7 Reasons You Should Create Long-Form Content (that are more motivating than ROI)

The idea of creating long-form content, and everything it takes to do so, can be super daunting.

Whether you’re writing long-form blog posts, recording a podcast, or filming a YouTube channel, it’s a lot of effort and time and energy to do it.

And the fact that the payoff from that type of content is often long-game, or even just impossible to actually track, makes it even harder to prioritize it.

So it’s easy for creating long-form content to get pushed to the bottom of your to do list over and over again, in favor of things that bring a faster payoff or don’t require as much effort.

But here’s the thing:

The long-term and harder-to-quantify payoffs are exactly why you should prioritize creating long-form content.

So let’s get into what you and your business stand to gain from creating long-form content (specifically, 7 reasons).

What do I mean by “long-form content”?

Before we get into the reasons you should create it, let’s clarify exactly what I mean when I say “long-form content”.

Long-form content is high-value, evergreen content that goes in-depth on core concepts and ideas surrounding your niche/expertise.

I also sometimes call this your Leadership Content, because it's the part of your content marketing ecosystem where you put your stake in the ground and show up fully as a leader.

This could show up in your business as:

• A blog
• A podcast
• A YouTube channel
• Regularly going live on Instagram and saving the replays in your IGTV (yes, this can totally be leadership content!)

The long-game benefit of long-form content

One of the biggest benefits of long-form content is that it’s ROI is long-term. 

This means that you may not see the payoff from your blog post or podcast episode as fast as you would an Instagram post. But on the flip side, a single blog post can keep working for you for months or even years after you’ve initially published it. Meanwhile, the lifespan of an Instagram post is only a couple days on average, or a few weeks, if you get a second wave of engagement on a Reel or something.

So that’s an important thing to understand.

But payoff that won’t come for another year or so is not a particularly compelling reason if you’re someone like me, who has ADHD and is a Rebel in Gretchen Rubin’s Four Tendencies (one of my favorite personal growth books!)

I tend to be motivated by either more emotional motivations (like things that play into my values or my big picture dreams), or more urgent motivations (oh hi, my reason for procrastination).

So here’s a list of 7 more-compelling-than-ROI reasons you should create long-form content:

1. Your ideas are life-changing, and an IG caption doesn’t do them justice

Creating long-form content gives you a chance to really go deep on your life-changing ideas.

This means you can have a real transformative effect on someone. Small transformative, but transformative nonetheless. And this is key in using your content to get an ideal client through the plot arc of your content, and to the point where they’re ready to commit to working with you.

It also means you can really get into the nuance of things. 

Often, when we’re limited to just a caption on Instagram, it’s easy for the nuances of our ideas to get lost or glossed over. This can lead to accidentally seeming like you’re not acknowledging different lived experiences, or like there’s only hard lines on something (yes/no, black/white, success/failure). 

And I know that you’re with me in the idea that nuance is where the magic is in so many things. We definitely don’t want to lose the nuance of your brilliant, radical, life-changing ideas.

2. Long-form content creates a more meaningful point of contact with your ideal client on their journey towards potentially working with you

It takes multiple points of contact before a person is ready to purchase something.

If your offers are particularly high investments, or more emotionally involved like coaching, it might take a lot more contact (and more meaningful contact) with you and your ideas for your ideal client to be ready to commit. 

A few IG posts probably won’t cut it for a lot of people. 

Long-form content gives you the chance to make your contact with them really meaningful, as opposed to surface level. 

This creates the opportunity for you to potentially shorten the time needed for them to be ready to commit to working with you. Where it might have taken a year of Instagram posts before, with long-form content, it might only take a few months.

Or at the very least, it deepens your relationship with them. And then, when you’re launching, they feel emotionally invested in you already, and are more likely to invest in working with you.

3. It’s a way for you to help more people, without undercharging for your work

I have to credit my client Erika Tebbens with articulating this idea in a way I hadn’t put together before. 

If you’re here with me, I know that you’re someone who wants to help people and have a positive impact on the world, and so it’s possible that you’ve struggled with or worried that pricing your offers higher (so that you can actually pay yourself, maybe?) would make you financially inaccessible to some people who need what you do. 

Creating long-form, high-value content is a way for you to be able to help more people in your audience, for free.

That way, even if someone isn’t able to afford to work with you right now, they can still get some transformation or success from your free long-form content, and you can price your offers appropriately without feeling guilty.

4. You’ll build a reputation as a leader, laying the foundations for bigger dreams

If you have big dreams for your brand, like speaking on stage, or writing a book, creating a library of meaningful, high-value long-form content lays the foundation for that dream. 

It helps you and your brand to be perceived as a leader (and dare I say – thought leader?), someone with big, deep ideas, worthy of a spot on their stage or bookshelf.

5. The more long-form content you create, you basically build a Netflix of yourself

You want to be bingeable, because when people first learn about you, you want them to be able to get deep in the weeds with you if they want to.

Like when you discover a new show on Netflix, the blurb catches your interest, you watch the first episode, and then suddenly it’s 3am and you’re halfway through the first season.

I can’t even count how many times I’ve discovered someone on Instagram or as a guest on someone’s podcast, loved them so much, and then gone to their website to get to know them even more, and there's… nothing.

No blog. No podcast. No video channel.

No way for me to get to know their ideas and approach and messaging, other than to go back to their Instagram profile and scroll through the chronological mess of their posts to see if anything catches my interest.

When what I really wanted was to get sucked into their brand, Netflix-style, and become a raving fan.

6. It becomes a library of resources so you can stop repeating yourself

When you’ve been creating long-form content for a while, you’ve also built a library of resources that you can link to again and again. 

No more repeating yourself a million times when people ask the same questions or you reference concepts you talk about a lot.

If someone asks you a common question, you can link them to the piece of long-form content that answers that question, instead of re-hashing it over and over again in emails.

Or when you reference a core concept from your unique approach or framework in conversation or a different piece of content, you won’t have to re-explain the nuance of the whole concept again and again. You can just do a quick one or two line explanation of what’s relevant, and link to the long-form content that explains the concept in depth if people want to learn more about it.

(I did exactly that in this post, when I explained what I meant by long-form content, and linked to my blog post about my content marketing ecosystem framework. #meta)

7. Not to mention the tactical benefits of SEO and Pinterest

If your only forms of content are emails and Instagram posts, it’s hard to be able to leverage Pinterest, if that was something you ever wanted to get into.

And the long-term benefits of SEO, whether it’s from your blog, or in YouTube’s search, or the Apple podcast feed, will be out of reach without long-form content as well.

It’s undeniable that long-form content is time and energy consuming to create. 

But that time and energy spent is an investment. Not just in your marketing.

It is that.

But it’s also an investment in the relationship with your audience.

It’s an investment in you and your brand being seen as a leader.

It’s an investment in communicating your message effectively and in a way that will actually help people.

And of course, it’s an investment in the long-term payoff that will come further down the line.