When you look around at blogging these days, a few things stand out as obvious. It’s intuitive to most of us that blog posts with images included in them get more visitors, more engagement, and more leads than those without. It makes sense that a website with a blog will have more pages indexed in the search engines than a website without one.
What might be less obvious is how much value a blog can bring to a website. There’s a constant, overwhelming tide of new content being published every day, and yet, blogging is still a viable and valuable technique. Studies and statistics back up this conclusion, as much as common sense might not.
For example, while only 20% of business blog posts are over 750 words long, longer blog posts generate 900% more leads than short posts. So why aren’t all marketers writing longer posts?
The effort involved in writing lengthy posts increases dramatically the longer the post is. That’s why the most popular word counts for new blog posts is in the 1,100 to 1,300 range. Longer posts are great, they do well, but they’re much more difficult and time-consuming to write. It’s no wonder that bloggers around the web and around the world don’t want to invest the time and money in creating longer content.
Though, trends are pushing word counts higher and higher with every passing year. Back in the early days of 2012, just after Google’s Panda update made thin, short content dramatically less valuable, word counts were much shorter. That 750 word average was more typical. Meanwhile, today, a good word count for a valuable post is closer to 2,000.
According to stats published by WordPress, WordPress blogs alone account for over 70 million new blog posts every single month. The majority of those posts are relatively short, written more to answer a single narrow question than to dig into a deeper topic. With so many posts being published every day, it may seem hard to stand out, but always remember: the bar is low enough that anyone can do it, with a solid effort.
