PR and marketing pros often wonder about the most effective length for blog posts.
A new survey reveals that bloggers are dedicating more time to creating posts, writing longer posts, and publishing fewer posts. And bloggers who follow those strategies say they achieve better results, according to a survey by Orbit Media Studios. CyberAlert has found that the findings apply to corporate as well as independent bloggers.
CyberAlert found in a recent analysis that its posts of over 1,200 words achieve better search engine results on the key words that appear in the headline and first paragraph.
Time Investment in Blogging
According to the survey, the average blog post takes three hours and 16 minutes to write. That’s a 26% increase from last year. Twice as many bloggers now spend six or more hours on their average post. Last year, half of the bloggers polled spent less than two hours on a typical post, compared to a third this year.
Bloggers who spend more time writing posts say they gain better results from each post: 33% of bloggers who spend six or more hours per post report “strong results.” Only 23% who spend less than six hours per post report strong results.
Posts are getting longer. The length of the average blog post has increased from 880 words in 2014 to about 1050 words in 2016. The percentage of posts 500 words or less is half of what was two years ago.
Bloggers are publishing fewer posts. Fewer publish posts daily; more publish just weekly or even monthly. The percentage of bloggers who publish daily dropped by more than 50%; the percentage publishing monthly increased 38%. More publish weekly, the most popular posting frequency.
A Shift toward Quality?
On the surface, bloggers are publishing longer, more in-depth posts. “But if you dig deeper you find that all of this ‘growth’ in comprehensive posts is coming in the form of lists,” comments Jay Baer of Convince & Convert. “This is disheartening and will ultimately be counter-productive. If everyone’s blog post is in list format, how likely is it for yours to truly stand out and succeed?”
Joanna Wiebe of CopyHackers agrees that length is not necessarily a sign of quality. Some blogs run roundup posts to achieve length, but those posts garner little interest except from the handful of people they quote. Some organizations are opting to publish at irregular intervals, only when content aligns with a marketing campaign and can convert customers, Wiebe notes.
Blogs Still Part of Corporate PR
In addition, more bloggers are using editors as opposed to self-editing their own work, a sign of increasing maturity in the field, experts say. The portion of Fortune 500 companies with blogs dropped from a third to 21 percent from 2013 to 2015, according to a study by the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research.
However, most PR pros believe blogs remain an integral part of corporate communications strategy.
Rather than simply churning out blog content, more businesses will craft the best content possible, even if it means fewer posts, Jordan Scheltgen, managing partner at content marketing agency Cave Social, told Business 2 Community writer John Egan. This helps companies “stand out from the noise,” he says, and provides a better experience for readers.
“It’s no longer good enough to produce high-quality content, because an article can be high-quality but the internet may be flooded with similar articles,” Scheltgen says.
Bottom Line: Bloggers are writing fewer posts in order to spend more time on longer articles. Hopefully, that underscores a trend toward increasing quality. However, some marketers question if some bloggers write longer just for the sake of length.
What blogging strategy do you think works best today? Please comment below.
Michael Kling is manager of public relations, marketing and social media at Glean.info, a media monitoring and measurement service that provides customized media monitoring and PR analytics solutions.
