Most of my articles are around 300 words. I try to pass the 200 barrier by at least 30 words each time, some times with more success, some times with less. I want to start longer form articles since I think they will provide more value than shorter ones, but I also like being concise and to the point and you can’t have that with most 1.5k articles. I don’t like the fluff most publications use just to reach a word count so I’ve always decided to stay as far away from that as possible and if that would mean publishing less words and because of that being less attractive for Google algorithm let’s be it. I’m not after a lot of hits anyway. I mostly writing for myself, while hoping that some of my content will be helpful to other people so I don’t mind.
For my latest Information Overload article I’ve tried to do the following:
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Prepare a draft for an article. Say you will publish it tomorrow.
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The day after when you come back to it instead of publishing it start with the first section and expand on it. Do it every subsequent day for the section after.
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You now have a longer article that might be better or worse than what you started from. Compare both and decide which one to publish.
It started as a short paragraph of 400 words and ended up just shy of 2000 words.
The main issue I have after writing for so long is that I don’t have enough time to edit. The solution would be to be ahead of the curve and have always the article for the day after ready to go and edit it right before publishing. I don’t want it to take a long time since I don’t really have it, but just a 5 minute editing session is better than nothing.