Are You Short or Long?

I know that sounds like a personal question. All I’m asking is whether you write long or short blog posts?

When I first started blogging nearly ten years ago the general consensus was that short posts were the best, around 500 words was considered normal and sometimes as little as 250.

There were some major bloggers who were posting very short content very freq uently. As much as four or five times a day. And then as now, when some of the big bloggers did something everybody else followed suit.

But times are changing.

Or at least I don’t assume that what other people are doing is the best way to do something anymore.

Blogging four or five times a day has never been for me. If you ever meet me face-to-face then you’ll realise I’m a big talker. And it’s exactly the same on paper. When I get stuck into writing I find it pretty difficult to stop.

So writing snippets of content, which honestly is what 250 words is, was never for me.

Starting out online I went out and learnt everything I could. I spent hours soaking up information and courses until I realised something that was the turning point for me being successful…

Most of what the guru’s tell you to do is different to what they actually do.

This is crucial to understand if you like getting courses from big name internet marketers.

Now don’t get me wrong, that doesn’t mean there’s no good content in those courses. There are, sometimes a boat load. But you shouldn’t assume that they actually use these processes in their own business, because a lot of the time they don’t.

And this holds true across free content on blogs as well as paid content.

More and more Google is looking to rank blogs and posts that are getting more user interaction.

Of course user interaction means Facebook Likes, Twitter shares, Instagram shares and a general spreading across social media.

But it also means how long someone has stayed on the site or on the post. After all, if they’ve spent twenty seconds looking at a snippet of information before moving on then they’re not really interacting with the site very much. However if they spend 1, 2, 4 or even 5 or more minutes on a page then there must be something there worthwhile.

Think of it from the search engine’s point of view.

1. One of their visitors searches for the term “how to build a mailing list”.
2. They go to the first organic result and open the website.
3. They leave that website in less than 30 seconds and go back to the results.
4. They go to the second organic result and open the website.
5. They leave that website after 5 minutes.

Clearly the second website was more relevant to the readers search than the first one because they spent longer on it. If that continues to happen then fairly soon the second website will be moved up to first position.

That means that the longer the post the longer people will stay on the page to read it and the more likely you will get credited for it when people find the content through search engines.

One of my websites has an average time on site of 54 seconds across all pages.

However when I write blog posts of 750 words or more, or record videos of 15 minutes or longer, the average time on these pages is 3 minutes 21 seconds.

People are spending more than triple the time on these pages than they are on shorter content.

And do thee longer pages get less visitors?

Nope.

In fact outside of our landing pages they’re the most visited pages we have and, more importantly, they’re the pages that get the most organic traffic from search engines.

So…

I would recommend you start focusing on creating content that’s a minimum of 750 words (or videos of at least 15 minutes). After all, can you really help someone achieve something in less!