I don’t know about you, but whenever I used to sit down to write anything…. I would wonder about how long it was supposed to be.
Maybe it’s an old habit from all those years in school, but I was always worried that my content wasn’t long enough. And I would be silently judged from all of the people reading it.
Later, after I started my professional writing career, I realized that content being too short is rarely the problem. Oftentimes, the problem is that content is too long for most readers.
To get people really engaged, your content has to be the perfect leangh.
But what is that? How do you make sure your content is not too long or short for your reader?
Winston Churchill once said...
A good speech should be like a woman's skirt; long enough to cover the subject and short enough to create interest.
Even through this quote can be a bit problematic these days, it's still good to keep in mind whenever you're writing to your audience.
Because the truth is that most people write a lot more than they need to, and I'm going to explain to you why it can be really helpful to keep your communications on the shorter side.
We all know that content is getting longer and longer...
Blog posts were really short and sweet in the beginning. Twenty years ago, most blog posts were between 500-800 words.
Back then, people had longer attention spans, and they would sit down and read a whole article from beginning to end. I like to think of this time as the golden age of blogging. It was so easy to build an audience, and create really helpful content for them.
But then marketers started creating an "SEO Arms Race" to impress Daddy Google.
What started off as a great idea turned into a soul sucking nightmare. In a span of just 10 years, online articles went from 500 words to longer than 2,000 words.
And it didn't stop there. People continued to add on to their blog posts because they want to rank on Google, and these days it's not uncommon for a blog post to be more than 3,000 words.
The reason why people do this is because longer posts generate more traffic. In 2022, SEMRUSH found that posts with more than 3,000 words generated 138% more traffic than shorter posts.
But this is the real doozy... your average reader only spends 52 seconds reading a blog post.
Which is crazy because while content keeps getting longer and longer, people spend less and less time reading it.
Keep in mind that your average reader can only read 120 words per minute.
That means today's blogs are publishing these 1,500-3,000+ word articles that people are only going to read 100 words from.
Want to know what you should do instead.
But what about email?
I hesitate to put this in here because I don't want to depress you. But as of 2022, most people spend an average of 9 seconds reading each email they decide to open. So your average person will read 10 words of your email before they lose interest.
But that doesn't mean that nobody is going to read your emails.
It just means that you’re going to have to be more engaging when you write them.
After all, there are people out there that are going to love you, and they're going to read everything you send to them.
But you've got to develop relationships with those people. Be cool, and show them why you're worth paying attention to.
Well guys... that's my 500 words worth of content for the day. If you want more, sign up for my newsletter below. I promise to be awesome. 😸