My blog articles are too long. When I write about writing I am ebullient, effusive and, well, long-winded. I write the sort of articles that I never finish reading when I am on the tram. My book reviews are much better – 300 words-ish, on Instagram, BAM! So why can’t I learn my lesson and write to a damned word limit?
Why? Because secretly my long writing articles have many advantages both for me and for my website. In this article I give three key justifications for writing ludicrously long blog posts. Then I’ll keep on doing it anyway, because it’s my blog and I’ll cry if I want to. Mostly, my objective is that you come away feeling good about whatever way you choose to blog.
1. It’s your blog and you should write for yourself, not an imaginary audience who may never come. The audience have to decide for themselves and so do you.
You know how people win the Euromillions? Then sometimes they go on TV with a bottle of champagne and talk about how it won’t change their lives (it will, they’ll probably experience bankruptcy for the first time in a few years). Yet, suddenly, seeing them there makes it feel real. Possible. And even though you are more likely to get hit by lightening twice in the same day, you believe you can win the Euromillions, and buy a ticket on your way home from work.
Youtube stars, Instagram wonders and whatever a tik toc celebrity is called are the same thing. Some people have millions of followers. That makes having a million followers feel like a real, possible thing. But the chicken and the egg are the wrong way around. Unless you are young, ridiculously pretty, and unimaginably lucky, the only way you’re getting a massive following is if you’re famous for something else first. So, stop writing to win followers. Weirdly, it doesn’t work if that is what you are doing it for.
Instead, write for yourself. My writing posts are all about me trying to figure out some aspect of writing. Because I haven’t figured it out, they are not concise. They do help me think things through. Although they get less readers because they are long, readers who are looking for a more in-depth analysis find it on my website. I now have more followers than I ever imagined I would, not because I tried to be like other people, or followed the contemporary SEO advice of the time, but because I wrote for myself and there other people out there interested in the same things as me. I didn’t write to find an audience: I wrote and an audience found me.
2. Google changed.
You know how I said I didn’t follow contemporary SEO advice. Not entirely true. I had the advantage of following cutting edge SEO advice, because a good friend of mine knows an unreasonable amount of stuff about this sort of thing.
Back in the old days, in which many people still inhabit, the key to getting hits was a good title (still important mind), a short article that didn’t do much more than repeat the title a great deal, and plenty of relevant keywords both in and behind the text (ie. in the HTML). Google, however, upped their game around 2014. They decided they were tired of being gamed by short articles with not much content and reworked their algorithms to pick out articles with depth that referenced other similar articles (either directly or in the content).
What this meant is that they more successfully promoted articles that would answer the searcher’s questions. It also means that my long, in depth articles are much more popular with google than they would have been in 2012. I have, to my astonishment, a half-dozen articles that appear on the front page of a google search for the subject.
This doesn’t mean you need to do anything special or clever to game the system. When I say you should change, I mean you shouldn’t be afraid to write whatever article you want to write. If you write good quality content that answers the questions you are exploring, google is now smart enough to pick it up as a good article. Long and extensive is the new black. No, that’s not true. Giving a good answer to the question is the new black: if the questions is better answered by a short answer, that’s the post that will succeed (ie. I don’t want to watch a five minute video explaining where that last hidden artefact is thank you). Also I think if I wore black in Paris at the moment I would actually melt.
Thus, the answer to “How long should a blog post be?” is “However long it needs to be to properly answer your question to your satisfaction.” It’s that simple.
3. The readers are out there.
I am a Doctor of Law and Economics. I have read Derrida (how I wish I read more comics instead). I can handle, even enjoy, length and obscurity. Yet when I’m mucking around on the internet I tend to read articles about computer games, ten reasons why Hollywood no longer uses this actor (no, I don’t care, but I still read it), and those articles about embarrassing coming-out texts.
I don’t think I’m alone in this.
Yet, when I need to know something, I’m ready, willing and able to sit down and read a detailed article to learn something new. There is loads of great content on just about anything out there. For reasons, I wanted to know about the chemical construction of cannabis a couple of months ago and, god bless them, several people had taken the time to explain it in detail for people without pharmacy degrees.
You are not trying to write for everyone in the world. Even Harry Potter has only been read by a small fraction of the world’s population – the bible does slightly better, but cheats by having many different version. Your audience is out there. If you write with passion, if you invest value in what you write, you will be there for the readers who need you. And there will be many, because a teeny tiny proportion of the people in the world is still a lot of people.
3b (Because I said only three, see what I mean about writing long articles): Keep writing.
The first year of writing my blog, nobody read it. My friends didn’t read it. My wife didn’t read it.
That’s normal. We all have busy lives.
The second year things started picking up. Maybe I was writing better articles. Maybe google was giving me points for being stubborn. Most days two or three people would visit the site. That’s right. A good week would see twenty visitors. After two damned years of work.
I’m not sure how long I’ve been writing for now, but I have a many articles. I have two to three hundred people who come to the site every day. I don’t know if they find what they’re looking for, but plenty hang around long enough to read several articles, so something is working.
It can assuredly be done faster than I did it, but regardless be patient. Write what you want to write how you want to write: make sure the purpose of your blog is something that works for you, not just a way to catch followers. Make sure you have something to say, rather than just hitting a few keywords then checking out. Once google realises that you have created a significant body of work about a subject it will start suggesting you to people who are interested in that work. Blog for reasons beyond just attracting readers then, when the readers come, consider the icing and the delicious cake you have already built
PS. There’s nothing wrong with writing short articles either – long book reviews belong and should stay in academia, the rest of us don’t have the time, and while I’ll read 10 reasons why Hollywood etc. I won’t read 3000 words on the subject. The only message here is to your own self be true. That’s right, it’s a stolen lesson. This is the internet!
photo credit: prozla Books From Boxes via photopin (license)