Nearly 40 percent of bloggers report “strong results” as a result of writing longer blogs and spending more time with each blog.
If you think the amount of time it takes to write a blog is getting longer and longer, you just might be right. According to a study published by Orbit Media Studios, the amount of time it takes to write this type of marketing content has increased over the past five years.
In 2014, it took 2 hours and 24 minutes to write a blog, based on different studies. Today, that time has jumped to 3 hours and 57 minutes.
Why is it taking so much more time to write blogs?
Among the most likely conclusions are the following:
- Although the suggested word count for this type of content is still around 500 to 600 words, many B2B blogs today have inched up to 1200 words. Longer blogs take longer to write, plain and simple.
- Especially among B2B organizations, longer content is often necessary because they have more information that must be covered.
- The longer blogs require more time to research information.
- Some bloggers write longer blogs because search engines often find them more credible, giving the site more visitor attention. The Orbit study found this to be true.
- Today’s blogs need to address more SEO issues, which means they take more time to finalize. This includes issues such as whether just single keywords or long-tail keywords should be used; identifying the most applicable keywords/terms; if the SEO should include questions, and other issues.
- More editing requirements. The longer blogs invariably require more copy editing needs.
So is longer blogging content paying off?
According to the Orbit study, nearly 40 percent of the bloggers interviewed for the study report “strong results” as a result of writing longer blogs and spending more time with each blog. Strong results can be interpreted to mean improved SEO, more web traffic to a site, and with it, higher conversion rates. This is when a web visitor becomes a buyer of the products or services of the company hosting the blog.
“Looking through the data,” says Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute, “it’s almost like going into the past where longer, meatier articles were king, and each article took hours. This gives me hope for the future of content consumption. At least for blogging, snackable content is dead. Audiences expect more, and bloggers are giving them better researched and more advanced, well-thought-out content.”
More information on marketing content creation can be found here.
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