Long form content can give you the best bang for your buck. It can be broken down into several short pieces of content which can be then spread over various social platforms.
Long form content can form the pillar for your online growth. A long, informative and value-packed video can help you attract lot of visitors, build trust with people and help you gain massive followers in short period of time.
Suppose you publish 10 short videos lasting 2-3 minutes each where you are at best sharing partial and incomplete information about a topic. It would take lot of time for viewers to gain trust and start seeing you as an authority in the field.
On the other hand if you publish 20-30 minute videos which are really detailed and informative, providing lot of value to the viewers, people are more likely to get impressed and become your fans. They may start following and even trust your recommendations regarding what products to buy. Same would be the case if you publish 1000+ word articles which are indepth and informative.
The kind of impression you can make and the speed at which you can gain followers would be quite high if you consistently publish high quality, super-valuable content on regular basis, instead of short, incomplete videos.
People would have to watch dozens of your short videos in order to gain the same kind of trust as they would if they watched just one or two of your longer form content, which was packed with actionable information that answers people’s queries and solves their problems.
Long form content can be difficult and time consuming to produce. But the amount of time and effort needed to produce such a content would be more than compensated by the results you can get from such an endeavor. Long form content is best when it comes to providing you better returns on your investment of time and efforts.
Long form content has several benefits and advantages. If you were able to produce one solid piece of valuable content, there are dozens of ways you can split that content into tiny pieces and post those tiny pieces on various social media pages and groups, linking back to your full-length content.
You may break your longer blog post into short social posts by taking a paragraph or two from the blog post and publishing on other platforms. You can make infographics out of that content, make a checklist or a shorter version of the article in the form of ‘Key Takeways’, create a bullet-point version of the article to spread it far and wide.
Similarly you can take a 30 minute video and break into into 5-10 minute clips where you are talking about certain aspects or details of a larger topic. You can even extract several 30 second Youtube shorts and Instagram Reels or Tiktok videos out of those longer videos.
This kind of activity can provide mammoth SEO benefits as well as immensely help in growing your social following and authority. The hard work you put in researching and creating that long form content can pay itself several times over. You can reap its benefits for many many months or even years in many cases.
However long form content alone should not be your sole content strategy. You need to mix it up. Sometimes publish long form content and sometimes go with shorter, consice, to-the-point content. Variety is important so as not to bore your readers. Otherwise you may lose lot of your readers if you always keep producing similar kind of content.
Sometimes it can get pretty exhausting for the readers to keep reading pages and pages of content or going through hours of videos. It can also get pretty taxing and burdensome for you as the content creator to keep coming up with marathon content all the time. So make it a little easy upon yourself and your readers by mixing things up.
Benefits of Long Form Content:
You are likely to have far more user engagement on a detailed, deep-dive, kick-ass, top-class content than on mediocre content. Users may love what they just read and are far more likely to share it with their friends or on social media, and are likely to think and talk about your content because you provided them with so much value.
Amazing content can attract lot of comment, likes and shares from the readers, which below-average or dull content cannot hope to do. Check out articles or videos which are absolutely amazing and see how many many views and comments such kind of a content attracts. One in-depth and highly useful piece of content can outperform, usually by a huge margin, hundreds of mediocre or crappy pieces. More traffic, more engagement, more shares and more backlinks – are these benefits of long form blog posts not enough?
You can re-purpose long form content in countless ways. One of my long form article 25 tips for affiliate marketing, I can make short 1 minute video clips of each tip and publish a series of Shorts on Youtube as well as Instagram. Such kind of series can really hook people and make them b binge watch our content. I can also list out all the tips which mention some things to do and some things to avoid, then publish those as a separate article titled, ‘Important Do’s and Dont’s for Affiliate Marketers’. I hope you are getting an idea of how powerful this can be.
Another great thing is the coming of fresh ideas or learning new information while producing long form. After publishing the 25 affiliate marketing tips, I got ideas for including more tips. Many more tips came to my mind which I could add in that same article and make it 50 tips instead of 25, or I could publish another follow up blog post. I, however, did neither of these due to laziness, procrastination and time constraints.
More ideas are likely to be triggered while producing long form content. For example as I am writing this content on benefits of long form content, I am getting lot of interesting ideas. One idea is for a Facebook post: Fastest way to grow social media following and becoming an authority, another infographic idea about the benefits of long form content, another viral short post idea about long form content vs shorter content.
I can produce another very detailed and deeply researched article on how long form content performs versus short content by citing various case studies and actual performance metrics – by using my own data or information shared by other people.
I can create a short report or a course (which I can then sell on Udemy or through Jvzoo or Warrior+) about how to write long form content and its benefits. Really the sky is the limit when you are producing longer content. Your mind will throw fresh ideas at you, which you did not have few moments before you started on this project.
Pitfalls of Long Form Content You Should Beware of:
1. Time Wastage – You may take too long to complete and publish, wasting a lot of your time. You may feel that the article is still not complete or you want to add something more to make it more perfect, and so on and on..
The key is to draw the line somewhere as it can be easy to get carried away. There are quite a few unpublished articles lying on my hard disk or sitting idly as drafts in my WordPress dashboard.
I didn’t publish them because I wanted to add a few more sections to make the articles more entertaining, useful or informative. Then I got distracted or busy with other things and that particular article got sidetracked. Soon it faded into a distant memory and it lay silently for many months before I suddenly remembered about it or found the time to do something about it.
I am not suggesting that you don’t take time to produce great content. On the contrary, I am a big fan of going slow and taking your own sweet time in researching thoroughly and editing ruthlessly in order to produce content that rocks – a content that you can be proud of.
However what I am against is needless time wasting. If it really takes you a whole month or more to produce an amazing piece of content that in itself is not a problem at all. But make sure you are not needlessly prolonging the time because of doubts in your head or because you want to make it just a tad bit better and so on. It is important to draw a line somewhere and strike a balance between publishing long form posts and maintaining a healthy posting frequency. And don’t forget short or medium sized content can be information-rich and valuable as well. So don’t get too hung up about word counts and article lengths – as we shall discuss in a little more detail below.
2. Getting Disheartened – Another major challenge is that you may start loving your content too much so much so that if it doesn’t perform up to your expectations you may become thoroughly disappointed and may give up embarking on another such adventurous journey again for some time.
Because you have invested so much time, energy and efforts into researching, planning and producing the long form content, you naturally want it to do well. You have high expectations from such a content because you put so much into it. And when you don’t get the results you want, it can be highly de-motivating and can feel terrible. If such a scenario happens repeatedly, you may be put off and may never want to produce long form content again.
3. Word Count Obsession – A very important thing to keep in mind about long term content is how you think about it and define it. For many people, long form content is all about the number of words you put on a page – the more the better. They want to crank out articles whose word count runs into thousands of words per article. But long form content need not necessarily be about the number of words.
It is actually how much information and value your article provides that makes it long-form, in my opinion. Sometimes you may be able to explain something or strike a chord in someone’s heart or change someone’s opinion or perception in few short and deep sentences. Many famous and successful personalities of the world speak using less words but they convey profound meanings and messages to the world.
On the other end of the spectrum, you have bloggers who have this false notion that the more the number of words in an article the more useful it will be. You will find bloggers writing about topics and needlessly making the content long. I have read articles on blogging tips where the writer wrote about how to start a blog, benefits of blogging, etc. This can be so frustrating to the reader.
A reader who wants to read on how to blog better will already know what a blog is and how to start a blog. He may already be having a blog of his own and wants to know how to get better at the art of blogging. The person who wrote such an article did it because he wanted to make the article super-long in the hope that search engines will rank his content higher. Many top bloggers are also guilty of this crime.
To avoid this, you should first have a target audience in mind for whom you are writing the content. Think of what their needs or problems will be, what questions they may have in their heads regarding this topic and try to cover those in your article. Don’t write about absolute beginner-level stuff when the reader of that content is likely to be a more sophisticated or knowledgeable person. Don’t insult his intelligence and knowledge!
The fact of the matter is sometimes shorter content can be more useful. There are times when I am in no mood to go through a long article to know or understand about something which I am searching for. I would like a short, precise and to-the-point answer. The point I am trying to make is the number of words are not the criteria of judging what long form content is. Google’s John Mueller, Google’s Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst, stated that “just blindly adding text to a page doesn’t make it better.”
What Does Long Form Mean?
As stated previously, I believe long form blog posts should not be defined purely on the basis of word count. The dictionary definition of long-form is any content that is longer in comparison to what is common or typical for works or content of a particular category. Generally bloggers used to define long form content if the word count exceeds 1000 words. That was the case 10 or 15 years back. Nowadays the definition has changed. These days long form refers to content that exceeds 1800 or 2000 words. According to HubSpot, it’s anything between 1,000 and 7,500 words. As per Core DNA, your content doesn’t get to be called long-form until it reaches at least 4,000 words. Buzzsumo defines long-form content as that which reaches or goes beyond 2000 words. The unhealthy obsession with word counts has gone too far in the online blogging space.
I personally feel the word count can be a useful measure of content’s depth and usefulness but it is not the sole criteria to measure it. My view of what long form means is actually a bit different. I feel shorter content can be equally useful.
The thing that makes your content valuable is how much information cover; how comprehensive and deep that information is; how well-researched, reliable and authentic it is; how nicely and clearly you are able to explain it and what kind of examples you give; how engaging and absorbing your content is; what kind of actionable, implementable steps you can provide; what kind of solutions you are able to offer; how much impact it can have on the reader in terms of changing his perceptions, inspiring him, or making him improve himself or his life. In short, your content should be knowledge-filled, effective, enchanting, resourceful, and impactful.
If doing all the above takes you many many words so be it. I am not against lengthy content, if there is a need for it and it is not done just for the sake of it. However, if you can do the same thing in fewer words, that also is equally fine and you don’t have to worry about or be obsessed about the word count. Shorter content can be more organized and tightly focused on a narrow topic of interest. My suggestion is to experiment with both forms of content on your blog as both have their pros and cons.
Short Form Vs Long Form – Debunking the Long-Form Content Myth:
You may find many studies and statistics that show the effectiveness of long-form content and the results it can generate for your business. However these are just one part of the equation. There are studies which indicate the growth and sales which short or medium content can bring. So shrug off the idea that long-form content is an absolute must to succeed in today’s highly competitive blogging industry. There are many influencers and high traffic blogs grew to over 100,000 subscribers by doing the opposite – producing short to medium sized content! Yes, there is still a chance for us lazy guys out there!
When you compare two short articles to one long article, the two short articles cumulatively get slightly more social shares, i.e., more total shares with fewer words written. – Soure: SearchEngineJournal
The real key in my humble opinion is to produce mind-blowing content. Don’t worry too much about the number of words. Instead, focus on producing content that your users will love and crave. Does your content teach something? Does it inspire change? Does it show the way to somebody? Does it offer guidelines and suggestions to solve a problem? Is it meaningful and does it serve a purpose?
How to Write Long-Form Blog Posts:
Leveraging Other People’s Long-Form Content: