Last week, I gave a presentation about blogging for my local writers’ group. It was a first for me, so I needed to research the topic. Thankfully, there’s a lot of info out there about blogging, much of it from Word Press. I thought I’d share some of what I learned with you since I am now this font of knowledge.
- There are 600 million blogs out there in the world. This is so many that they make up one-third of the web!
- Most people read blogs to learn something new.
- 80% of new blogs last only for 18 months. Most quit after 3 years.
- 22% of Word Press bloggers write once per week. 2% post daily.
- Word Press is the most popular blogging platform, hosting 43% of blogs.
- The highest recorded salary for a blogger in the U.S. in 2022 was $104,000.
- It takes an average of 20 months to start making money with a blog, but 27% of bloggers start earning money within 6 months and 38% are making a full-time income within 2 years.
- Posts that have “how-to” or “guide” in their titles are the most popular in general. (I am testing this with the title of this post!)
- Images are helpful in garnering interest. Post with up to 7 images get 116% more organic traffic compared to posts with no images.
- In 2021, the average length of a blog post was 1,416 words.
- The average blog post length has increased 57% since 2014.
- The trend is for increasing word count for posts. Posts with over 3,000 words get 138% more visitors than posts with fewer than 500 words.
Do any of these stats surprise you? I’m surprised by the trend toward longer posts, but perhaps that makes sense because there more words and more topics for search engines to find. But I would think that people don’t have that much time to read. Maybe they find the posts but don’t read all of them?
Okay, now I need to find an image for this post. And I should probably make it longer, but I am out of time!
Marie's Meanderings 
The idea of longer posts surprises me. Like you, I would have guessed that people have limited time to read, and therefore, they would prefer shorter rather than longer.
Yes, that trend seems to have surprised a lot of my blogging friends.
Hi. I bet that most readers skim through long articles, or don’t read them at all. Like you say, it’s too time-consuming to do otherwise.
I suspect you may be right on that!
I can say for certain I’m not a fan of long-winded posts. Reading them or writing them!
Yes, that trend is a head-scratcher. I hope spring is coming your way. Say hi to the icebergs for me!
Spring is here, with icebergs too. 🙂 What’s it like over your way?
Spring has sprung! We’re having a huge melt going on. There’s lots of snow to melt – we had a 7-foot drift next to the end of our driveway. It’s only about 4 feet now. It’s nice to be able to see oncoming vehicles now but people’s basements are getting flooded.
Awesome! We didn’t have much snow at all, so things are happening fast. I have clothes on the line and Miss Vivian caught her first shrew for the year this morning!
Very interesting stats – thanks for sharing. I am always afraid that my posts might be too long. Who knew! Photos do make even longer posts more readable. I would give this post a thumbs up as it is!
Well, that’s very kind of you, as always. Happy Spring JoNell!
This was very interesting!