I think this will be the shorter post of my journal. I just want to make the point, for myself later and others, that writing is great to organize ideas, share and create a path but really takes time. And by checking my posts statistics (see below) it’s not that I am slow, it’s like that for everyone!

Build a Revisitable Path

It was great to be able to enter focus mode this week, because, although I was writing about past events, some already four days old, I was able to organize my ideas, search a little bit deeper and actually come to new or revised conclusions. Another impactful effect of writing this kind of short-post journal is that you get a sense of a path. A path that you can revisit and understand maybe only later.

Share. At Everyone’s Rythm.

This time, to try something different, I shared the three posts I wrote these days, not by email but via Facebook, Whatsapp and LinkedIn. I got very few direct reactions but I saw from site visits and comments on conversations that many persons, of the ones I want to share with, actually read it. That is a great result of using a Blog to share. Everyone is so busy or gets so many messages that this way, people can read when and how they can.

Time Spent and Some Statistics

I used two full Sabbatical days, a total of twelve hours, to write three posts. Looking back, I think it takes me on average three hours to write each post. If that post is about a single day…. it can take almost as much to explore a topic as to write about it! …and by the way, I invest three hours but you can read it in three minutes…that’s one minute of reading per hour of writing, so enjoy it!

I analyzed some statistics (I love them) of all the previous eleven posts I wrote. The chart below shows that, after a start with shorter posts, my last posts were between 500 and 1.000 words, which seems small-to-medium size when compared to other blogs.

For whoever is interested in blog techniques, here’s a classification method by blog experts on the size impact and purpose of each post:

Micro content: 75–300 words. Super-short posts are best for generating discussion. They rarely get many shares on social media, and they’re horrible for SEO, but if you want a lot of comments, write short posts!

Short-form content: 300–600 words. This is the standard blogging length, recommended by many “expert” bloggers. Shorter blog posts are a good middle-ground for social shares and comments, but are too short to gain much authority or search traffic.

News article-length content: 750 words. This is the standard length for professional journalism, especially newspapers. I find that it’s pretty good for getting links from other bloggers and shares on social media.

Mid-form content: 1000–1500 words. You’ll get fewer comments at this length, but a lot more shares on social media, especially if you’ve followed the advice above and written a piece of content that actually solves someone’s problem. That being said, I’ve written posts this long and gotten 100+ comments, so it really depends on the topic and your audience.

Long-form content: 2,450 words. The highest-ranking articles on Google are most often 2,450 or more average word count. If you want to have a top-ranking posts that can become evergreen on search engines (and thus get thousands of new readers per month, year after year), this is the best length to write. However, make sure you do your keyword analysis to write about a topic that people are actually searching for (I use Ahrefs for this). It would be a shame to write a book-length long-form blog post on a topic no one ever searches for!

Source: thewritepractice.com

Taking on average three hours to write a 900-word post, I am writing at the pace of five words per minute… which looks really slow! In fact, is 10x slower than the average speed of typing when just copying (50 words per minute) but aligned with the best practices of the Blog World (see chart below). Another example is the standard in book writing effort that goes from between 500 words up to 2.500 words per day, again not much different from my statistics. Conclusion: WRITING REALLY TAKES TIME.