The Ideal Blog Length, Images and Visuals usage, and List Posts in Content Marketing
Blogging is defined as a professional art form where best practices in written content are constantly developing. In this dynamic world of blogging and content creation, one always needs to be up to date with the latest practices and trends around in order to survive.
Online data, advertising or blogging trends, even professional research can go out of date in a short span of time if you are engaged in an online business. This arena is quite challenging, dynamic, research oriented and gets saturated very easily.
To have a successful blogging or social media campaign, one needs to learn to take advantage of recent social media trends to succeed. Some of the recent blogging and digital marketing trends are mind blowing and an eye opener.
These days social media marketing is dominated by real-time videos posted on the Snapchat and Instagram as stories which disappear after 24 hours automatically. Website design and SEO has changed drastically due to user trends and the latest Google algorithm updates.
Effective blogging has become an amalgamation of visual arts, long-form content production and online social engagement.
1) The Best Blog Posts Are Getting Longer
A few years ago, the ideal word limit for a blog post was 400-700 words. The readers wanted to read brief blogs. On the contrary, these days the limit has increased from 700 words to 1600 words which requires an average reading time of 7 minutes.
According to recent researches long-form content has inexplicably overcome the millennial attention span.The most shocking thing is that it is true for both modern blogging and content marketing purposes as well.
Readers are actually responding well to long and engaging blogs as compared to the shorter ones. These longer blogs are the most effective for social media marketing, content creation and overall marketing campaigns. This increased word limit gives an opportunity to give out more details about your products and your business which makes the consumer well aware.
It is also amazing how you can load up your content with more and more keywords.
2) Blogging Trends are all about Images and Visual Content
To make your content even longer and engaging you must add related images, charts or some visual content to it.
Bloggers who use visuals in their posts can generate up to 94% more views as compared to those who just use texts. Furthermore, there are now a great variety of visual content formats that are being used in today’s blogging arena including: Pablo by Buffer is a fabulous free design tool to add text to images.
o Images
o Video
o Captioned Photos & Quote Images
o Info-graphics
o Charts and other Visual Data
o Embedded Social Media
o Interactive & 360 Video
o GIFs
o Slide Share Decks.
It seems that being a good blogger has recently become much more than just being a great writer. The positive aspect is that there are now a variety of amazing free online design tools at bloggers’ fingertips.
3) Lists are (still) on the Rise in Content
Marketing List posts can be about anything, and can be combined easily into any content marketing strategy. This has been a long standing technique because of its everlasting usefulness.
List posts are quite effective because of the following reason.
1. List posts are increasingly effective and pervasive throughout the blogging field. The Numbers stand out in and gain reader’s attention.
2. Lists provide easily comprehensible, memorable, and thus valuable information to your audience.
3. The short bullet point headings make it easier to read and understand the data.