Max writes:

Interesting study. I’m confused about the pageviews though…was traffic really that much better 1 year ago?

Max

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Christopher M. Knight writes:

Max,

It’s not that page views were better a year ago (hardly), but rather the view count is for all of the articles submitted during the Sept 1-27, 2005 time period, but with the total aggregate page views through today.

We never kept track of the time frames that articles received page views — While we can track which articles got added or approved in a given time frame, we can only review how many total page views it has through today. This is something we’re evaluating adding to the database for future studies.

2005 page views are really total page views for the articles from Sept 1-27th 2005 through today.

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Edward Weiss writes:

Copywriters are continuously debating whether long copy is more effective than short copy. They say if it interests the reader, 2000 words or more is best because you’re engaging them and drawing them more into your “web” so to speak.

I tend to agree and I think this also can apply to article marketing. If something is interesting and reads well, I’ll most likely read it.. or at least scan it and read it later.

However, I won’t read short articles that are poorly written and have no worthwhile content. If I read an articles headline and am intrigued, they’d better deliver some substance in the body or I won’t read it.

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Lance Winslow writes:

On the 250 word articles it appears to be close and if someone wrote a 750 word article and it out performs a 250 word article that makes sense over time. But with (3) 250 word articles to (1) 750 word article the (3) Swarm past the (1). In my estimations many of the articles I originally wrote with 900, 1500, 2000, 2500 or more have lots of traffic consistently, whereas some of the smaller articles 275 to 325 range died out around 350-450 article views over time. However, even those with 350-450 article views they still get some traffic and when I multiply those by 3 it seems that they are pull better than articles three times as much.

Additionally, I am interested in the article pick-ups ratios, because if each article picked up gets 300 article views somewhere else on average over a year or more then, what size articles are being syndicated more? That is a question I need to know because right now at; 52,759 article pickups, I would like to figure out how to get that to lets say 100,000 by mid-2007. And at the current 2,620,379 article views, it would be nice to see if that can get to 4,000,000 article views by mid-2007. I think both goals are possible based on the current growth rates. Do you have any data on # of article pick-ups per size of article?

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Christopher M. Knight writes:

Lance,

Currently, we do not have any stats on pickups in relation to article word count…but I’m sure we could add that to query report… I’m not sure it’ll provide any meaningful info?

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Lance Winslow writes:

It matters to the article marketer who is targeting their articles to reach maximum syndication rather than merely article views probably, so this is why I ask. Of course a survey off all your Ezine Publishers who have been with you for so long could easily tell us their preferences too. It appears that those who pick articles up for websites might even have a different preferrence. I noticed the self help articles I have written really kick butt with the Ezine Pick-ups, but I imagine you have more Self Help motivational Ezine types and super industry subsector niche consultants who really are super positive people and they well, I just suspect they really like those positive articles on things like success, motivation and inspiration. Indeed just judging by you and your teams comments on this Blog I kind of get that from you too and so I assume that your entire staff is like that, like you that is and that is why you have attracted such a great group of people, vendors and even authors over the years? Well that is my impression, I just really get that feeling and seems to me that is why the ezine pickups are greater with positive self help articles. My question is I just wonder what size articles they are looking for. And I see you point about the use of Bullets and Numbers too, yes I see that in my articles, they tend to be the first ones picked up. Interesting. Anyways I am rambling, but I think that data would be interesting and worthy too for article marketers on a mission! The final frontier of article marketing at Flight Level 1O or 10,000 AGL.

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Adam writes:

Would it not benefit you more if you took several of those long articles and broke them into several short articles. Would that not have better results?

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Christopher M. Knight writes:

Adam,

Yes, that is the conclusion that I was trying to further prove through studying the history of various word counts compared against the traffic generated.

In terms of traffic per article, the larger ones do perform better, but not statistically better… meaning, it’s clear that a higher volume of smaller articles will net you more results than a low volume of larger articles.

This study has influenced me to begin encouraging our authors to move towards the 400 word min. word count rather than skimming the rim with 250 words.

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