Is it worth it to bring my article up to 1000 words?

Wait...what? That might hold true for a blog post, not for an article :rolleyes:.

It's difficult for me to write an article of that length, even if I shoot for a 500 word article, it ends up being at least 700 words and if I edit it down to approximately 500, it just seems lacking. However, that's just me.

The very most important thing in writing articles/content, is that all of the vital, pertinent information is put forth congruently and that there isn't a lot of obvious filler fluff, imho.

Let the length be what it will be

Terra

Other than IM, as in the "real world," I can't think of any niche where 500 words is, as a rule of thumb, deemed acceptable to provide sufficient quality, detail, and be worth syndicating.

Even in IM, when you look the major blogs that often dominate top search rankings, you do not find 500 word articles.

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Good advice.

A few tests I've done on this show the opposite. Let's assume that we have two pieces of equally well written content on the same subject. One is 512 words (I like being random), one 1,268 words. Now as we said, both of these pieces are equally well written. No fluff, nothing major left out. Just two great pieces of writing.

From a potential syndication partners point of view, on two equally well written pieces covering the same subject, they tend to go with the longer piece. Why?

• More information is usually covered (like we said, no fluff. If we're talking about fluffy pieces it was never syndication worthy in the first place).
• It means they have to find less content to syndicate. Their readers get one nice longer piece, and find their hunger for information satisfied for a little bit longer.
• Readability. Now this is not to say that a 500 word post doesn't read well. The way it reads though tends to be different from a longer article. They have more of a blog post feel to them, something that is often unavoidable given the concise nature of the post.

Just my opinion and observations from testing the matter. Who knows, your experience may vary.

These discussions fill me with misgivings.

Partly because, in them, I tend sometimes to disagree with the people with whom I normally agree.

Yes, it's true that a 1,000-word article "full of fluff" isn't going to be worth as much, but from all my experience of this, across a wide range of niches, it's very clear to me that articles around the 1,200+ word length have a far greater chance of being syndicated to authority sites and ezines. Mine do, anyway.

Fin isn't suggesting trying to syndicate something "full of fluff" and I think we should be replying to his question on that basis.

The idea that anyone should be trying to write more articles by keeping them down to 500 words is entirely misguided: 500-word articles very rarely get syndicated to authority sites and ezines.

In a large range of entirely unrelated niches, I consistently get much more traffic (and even more backlinks) from a 1,200-word article than I do from two 600-word ones.

While I have great sympathy with the perspective that "an article needs to be as long as it needs to be", to tell its story/serve its purpose, and I'm not suggesting padding it with "fluff", the market realities are such that I would be trying to lengthen this article, in the belief that doing so will significantly enhance its chances of profitable and productive syndication.

Yes; yes, there is.

Yes; yes, it probably is.

All my experience leads me to believe the opposite: I think it will probably do more good than harm - assuming, of course, that it's done in a way which doesn't look "padded".

Sometimes length really does matter.

Nah ... an "old thread" is one from 2009/10 that someone bumps to get their sig-file into it. This was only a week ago.

Between us, we can produce the right length of articles: my editing normally makes them shorter! :p

If you can get your article up to 1,000 words and have it still be very high quality and well written that is great. I know it can be hard to write 1,000 words sometimes. Don't just stuff words into it and use "filler" words to get it up to 1,000 words or you will end up with a badly written article.