John Chow dot com posts dissected - Part 1:Length of Post

So, how long or short should a blog post(or for those in the biz -copy length) be? I like the saying that Randy Ray from affiliatemarketingprograms.blogspot.com submitted as a comment on Aaron Wall’s post Optimal Word Count & Web Page Copy Length -

Like a woman’s skirt - long enough to cover the important stuff, but short enough to still be interesting.

With that in mind lets see how John Chow’s ‘skirt’ length is currently.
All post in April and May had an average length of 352 words per post. The interesting thing was that the median [value which is the center of a large group of values] of the word count was 282. This shows that there is no bell curve to be found in this statistical review of word count.

62% of the posts had between 100 and 399 words. Now the tricky part, can you put enough information inside those 400 words to keep people coming back for more?

This curve is shifted to the left because of the word count average for paid reviews view ReviewMe. The Review Me posts averaged 696 words per post, which is 2X to total posts average. I should probably do a whole part on the ReviewMe statistics I pulled.

From April to May the average dropped from 376 to 330.

Length of Post By Category:

Reviewing the average word count by category you will see that the Make Money Online and The Net categories get the most content applied. The assumption here is that this is John’s core competency and thus a lot of information exchange is happening in these posts. Cars and Videos have a low average word count, but then again these two categories need visual aids to present ideas inside the post.

Catergory	Posts	Word Count
AGLOCO	5	271
Cars	5	113
Fine Dining	9	401
Investing	4	319
Make Money Online	56	491
Ramblings	33	190
Review Me Reviews	8	554
Review My Blog	25	248
Technology	12	237
The Net	40	452
Videos	5	68
Wordpress	10	238

Length of Post By Author:

Seven different people hit the publish button on JohnChow.com in April and May. John contributed 87.7% of the post but did have the lowest word count average. Michael Kwan published 16.9% of the words during April and May

• Bob Buskirk - Post - 1 Avg. Word Count - 969
• Michael Kwan - Post - 18 Avg. Word Count - 703
• Alex Shalman - Post - 1 Avg. Word Count - 463
• Mitch Harper - Post - 4 Avg. Word Count - 373
• Wesley Novack - Post - 1 Avg. Word Count - 370
• John Chow - Post - 186 Avg. Word Count - 314

Length of Post By Day of Week:

April 1st was a Sunday, so every day but Friday and Saturday had 9 turns, so this data subset is not ‘complete’.

You will get the most amount of content presented to you on Thursday. I wonder how many of the ReviewMe post were made on Thursdays.

Part 1: Conclusions

As I write this I am excited to see some hard numbers put against the question – “how long should my post be?” Even though I can say that between 280 and 450 should suffice, I want to remind everyone word count should not dictate the amount of information you are looking to share. I am trying to subscribe to the method of provide all the information you feel is relevant to the topic to open it and close it in a designate amount of post. Just like this case study, I did not want to have one long post I am breaking it up in to different parts to keep relative in formation together.

Check back tomorrow for Part 2: Frequency of Post. If you enjoy your Feed Reader, please subscribe to my full rss feed.

What does this information presented in this post tell you? Would you like to see more? What questions would you of asked of the data? Please leave you comments. If I can provide more information I will.

Top 10 Word Count

1. Seven Day System For Making Money Online - But For Who? - (1370 Words)
2. Make Money On The Internet - March 2007 - (988 Words)
3. Tubely - 100% Free Online Dating Service - (969 Words)
4. Wordze - Get Better Search Engine Positioning - (901 Words)
5. Bidvertiser Helps You Make Money Online - (890 Words)
6. Spammer Make Fools of Google - (845 Words)
7. Blogging Tips - Take Your Blog To The Next Level! - (844 Words)
8. The Seven Habits of Highly Successful Bloggers - (825 Words)
9. Five Beginner’s Blogging Tips - (780 Words)
10. Make Money Online with iSalient Surveys - (761 Words)

10 Post around 352 Average Word Count

1. Make Money Online With Kontera ContentLink - (370 Words)
2. 13,000 AGLOCO Sign Ups - (364 Words)
3. Get NoFollow Removed On Your Comments! - (362 Words)
4. Are You A Millionaire Blogger? - (360 Words)
5. Feeling The Power Of Google PageRank 6 - (358 Words)
6. Make $100 With A Citibank Saving Account - (350 Words)
7. In Today’s Globe & Mail - (347 Words)
8. ReviewMe Takes A Run At PayPerPost - (345 Words)
9. Offering Free Tools From Your Blog to Get Crazy Traffic - (340 Words)
10. Wordpress BankRoll Plugin - Sell Your Own Reviews - (336 Words)

10 Post Around 282 Median Word Count

1. Cashing Out - When Is The Right Time - (298 Words)
2. Checking Out The Family Farm - (295 Words)
3. Before You Link Out To An Interesting Post - (293 Words)
4. Make Money Online - Batch 74 - (292 Words)
5. Must Remember To Check That Spam Folder - (292 Words)
6. Post Level Text Link Ads Pricing Explained - (284 Words)
7. A Very Fair Seafood Resaurant In Toronto - (280 Words)
8. List of Blogger Salaries - (274 Words)
9. 15,000 AGLOCO Sign Ups - (273 Words)
10. Make Money Online - Batch 70 - (273 Words)

Bottom 10 Word Count

1. The Real Real John Chow - (72 Words)
2. Microsoft Announces Surface Computer - (68 Words)
3. Best Company To Work For In America - (63 Words)
4. ReviewMe Place Review Limit On Publishers - (61 Words)
5. Dealing With The Landlord - (53 Words)
6. Need A Light? - (43 Words)
7. Now This Is A Police Car - (42 Words)
8. John Chow Kick Ass Game - (39 Words)
9. Free Topless Car Wash - (38 Words)
10. Extreme Parallel Parking - (18 Words)