“Paginated” articles – there’s a $64 term for you.
Any time you look at an article that is spaced out over several pages that you have to click through to read, that’s paginated content. In some cases, it’s a series of images with captions. Just this morning, one showed up in my Facebook feed that was nothing but 20 pictures of dogs sleeping in weird positions with short captions for each image.
Now, I’ll admit that content like that is a bit corny and the subject matter can be even more ridiculous than sleeping dogs, but the fact is that there’s an audience for that stuff – a hugeaudience – and good marketers know it.
Curated content is big business right now, as evidenced by the sheer number of copycat posts you see on various subjects. If it’s on Buzzfeed today, a variation of it (or the exact same images with different captions) is likely to show up on HuffPost tomorrow or vice-versa.
The good news is that if you’re using all original content, you’re ahead of the wave. Even better, you don’t necessarily need to rely on image-based posts either. Paginated articles are a great way to get people to read more of your content and provide meatier, more substantial content.
Integrate images into long-form articles at a rate of about one image per hundred words (or at least one per page), and you accomplish three things. First, you capture the reader’s attention with the visuals. Next, you get the attention of Google and start developing organic SEO. Last – but certainly not least – you gain more opportunities to monetize your content.
Pagination and Long Form
The reason this works so well is that while you’re presenting your content in smaller chunks to the reader, Google views the article as a single, homogenous unit. It’s not 10 pages with 150 words each. It’s a 1,500-word long-form piece of content, which, if you’ve seeded it with about 1.5% relevant keywords, is going to start climbing the ranks quickly. That accounts for every split page of the article, too. The better your keyword strategy, the more ways your article has to rank.
Pagination and Monetization
I’m writing with the assumption that you want to make money with your content, and I can say without hesitation that there is no better way to stretch the monetization of your content than with paginated articles. The next time you view an article with those nifty “next” and “previous” buttons, just take a minute to observe how many ads you see as you page through.
If your copy is compelling and has a low bounce rate, you have a tremendous opportunity to monetize through pagination. The more engaging your content, the more people will read. The more people read, the more ads they see. The more ads they see, the greater the probability there is that they will click on one. See how that works?
Look at it this way: Present a 500-word article on a single page with three ads, and you have three opportunities to capture a click. Present the same article over five page segments with three ads each, and now you have 15opportunities to capture a click.
Pagination and Ease of Delivery
From the standpoint of time management, it doesn’t get any easier than pagination when it comes to formatting and delivering your content quickly.
Sure, you could create separate pages and go back linking everything together, but platforms like WordPress make the process much easier by integrating single-click page breaks into one central HTML document. As soon as you insert a Page Break, you have created a paginated article. Good for you! It’s much easier to do it in one click than it is to create, format, and populate individual pages.
Test the Waters
So here’s my challenge to you: The next time you decide to run a new article, whether it’s curated content or 100% original, run a split test on it. Create a version that presents the entire thing on a single page and seed appropriately with ad content. Present the same content in paginated form with ads on every page, and see which one performs better.
At a minimum, I’d be willing to bet it performs on an even par, but I’d be surprised if the paginated article didn’t have at least a slightly higher ROI (and, honestly, I think it would be more than slight).
Not sure how to segment a paginated article? Just tell your friendly neighborhood custom writing service or copywriter that a paginated article is what you want and watch them work their magic. When you see the article in raw form, it will probably make perfect sense why the segments flow together so well.