Blogging 101: Which is Better – Frequent Short Post or Infrequent Long Post?

Ever since I moved to my own site, I have been trying to be “more consistent” with my post of contents. Image source: elitecopywriter.com

In a way, it is a good thing because I am forced to be on my toe to look out for contents for the blog – fortunately there is no lack of source for the content, from current news, photos, my dreams and travels.

The only challenge is to finding time and writing down as detailed as I could remember. And now on the weekends, I wake up early to start on drafting the post and use whatever free times on my laptop, looking for the right words to fill in the blanks.

Since I am trying to consistent, for some time even before I moved the blog to a self hosted site, I have thinking on the frequency of posting and the length of the posts.

A quick google on the net revealed a few interesting comments & tips:-

Want more comments on your blog? Try writing short, discussion-based posts no longer than 275 words long

Want more shares on social media? Aim for medium length blog posts between 600 to 1,250 words.
Want more traffic from Google? Write longer, heavily researched posts 2,450 words long

Search engines love long, authoritative posts, especially when they’re focused on solving a pressing problem for readers. Longer posts might not get a lot of comments, and they might even be shared slightly less than average on social media, but if you can wait until Google takes notice, you might just get lucky and see a big bump in search traffic.

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And

If you write a really long blog post (1000 words or more), you have a higher chance of ranking well in Google. There are a number of reasons why blog post length is important for SEO. These reasons all have to do with the fact that in lengthy texts, Google just has more clues to determine what your text is about.

If you optimize your copy well, your keyword will be in the text rather often, because it’s so lengthy. No need for keyword stuffing in lengthy texts! You’ll probably have more headings, more links, and more pictures, in which the keyword will be mentioned.

The downside of blog posts containing more than 1000 words is that they can become hard to read. You’ll need some proper writing skills in order to write easy-to-read articles of more than 1000 words. Also, large pieces of text could very well scare off your audience.
Badly written, lengthy articles will not be read all the way through. People will probably click away from your site rather soon. These articles won’t be shared on social media and people probably won’t return to your website to read some more.

In the end, badly written and lengthy articles won’t rank well in Google, simply because of the bad user experience.

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And

The perfect blog post length or publishing frequency doesn’t actually exist. “Perfect” isn’t universal — your content’s success depends on tons of personalized factors.

There’s a frequency implied in the content, and that makes sense. But you might have goals that only demand publishing once a quarter or once a month or once a week or once every day. That’s okay. But you should tie those together.

Consistency, we have found, is almost always more important than raw frequency, especially if you’re trying to build up that consistent audience and a subscriber base.

So I would focus on that, not how I should publish more often, but I should publish more consistently so that people will get used to my publishing schedule and will look forward to what I have to say, and also so that you can build up a cadence for yourself and your organization.

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In the old free WordPress.com, posting frequency was rather random and more importantly when I feel like writing down something (sometimes just to say that I am still around). There were times when there were no posts done for weeks. Image source: www.omnicoreagency.com

When I started blogging, I was posting on an average of 20 posts per month. My best month was 56 posts in one month in 2008 (wow, I must have been very, very free then). Then from 2014 onwards, the slump started with 2017 only having 13 posts for the whole year. 2018 was even worst with just 7 posts for the whole year. The slump started correspondingly with additional workload at office. Another reason for the slump is because I moved my “anger” and “dissatisfaction” from blogs to social media.

Anyway I am picking up the pieces in 2019 now with a dedicated blog site and a promise to myself to be more consistent with blogging, I gathered that a posting of every 2 days was enough to start off with the day in between to be used to gather the idea & outline of what I am going to write down and then spend the time to draft the post. I did start off with posting every 2 days but I soon find that I was rushing to do up post and before I know it, the next deadline is looming around the corner.

So I now moved the posting to every 3 days once which meant I have 2 days to gather the outline of my post contents and then go into the details. Another one more day may not make much difference but then again, any longer time to do the blog posting also meant I could do a longer post.

And once I have done one draft bog post, there is just enough time to revisit all the old blogs post and do a clean up.

Cleaning up old content should be part of your content maintenance routine. If you don’t go through your old posts regularly, you’re bound to run into issues sooner or later.

You might show incorrect information to visitors or hurt your own rankings by having too many pages about the same topic, increasing chances of keyword cannibalization, which is a lot of work to fix later on.

Therefore, go through your old posts, and decide what to do: update, merge or delete!

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I am starting off from year 2019 and moving backwards all the way to year 2005. There are plenty of things to clean up – key ones would be to add the keywords which I was unable to do in the free WordPress site (maybe it was there but it was not important). Based on the SEO analysis, I still have 1,443 posts that does not have any focus keywords, so I am still a long way to go.

And there is the strong and unrefined language that I used back in the old days (I am already regretting it as I surfing through the old posts). And of course, some of the old blog posts needs to be “beef” up with more contents & images.

Based on the Rank Math, SEO plugin that I used, the minimum number of words that I must have in a blog post to “qualify” is 600 words. So I am trying to keep this minimum for most of the time and if I have a lot of things in mind, it can even go up to 3,500 words like this one post.

So if I have shorter time to draft a blog post, it may end up as a short post – maybe just enough to meet the minimum 600 words requirement and on the other hand, longer time means longer post, with at least 1,000 words.

Ideally the best thing is to have long, more frequent posts but the problem is time, time and time. So I need to pick between short, more frequent posts and long, less frequent posts.

So which is better?