How Long Is Your Content?

"Brevity is a sister of talent" ~ A.P. Chekhov

That's the quote I grew up on.

Much prior to Anton Chekhov, William Shakespeare said "Brevity is the Soul of Wit".
I never thought of myself as being too verbose, but apparently, now I've realized that this talent's sister doesn't want to be my friend, which causes a major problem in my current work.

While some others struggle to write a 1,000-word article, I struggle to keep mine under 6,000 words. None of my posts are shorter than 3,000.

All experts advise that the posts must be as thorough as possible. Apperently, the ability to deliver much information in short expressions is not my strength, especially in English, where I often have to go a long way to explain a concept, while much shorter phrases must be available; my vocabulary is just not broad enough to choose the best wording.
This means to me that in order to have my articles thorough and keep them under max 3,000 words, I must choose very narrow topics..

When I choose a topic and a targeted keyword for it, it seems like narrow enough. I make a plan like Kyle taught and define my headers upfront. But when I start writing, something else always comes to mind relative to the topic, that further details the concept. Or, while doing my research for the content, I discover something that I didn't know in advance and that has to be covered.

Why are the long posts a problem? They are not! That is if you can still write at least 2-3 posts per week.

However, I'm unable to write more than one article per week. I tried breaking my long posts into 2 or 3, but then it takes even more time because the paragraphs are connected to each other conceptually, introduction and conclusion must be changed, more keywords are needed, images also often need to be added when pieces get separated.

Now, I've added the YouTube channel to my workload.

My aggressive but realistic goal was to write one article per week and create one video. I started with "How To"s screencast videos for beginner-bloggers and after the first 40-minute video, managed to keep the following ones under 15 minutes each. I was very close to my goal of 1 post/ 1 video per week... until I decided to do a review video.

This was more than 2 weeks ago. Well, I did "waste" about 3 days of work for the family activities as they wanted to treat me for my birthday. Other than that, I was not even able to write a post to my website (though, I have a guest post that I'm yet to publish) or spend time here and keep in touch with my WAmily.

I'm back now! Two weeks of work are finally online. This new video is 40 minutes long... LOL. I have to say that I've learned a lot about video-editing during these past 2 weeks. Some real waste of time was related to my system not being powerful enough to handle such heavy video files, and it kept freezing.

I'm telling myself that I will not do it again - no more long videos!.. or long posts! Am I lying to myself? 😉

I would greatly appreciate your support for this video in terms of watch time (mute it and let it run while you are doing something else), comments and likes. It's the latest video on my YouTube channel - I'm not supposed to be posting a link here, but I posted the direct link to this video in the YouTube give and take comment thread, or you can find my channel on my profile page under "Follow Julia On".

By the way, if you have a YouTube channel and haven't discovered the YouTube give and take comment thread, please use the link above to join us in requesting and offering support to each other's YouTube channels.

If you haven't subscribed to my channel yet, please do! I'm still too far away from my first milestone of 100 subscribers.

My problem is the inability to correctly estimate the length of the content ahead of time. At first, I couldn't write often because of my poor English writing skills, but now I feel much more comfortable writing, and even speaking in English in front of the camera. Even though writing and speaking in the second language still increase the time I spend on each article and video, I now understand that this is not the main issue anymore.

How do you estimate the size of your content? What is the average length of your website posts?

Do you have any advice for me on how I could improve my efficiency?
Thank you so much for reading, watching my video and subscribing to my YouTube channel, and for your continued support!

Have a wonderful weekend and be well!

~ Julia