares own opinion for particular subject. So we can say it "Video format Round up". It's great videos and provides valuable information.
This may be another format of Round up that people can easily consume.
I think the main problem with roundups is that they are often a list of people talking about a topic in a general manner, without giving specific information. Users and search engines don't like them, because they don't do an efficient job of answering user queries.
My best alternative: take information you get from experts, but only use what is valuable to your readers in the content. Surveys, like Rand was saying, and quotes are great ways to get that information.
that's why outreach is dying because some are just abusing it and doing things incorrectly which results to spam emails.
For expert round-ups podcasting is really a good way to start since it happens naturally with value preposition for end users.
Hey Rand,
I really like the idea of doing survey's as opposed to "Expert Roundups". Like you said the ability to create graphs and charts would allow for a much more interesting and engaging read (it would probably get more shares on social too).
I know there are several tools available to help put together survey's but do you have any recommendations?
Quizzes seem to be really hot on social media right now and people seem to love doing them. Creating Quizzes and asking people to participate may also be a more useful tactic than "Expert Roundups" and you can also put together interesting data sheets, any thoughts on the usefulness of Quizzes?
Thanks,
Mike
Rand, I signed-up just to say - love the video. So much so, I made you a meme (please don't hate me) :-> https://twitter.com/EdLeake/status/840512356128047...
I get these expert requests every day, most look the same and for topics that really aren't my expertise at all.
Our simple tactic isn't mentioned in your video, so wanted to put it out there:
That's it.
These experts can be tools, software, companies and people.
A real example is our 'PPC spy tool' round-up that goes live soon, we reached out to all involved for their top-tip and input. It added another slant to the post, along with actionable advice.
Oh and the important bit, positive responses from most of the people we approached.
Hey but i feel the expert roundup type content still works out well for some people. I recieve such emails quite often(on different corporate domains) some of them looks wannabe while others really drive me in believing there words.
I once tried to shoot such email but then many people bullied voer the email and then i had to stop, seems like its beeen overused and not gonna work anymore for me atleast.
Thank you Rand. I totally agree that while Expert Roundup aren't working on the long run, there are ways on how to get this done that will at least earn a good amount of shares and visibility online which are what you have stated here.