Writing blog posts of at least 700 words helps out with SEO for a variety of reasons.
First, people will spend more time on your blog. And the more time people spend on your blog, they more likely they are to subscribe.
The second benefit is that your post’s text-to-HTML ratio will be solid. If you don’t know much about this ratio, it means you’ll want the amount of text within your blog post to exceed the amount of code running in the background.
Not only are longer blog posts important for Google search rankings, they are also important for your readers. The theory behind a long blog post is that the longer it is, the more value it contains.
I recently wrote a blog post of exactly 6,000 words, and another post with a little over 5,000 words. These two blog posts could be turned into e-books, and there are blog posts on the web that exceed 10,000 words.
To write a ridiculously long blog post, you need to say A LOT within a single post. So how do you get started?
Write Up A Massive Outline
Anytime I want to write a ridiculously long blog post, I write a ridiculously long outline. For my recent blog post 50 Tactics To Grow Your Email List, I listed the 50 tactics I would discuss within the post before I started to write it.
If you want to discuss 50 tactics but start writing as soon as you come up with the first 25, it’s more difficult to come up with the remaining 25 tactics. Struggling through a comprehensive outline without writing a single word will ensure that you have a solid foundation with which to work.
It’s possible, but very unlikely, to write a ridiculously long quality post without a massive outline. If you are able to make it work without an outline, please share your secret!
I’ve found that once you have an outline, the actual content flows much easier.
Mention People Within The Post
This tactic is mentioned in the email list post referenced above. Mentioning other people in your blog posts works wonders for marketing and content creation.
Social recognition is a universal desire and a key factor for motivation in the digital age. People enjoy being publicly acknowledged in others’ work. And oftentimes they will share the blog posts they were mentioned in. If you mention some key influencers within your blog post, reach out and let them know, and don’t be afraid to ask them to share the post if they like it.
Plus, writing about influencers also leads to better and stronger ideas for the post itself. The most important thing to do when writing longer pieces is to both let your mind wander into new ideas while maintaining your focus on the topic and outline.
Integrating influencers within your writing will enhance your content and enable you to lengthen your post without fluff. And when influencers share your content, you earn backlinks, which lead to more exposure and increased traffic for your blog.
One of the best ways to reach out to influencers is to follow Brian Dean’s famed skyscraper technique.
Use Visuals
You want to create a blog post that is optimized for your visitors as well as search engines. Many people are visual learners. A text-heavy post with no images makes the reading experience less effective. While images won’t increase the word count of your blog posts, they’ll keep your readers engaged.
It’s easier to learn something with pictures or video tutorials. The human mind registers an image 60,000 times faster than text, and our eyes are naturally directed downward immediately afterwards. Think about that for a moment.
This is why captions are so powerful. The more pictures you use, the more your visitors will be look towards the next block of text. Engaging images grab our attention and make us more inclined to finish reading the post.
Nearly every ridiculously long blog post I write (with the exception of Social Media DOs and DON’Ts) is packed to the gills with images. Using pictures to break up lines of text helps capture a reader’s attention, and maintain it throughout a longer post.
Focus Only on the Post
When you are writing a ridiculously long blog post, you mustn’t get distracted. If I plan to work on a long post, I block out any other work for that day.
I don’t do anything (video creation, podcasts, begin writing another blog post, etc.) until I have completed that one blog post. While I try to do it all in one sitting, some posts might take two days to complete.
The less friction between you and your ridiculously long blog post, the more fluid the final result. The most I’ve written in a single day was 13,000 words. I wrote all day and did no other work.
The outline will make it easier and faster for you to write a ridiculously long blog post, but it may still take several hours to pull it off.
In Conclusion
Ironically, this blog post about writing ridiculously long blog posts isn’t long at all. But when it’s time for me to write my next ridiculously long blog post, I will utilize the methods I discussed in this post.
These are the same methods I used to write a blog post of 6,000 words and a book, Lead The Stampede, which contains 60,000+ words.
This post is just over 1,000 words. Why? Because if you start fluffing up your posts simply to add to your word count, your efforts will backfire. Only take on longer pieces when you have something useful to say. Otherwise, cut it short.
Ranking #1 for keywords but providing a bad experience for your visitors will hurt your quality score and, ultimately, you’re credibility. Never risk losing your audience for SEO purposes.
Also remember that the moment you lose passion for the topic you are writing about, the quality of the piece will tank. Either recover that passion before continuing, or move on.
What are your thoughts on content length? Have you tried the skyscraper technique? What is the longest blog post you have ever written? Sound off in the comments section below!
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