Extremely Looong Article
Ok, so as I was saying in my previous blog post here, I am currently working on a blog post that, when all is said and done, will be somewhere in the ballpark of fifteen thousand words.
Yes, you read that correctly! Fifteen thousand words.
How did I come up with that number, when the training modules here say to aim for about 1,000 words?
Well, when I did my keyword research and I found a keyword I wanted to use as the basis for my next article, I decided to "research the competition".
I basically googled the key phrase and took a look at several of the articles on the first page of the search results.
You know what each of them all had in common?
Each of them were several thousand words in length. One of them was over 5,000 words long.
You know what else they all had in common? Several of them were "lists".
eg) 10 Things You Can Do About ____", "37 Easy Ways To ____", "15 Different Ideas For ___".
So I decided to emulate them and one up them by making a list of 50 items.
When writing the outline of my article, I figured I would aim for 50 to 100 words per item... That would put it nicely in the neighborhood of 2500 to 5000 words.
But since this is a niche I am passionate about, I couldn't stop writing about several of these bullet points.. Some of these bullet points have over 300 words of content.
Is this overkill? It could be!
How on earth am I able to write this much? Well, truth be told, I'm writing this in my spare time. I started the article 10 days ago...
Shouldn't I shorten the article?
So this is where I am wondering if I have written too much.
So what I have decided to do is to go ahead and write out the entire 15,000 word "article".
But then I will truncate it by splitting it up into several smaller articles..
AND I am going to try my hand at creating an Amazon Kindle eBook which I can promote.
I am also planning to break these 50 points up into 50 different emails for a potential email list campaign.
Hey, why stop there? I could even create 50 short YouTube videos about these.
Writing 15,000 words seems dauntingly impossible.
Yes, it may seem that way. But when you treat it as if you are writing 50 smaller articles, it's really not that bad.
The only thing I'm having to grapple with is that it's taking longer to publish this one article, as compared to if I were writing several 1,000 word blog posts instead.
This is totally experimental.
Let's see where this goes. I didn't plan it to be this way.
Oh, and I'm also trying to incorporate multiple affiliate links into the same article, for each of these 50 items.
But when I saw that my competition all had these super-long articles, upwords of 5,000 words... Then I figure that if I want to compete for ranking against them, I had better measure up the same.
I know this is an unconventional approach.
If I'm lucky, I may be able to finish my first draft of the article by this weekend...
But I'll keep you all posted on this.
One other thing I noticed: The keyword I am writing for does NOT appear ANYWHERE in the articles on the first page of Google that come up when searching for it.
Recent Comments
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I don't want to be a negative Nancy, but honestly, I don't think I would read a 15,000 word post.... I work for a newspaper and we keep things between 500-1500 words. When an article gets too long, people lose interest. I like Mark Ks suggestion of making an e-book out of the super long post!
Best of luck with your article.
With 2020 vision,
Karin 😎
Karin,
To be quite honest, I wouldn't read a 15,000 word blog post either! :p
It's just that as I was writing this article, I came up with this idea...
I think I'm going to go with Mark's ebook suggestion. (I wonder if ebooks might be covered here somewhere in the training at WA.)
But I will say that the top-ranking articles for the keyword in question all have 2.5K to 5K+ word counts...
I know that WA teaches us to go with 1,000 word blog posts...
But check this out:
https://neilpatel.com/blog/why-you-need-to-create-evergreen-long-form-content-and-how-to-produce-it/
https://neilpatel.com/blog/longer-content-ranks-better/
Apparently 2,000 to 3,000 words is the suitspot for better engagement, better ranking, and better conversions... according to these posts.
This is probably true for Google and other search engines. Of course, Google and other search engines don't necessarily "read" like humans do. :)
I will check out those links shortly. Thanks for sharing them!
With 2020 vision,
Karin 😎
If you are going for a rank 1 post then maybe a longer article is a good idea, however if you are try to engage the visitor then a 15,000 word article might not be the best.
A lot of visitors will see the length and probably not bother reading it all.
I would consider making an ebook out of the article which you could either sell or offer as a freebie for signing up to your newsletter or something similar.
10 words are great more than that I have no I sea! Google loves long articles starting from 1300 onwards!
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You could do very well with the e-book!
Jeff