Marketing Blog Writing Styles: 12 Pros By The Numbers
Were you surprised by any of these results? Let us know in the comments.
I’ll relay some of my observations, then tell you how I got the numbers below, if you’re feeling nerdy.
Before we go any further, here are links to the bloggers: Seth Godin, Mitch Joel, Chris Brogan, David Meerman Scott,Marcus Sheridan, John Jantsch, Brian Clark, Derek Halpern, Darren Rowse, Rand Fishkin, Spencer Haws, and Pat Flynn.
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Words Per Sentence
This is the most evenly distributed of the data sets. The takeaway: there is no common or “right” style. Darren, Rand, and John use longer sentences with more phrases and Seth and Derek keep the thoughts short and digestible.
Words Per Post
One thing jumps out quickly. Pat Flynn pours a lot of time into his posts (a lot more than he used to, see below).
“Epic Posts” are considered to be 1000 words minimum and the median of 838 is getting pretty close. Experts like Yoast (WordPress SEO Guru) say you need at least 300 words to rank well on Google. Only one of the bloggers I analyzed averages under 300 and only three average under twice that (600).
How long is the median 838 words? This post is exactly 838 words long (because I wrote these seven words here).
The two guys who write the most words per post are very concerned with search traffic. Spencer and Pat write on SEO topics quite often, so if you are looking to get more traffic, you may want to follow their lead and spend more time on each topic.
