When you're trying to attract and win clients through your content there's often a dilemma about where to spend your time.

Because, despite what some content and seo gurus seem to imply, we don't all have 12 hours a day to spend or a team of people all working on content. We have to prioritise our time.

So should you write big, long articles or short, conversational pieces.

In my experience you need to do two things:

Firstly, you need at least one big piece of content that stakes your claim as an expert in your field.

It could either be an “ultimate guide” to an area that's a core part of your offer to clients or it could be some kind of unique point of view. Or both combined.

In my case I have ultimate guides on my site to building an online course, value-based marketing, winning corporate clients, follow-up and finding the time for marketing.

All key areas I help clients with.

Each one took a few weeks to develop. They're like little mini books.

But they do two things for me:

• Because they're big and contain new and valuable ideas they tend to get shared and linked to. So they attract traffic from google and social media.
• Once people visit my site and read the articles, they're left in no doubt that I have a lot of expertise and experience in those areas.

So each big article both attracts potential clients and moves them closer to being ready to buy.

You don't need as many of these big articles as I have – but I'd advise having at least one that gives visitors to your site that “wow” moment. Especially when they compare it to the typical quality of marketing content on most sites.

Once you've got that one big article, I'd focus on shorter, more conversational pieces of content.

These are essentially to keep you top of mind. 

The way I look at it is my big content gets me to pole position. Once I'm there it just needs a little nudge every now and then to keep me there. It doesn't need another huge article.

And the shorter conversational pieces of content do something else too: they build a more personal relationship.

With emails like this it (hopefully) feels like I'm chatting to you.

The stories and occasional bits of fun help to make me seem more like a real person you could work with.

And I can make little calls to action to ask you to email me, or call me to talk about a project, or click a link to see a new product I'm offering.

I've found that this mix of one or more big pieces with regular little conversational pieces is the best mix of content.