What Word Count Do You Use For Your Articles?

I always use as close as I can get to 500 words.
Using Dragon Naturally Speaking, that's about a minute's talk time!

For content on my sites, I never bother counting the words. I don't see the relevance.

For my own sites, 100% agree.

When syndicating content, though, there seems to be a sweet spot at around 1,000 words +/- 200 words. It makes a nice entry to an ezine and is usually easy to fit into a content hole in a print publication.

About 900 - 1,200 words here, occasionally longer.

In all 8 of my unrelated niches, I get far more traffic (and even backlinks) out of a 1,200-word article than I do out of two 600-word articles. Not so many people want to publish 600-word articles for their already-targeted traffic to read. I can get away with the occasional one that length after establishing credibility as an author in a niche, but quality/authority sites typically want longer ones.

It's very, very noticeable, in every single thread in which article length is discussed in this forum (and that's a really large number of threads, now!) how all the article marketers I know to be earning a really good living from it - though typically they include some different people in each thread - are giving more or less the same answer every time, and it's a 4-figure number.

300-350 words isn't really an "article": it's more likely to be "a chunk of keyword-rich text to which a backlink or two can be attached". That isn't article marketing. It used to have some SEO benefit, I understand, a few years ago, before all those Google updates, but even the kind of backlinks you can get with those "articles" have no real benefits, these days. And targeted traffic? I don't think so.

John, yes, I agree with you about that sweet spot (in fact, outside of the IM sphere, a sub 500-word piece is seldom even described as an article). I was responding to the OP's remark concerning his own web pages.

I'm preaching to the choir with you, but assuming the OP has total control over his site, I would have thought the only considerations would be the quality and relevance of the content from his visitors' standpoint.

Frank

My articles are optimized for reading by humans, not search engines. Key words are largely disregarded in favor of reader experience. Thus, word count can be anywhere from 800 to as much as 1300 in some niches, because it's what publishers and readers expect. Anything less may convey a less than prefossional writer.

Just because it does not seem to work for you, does not mean that it does not work.

According to Frank Kern, he writes copy for three audiences in the same letter.

The first set only reads his headlines.

The second set only reads headlines and bullet points.

And the third set will read everything on the page, and and supplemental pages that add more information to the topic at hand.

Long copy does work, but if it is not working for you, then you are not using it correctly.



P.S. People have as much time available as they feel they need to have available to get the information they need to make a decision. Compelling copy is such that people don't even realize how long they have been reading. They just keep soaking it up, totally unaware of how long they have spent actually reading.

If I can crank out an 89-page ebook and most of my buyers read it in one sitting, then obviously the writing style and quality of information will always trump the number of words on the page.