Article Marketing, Articles that are 2400 Words Long?

You start off a subheading with an attention grabbing subheading title. You draw out the reader's needs and fill it with the information you have for that subsection. Once you do that, you raise more questions-these trigger the reader to read the following subsection with its own subheading.

The name of the game is not to let the reader's attention trail off. You need to do this because of the length of the article. If you were writing the standard 500 to 1000 word article, you can get away with the standard list format.

When writing for article syndication, take into consideration not only the standards which publishers require, but also expectations of the readership audience. For example, the sweetspot appears to be around 800-1500 words for ezines, and much shorter articles may be allowed by blog publishers.

Personally, I try to write long engaging articles (1000-1500 words or sometimes push it to 2000+ depending upon the niche) because conversions can be significantly higher than short articles. However, there are various limiting constraints on article length by publishers, and it is far more typical for editors to reject an article rather than cut to fit.

Before writing an article for syndication, you should plan for the often fine line between the limits of publication requirements and reader expectations.

I take your points completely, Seth, and I understand why you're saying what you're saying, and I agree that you need a punchy opening, and to intrigue people as quickly as you can. And I don't intend the point that follows to detract from that at all. But ...

The reality of using content to generate traffic is that (for various quite complicated and interesting sets of reasons) it's phenomenally difficult to get 400-500-word articles published anywhere helpful/targeted, and they're not going to do you any good if nobody much gets the opportunity to read them. Let's not forget, here, that putting them on your own site, and getting them published in places where you can just submit them on your own, without meeting a publisher's editorial and acceptance needs, isn't going to get you very far at all. In all the ways that matter, that just isn't "article marketing".

In a whole, qualitative, very significant way, a 400-500-word article is typically not part of a realistic traffic-generation strategy in the way that a 1,200-1,500-word article can be. I do this for a living, and I can't make a living out of 400-500-word articles because I can't get enough of them published in the places where the already-targeted traffic I want to to attract is already reading, and that's what matters. Like it or not, those are the facts.

That's why 400-500-word articles have no realistic traffic-generation value.

The hugely talented American classical composer Charles Ives wrote a fantastic little masterpiece of an orchestral work called "The Unanswered Question" - acclaimed by tiny numbers of aficionados as his finest work - but it's entirely the wrong length for concert performances - it's just too short to fill a decent space, and as a result almost nobody apart from people who are already huge Ives enthusiasts has ever heard it!