Bloggers: This Is How Long Your Posts Should Be
Written by Glenon February 18th, 2010 56 Comments
When I analysed the most tweeted blog posts ever, I found that Twitter users like posts that are around 1,100 words long. When I wrote the most important blogging analysis ever, I found that the average length of popular posts was 1,600 words. This was quite surprising to a lot of readers and is a figure far higher than most people are producing.
In the comments for one of these posts, someone gave me the idea of analysing different industries to see the average post length in each, so they could gauge how long their articles should be. I’m not a blogger who will guess numbers and just throw stats out there, so I decided to do an in-depth analysis. I picked 3 posts from 5 blogs in 8 different niches (confused yet?) and noted the word count for each.
I’m a huge fan of personal development. For the last 19 months I blogged about very little else and like to think I made a mark on the industry – despite my age and “total nobody” status. I don’t really write about self improvement anymore but I still actively work on improving different aspects of my life.
As I announced last week, I have sold my biggest blog, PluginID. The site was around 19 months old, had 6,600 subscribers, and according to a tool that monitors different niches online, was the 10th biggest personal development blog in the world.
I ran a poll in the sidebar here for a few days asking people what their main goals were for 2010 in terms of internet marketing. The two clear favourites were: “Quitting your job to make a living online” and “Increase website traffic”. The latter, of course, is people looking for more eyeballs on their content. And, although it may not be obvious, so is the first.
I try not to sound too egotistical when I say this, but over the past 12 months I have certainly been one of the ‘faces of guest posting,’ simply because I have had a lot of public success with the tactic. I’ve been interviewed about marketing using guest posts over 10 times, I’m mentioned on the homepage of a guest posting community and I’ve written far more of them than I care to remember.
I recently stopped working on a number of large projects because I was not totally passionate about them. I’ve always lived my life around what interests me the most, but I’ve always still worked on things I don’t care about that much. That all changes now as I have sold a number of affiliate websites that make me money, but I don’t care about anymore.
Around two years ago I took some time out to analyse the top 50 Stumbleupon users. At the time, StumbleUpon was just starting to get noticed by internet marketers and as the service had the ability to send a lot of traffic to websites, people wanted to know more.
Launching a new blog is very daunting for some whilst very exciting for others. To me it’s a totally exciting experience and I can’t wait to get started. If you’re the same, it’s important to make sure your enthusiasm doesn’t lead you to launching too early and without having everything setup properly.
