 So we are Jimmy and Sarah, we're Sarah and Jimmy depending on which way you look at us first. We write for Stuff Monsters like it's a vlog where we started on Halloween in 2010, still goes strong, so we're really glad of that. We also have a couple other sites that we write for, first home sites. Do you want to talk a little bit about those? Oh we definitely do, because they're going to want to rush right up to the arena every single one. We should direct people to Thomas Wolf was wrong, was definitely. One of our past times is going around the internet and old newspapers and periodicals and brochures and finding where people have decided to write a sentence, Thomas Wolf was wrong, you can't go home again. And apparently thousands of people have written that sentence and we find them and blog them on our, it's a Tumblr. Yeah it's a Tumblr and we're doing a couple hundred maybe? We're getting close to 200? There's no hand in sight. So the whole thesis of it is, if you're going to, yeah no, it's a cliche, don't write Thomas Wolf was wrong, you can't go home again. Because I just did on vacation or something. If that's your line, you need to rethink this. When we probably end up on our Tumblr page, were they being not chained but... Jeered. Jeered, yes. We had to let her live in Lebron and actively let her do it. Lebron, yeah, yeah. That was a big thing. I think that the elephant in the room is, we should say, like we were 20 minutes ago out in high school this building, preparing for this talk. And I was like, why is it so familiar? Why am I nervous? Why am I cramming before like this big event and I realized, oh, I went to college here. This was my school. And it was serious as well. This is kind of where we met. I was commenting earlier how interesting the change in scenery in the cast areas. No, no, no. It was totally different. I didn't get to see it coming today. Great, you were right. Okay, so... I have to live off her all the time. So to give you kind of a picture of our wide variety of interests, we, we, there's some monsters like, we write about monsters, animal, most recently. We also, just Thursday, put out a movie review of the movie Zombeavers. Totally recommend a movie that review. It's a good reflection of the quality of the movie that Zombeavers is. But we also write about purgism and the nonprofit that we run where we give books to kids. So a wide variety of writing styles and interests. If you saw our talk last year, we wrote about what to do after you run out of ideas. We've been vlogging for five years now. And statistically, that is very individual. A lot of people don't think it nearly as long. So we kind of wanted to focus on how do you generate ideas? What are the best practices to keep ideas going and to keep writing? We, we noticed that the enthusiasm at the beginning when you first started vlogging about your fifth or sixth post, when you realize that you have not built the next Helpington post, or your time to be already on Helpington, or how do you write the sixth through tenth, and how do you write the twelfth through the fifteenth? So that was our talk last year. We gave some big tips. What was your big tip last year? Questions. Ask your readers what they want to see. Ask yourself what you want to write about. Ask the universe what's going on. See, I asked you that question. My big one, if you're going to vlog and you're going to write, you need to take notes. And that was my big tip. You need to take them all the time. You need to take them when you are out to watch with your friends. You need to take them when you're working. You need to carry a little notebook with you, or a little iPad, or something, a little voice recorder that you can put your notes in, because I guarantee you, you're going to have a differently sound point of day, and you're going to say, oh my god, this is like great to write about. And then you're going to get to your computer screen about two days, and you're going to be like, what the heck was that? And you're not going to remember. So my big tip from last year was to take notes as you're living your life. Next week, what we thought was a pretty excellent presentation last year, and afterwards, you got a lot of really awesome questions, and one of them was, but how long should you make a lot of notes? And a couple people asked that, and so we thought this year that that would be a good follow-up topic. So everyone should be warned that their questions after our talk today are probably going to be what we talk about next year if we're okay. You know why? Because we keep notes. And we ask questions. So if you've all heard of this, I've heard several little people floating around today. How long should your blog go sweet? Most of the experts say between 300 and 600 words, but you've heard people say, when it comes to blogging, sure, there's better, because nobody has an attention span on the internet anymore. And other people say, but Google likes them super much, so they should be at least 500 words. So what we did is we videoed through all of this statistics to give you a one-day good answer. You all have to let us know. So what do the experts say? Well, it turns out that longer tends to be better for your search rankings. CERF IQ, CERF stands for Search Engine Results Page. This company CERF IQ did some research and they found a direct correlation between the link to the content and its placement on the results page. You see at the top, that's the number one ranking at just over 2,400 words. It kind of tops out in the number two and three spots, right at 2,500 words, and then the link to the post is tapered down as you get farther down the page. Which we found surprising. They recommended, even though they're talking about about 2,500, they're recommending that the ideal blog is about 1,500 words, which at 300 words a page on paper is about five pages. Yeah, really? Five pages. Okay. They just break really big, I guess. So last year on Muds2.0 in 2014, they analyzed 100 million articles online, which I think is a good example to look at. They found out that longer also inspires more shares. And if you were thinking that 1,500 words is a little longer than you'd like to rate, they're ideally going to post 3,000 words, or more, up to 10,000 words per article. Gets better social shares on Facebook. It's a big blue bar on Facebook and the other social channels are kind of underneath there. So longer does better for social shares. People will pass it around on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and other social platforms. If you're thinking I'd rather write shorter, we have a little bit of a news for you. The author of TheWrightPractice.com said that shorter is better for comments. So they don't get shared and shared around social media as much, but more people will comment on your page and engage with your site directly. If your posts are about 200,000 in five words, which is even below the expert recommended 3,500 range. So we know you're thinking that would be really helpful. Sorry. We totally agree. We looked at all this and when we did the research, we kept working on circles about what it was to give and how to narrow it down and give you a solid answer and a good focus. So this is where we hope you don't feel cheated because we're not going to talk about blog length anymore because we decided it's so ambiguous. It's almost like the answer is right until you're done. Close. So we asked ourselves when we thought it was the big question. When Sarah, when we were working on this presentation, Sarah, we were going back and forth in a Google doc and Sarah wrote WWSGD and her name is Sarah Javadoni. And I was like, so you're saying, what would you do? I was like, that's obviously not how the parents get it. What would that go with you? He's much more successful and got better glasses. Sarah's not that narcissistic. Do you guys think so? He's one of our favorites. I guess it is thesis, we found this one little article and basically you can kind of keep on having there people in this room who can speak to this way better than I can about staying one step ahead of Google's algorithms and keeping your SEO up and all of these things. But I'm sorry, you want to be a blogger, you want to write interesting content and you want to have great followers and you want people that have great comments on your blog or you want to always be on a technical aspect staying ahead of it. And basically we decided that, I guess we're going to say content has came, content has came. So that was kind of what we boiled it down to. Yes, Susanne Kodun said that the types of companies that focus on short-term names, focus on trends, focus on rankings and statistics and popularity and shares are the type of companies that are pulling their way to the bottoms that I'm going to use and kind of just sitting themselves in a hole that they're not going to be able to get out of the trends change and wants popularity gets measured by the metrics. And I feel like there's one good word that bloggers and SEO experts can refer to is change of Penguin or Pigeon or any of the other Google updates that everybody works so hard to get right to on Google and all of a sudden Google changed to what they thought was important in their SEO tank at least momentarily. What we found with Penguin, I think this was from 2014 and that's the name of the Google's algorithm, they decided instead of doing occasional big updates to their members, they're going to do constant updates all the time. So it basically, if you're going to try to stay ahead of the Google algorithm, that's going to be a job of itself. And if you want to write content and you want to stay up with Google's algorithm, they're almost too separate. Unless you want to make them blog about how to stay ahead of Google's algorithm, then that would be perfect. But unless that's what you want to talk about, it might not be your best interest to stay on top of that. So again, just keep coming back to right, brilliant content. And to that end, length could be definitely an important factor, but it should be worked into your considerations and not an end in itself. So we think before the factor should be considered while you're writing. Usefulness, shareability, rankings, and content lifespan. So we're going to go through these each pretty quickly and give examples. Usefulness, we call this the right-enough-to-be-useful and then stop approach. Don't keep going, paragraphs longer and you need to get your point across just because it makes your posts longer because you probably have to get attention from your readers to read out that part anyways. What was it that you said that you should, the book should be as long as it should be but not as long as it's more 20 or something. Yeah, right. Yeah, so how much time does your topic need? If you're writing about your Saturday afternoon, maybe you don't need 1500 words. But if you're writing about the financial crisis in Greece, maybe you. So consider your topic and how much time it takes. If you have a really long expansive topic and you've got 40 pages of information that you want to get out there, maybe consider dividing up into a series of smaller ideas, writing a post about each, and then interleaking them together and then you've got this internal link structure that helps your SCF and it isn't built solely on the link for your posts. If you think you can tell it in a tweet, it's probably not a blog post. So what you need to do is probably go back, rethink it, think of some other aspects of it. How can you broaden it? How can you bridge it out, connect it to bigger things? And then you might have a blog post. But if you can just tweet it, you might not reach it. So a good example of this we have would be a DIY blog post. They are very informative. They're super useful. And usually, writers don't fill it with junk of content. There's kind of a step-by-step structure. And good writers will add personal narrative to it, make it interesting, make it relatable. But you don't want someone going about solar panel regeneration. The reason I picked this one is because I thought it would be really cool to build your own solar panel. You can buy them. There must be components in them that you can build. So I came across this blog called Solar Burrito. It's this guy, very fantastic. He lives in a tiny house. He builds his own solar panels. I think he burns cow dung to his bread. That might be a little too far from me. But it's kind of a cool blog and we realize that things like that are highly, highly useful questions. Well, that's my way of doing this. Cheryl, take your content, share it all. What inspires action from your readers? What gets teenagers to pass it between each other at school when they're supposed to be studying it? Oh, you don't want me to answer that. The internet. Okay, well that's fair. So the internet is a very particular medium. And again, if you have 70 pages worth of material and you want to get out there at once, then maybe a blog isn't the best platform for you, in that case. But if you have something that will captivate your readers to share with their friends, it's engaging, it inspires action, it encourages them to pass it on on Facebook or comment at the bottom of your page, then that's what you want to aim for. Does everyone read I Am 9 or are you familiar with I Am 9 or have you seen it or looked at it? It's this interesting website. It's almost like an internet blog. You can go to it and scroll for days and days and days and days and days. They have all these writers that are going home to the world and they write interesting content. The series I noticed the last couple years, they do this interesting thing. They write these long form articles, sometimes they link to other things, sometimes they agree through content. And then every now and then, they'll have a post that's just one cent as long. That's like, who is the coolest startling cat? Or something. And then people just, the comments will not stop. And it's just one sentence. One sentence inspires hundreds and hundreds of comments. So they seem to do this weekly, which is a good way to engage your readers because it's a regular occurrence they can expect and enjoy and therefore the latest one that I saw this week was what is the greatest fight scene of all time? And it's got this big picture of a food master. And this one was actually a little long. 99 words, I put it in word count. But that's not even in the triple digits of word count. And the screenshot underneath it, I took three hours after this, posted it has four likes, it has 102 comments in the first three hours of it. And granted, iO9's reader base is pretty strong, but that goes to show you that short ones can generate more comments necessarily than likes or shares. What is the greatest fight scene of all time? I'd say it has to be something personally. So rankings, it is still something to be considered even if the length isn't the only factor that contributes to it. There are a number of things that go into your search engine and we won't go into them much of your, this isn't an SEO, you know, but quality content and site management are very big over our two categories in this. And then lastly, content lifespan. Yeah, so we call this as CNN versus the New Yorker, which you go to CNN and you know that you're not getting 3,000 reported articles but on the New Yorker you do. This is a good question to ask yourself when you're creating content. Will this be useful in a year? A lot of these, especially I don't want to say political debates that people get into, that will froth to a mouth, that will fight someone tooth and nail over something. I guarantee you about six months neither of you will even remember what I'm talking about. So things like political discourse changes all the time, but what is something, or what is the law close to your right that they could be right today if someone could read it in five years and still say, huh? Well, that's in terms of it. Yeah, so I pulled a couple of articles you could find in parts. For this example, one on the left, 81-house Kurt Cobain and the gendering of Martyrdom. Why is it that Kurt Cobain and the 81-house was just in this? The auger wrote 1250 words on this topic. And I'm going to read it, because it's still a little hard to see, but I imagine it's great. And on the right, a local blog, actual blog, 370 more words about Brits and soul playing and ISIS next month. You don't really need more than that, because the show that's coming up honestly, probably the last three words were just great. I have no information about the show. Is there anything else from out of town? Okay, so the ISIS is a theater in town where musicians play. It's a legitimate Yes, it's these people aren't like right now. The thing on that old experience, it has been, yes. 370 more. You should read that already. That was fantastic. I'm glad you picked that up. I read it a couple of weeks ago and it basically just talks about how Jimmy Hendrix and Kurt Cobain, how when they obviously died by their own doings, the press, the musical press says, tragedy with a voice from the generation, a silence, all of this music and then someone like the inevitable downward decline. So it was interesting how the musical press handles male and female musicians when they're alive. Especially the 27th others. Is he so timeless content? Oh, I'll be talking about that. Can I call next man? Yeah, rock and roll theories are cold. Okay, so we're going to do a quick recap. Long versus short. We've seen some good arguments either way, whether you should go long or whether you should go short. So pros and cons of long. Take it away. Oh yeah, keep your readers on the side. I don't know what I'm saying anywhere about that. That's usually what we're all wanting to do. Rank's higher in Google. That's what we saw earlier on the chart. More social shares. It asserts your authority. I guess that one makes sense. If you're an authority on something, you're going to write more. You're going to have more to say? Perhaps. These are really self-explanatory. I'm wondering what more I can add to this. Increases likelihood of quality backlinks that provide value. We kind of took that one from another list. I think short and long posts do provide value to what it is that you're looking for. But generally speaking the long ones are expected to. So cons massive time average especially if you're writing long, most regularly and just it requires more time to write, to research, to edit. If you're like us, you probably have three jobs and kids and a life and you want to do stuff and you have all these and you can't write for 12 hours a day. What should we do? And it also requires more time for the reviewers who like me making bookmarked and saving for later and then I can pause and then read it. So maybe two overwhelming reviewers to get through. I know I've put down some posts before and I wrote all the way to the bottom and I said no. And you can make us back to that. And depending on the type of writer you are you also have the risk of being less focused. If you go off on tangents and you kind of come to writing circuitously you run the risk of not being focused as well as you would otherwise which can also turn later readers. Short firm posts we can run with this because these are also known as long posts. I'm kind of following into the camp where the things I blog about I'm trying to write less and less words because I used to try to write pages and pages on one post and now I'm trying to it's good writing actually if you can say everything that you're going to say in this and say in that I think it makes you a better writer at least it does for me and it takes less time. You know that's one of the things to do. That's great. Mark Tween if you want me to write a good letter that will take you a long time if you want me to write a short letter it seems like maybe if you want to write an even better letter it will take even if you want a short letter it will take a long time to write a long letter you can give that to you quickly something like that we're really doing poorly on the Mark Tween folks today and I love him. He's like one of my favorite favorite authors. There are some great bloggers who focus on writing and on narrative and our favorite local one is the new you do Desperate Shops in town focusing on building a narrative and writing writing well in a short amount of space so that your readers feel the story without a lot of unnecessary time or time. Short posts are more easily digestible if you have if you're on your lunch break and you're like me you eat at your desk and you're surfing the lab in about two minutes I would much rather read something that long than something that's 27 pages so it's easier to digest also like we said before with the I of 9 page about what's the greatest come-from-flight scene ever they generate more comments I guess there's some, I bet someone's named that as a paragraph online, like the shorter the blog the more comments you get I would, if not we should name it if someone hasn't beaten us today well WWSGD and we found that it helps us to keep our consistent schedule like we said we have several blogs and we separate the rendition to the blogging and so it helps us keep the ideas generating keep things posting on a regular basis for our readers the downsides are topics being on the conference in a number of years if you're writing about your topic is everything you need to know about windsurfing and you have a 200-word article but I don't think for your readers you're going to or not consider you with a 40 that could be done stand up, hold on let's forward that's your strategy our two key words actually you have to spend more time trying to figure out how to put them in so that it reads well and the quality of your writing is more inherent I put that in there because I think that like we were saying with the quality I found it was perfect I didn't have time to write short letters I wrote a long one instead perfect, that's exactly what we're saying it almost takes more writing talent to write something compressed and concise anyone can write pages and pages and stuff but I guess a better writer will write half so how many of you do long long writing how many of you are on the short side of things so we've got a good mix what do you do if you want to switch up and go the other direction making long posts is true divided into I think we've touched on that a couple of times if you like we said if you have what your idea is 40 pages long and people love series online when you say part one, part two, part three these are some of the higher they have higher shareability than the other ones at least they get their click throughs so writing this series that's been one of the pro-blogger tips forever check your thesis are you getting off topic are you staying on in line with where you meant to be writing or did you get sidetracked and then a completely different blog goes to the little one that you already started edit edit edit does that mean let your mom read it well you could let a writer to read it that's right we always have a couple people in our lives that you should trust when you're at the end but it might not should not be your mother I love your mother she's really sweet and I love her but everything you write is too much and she can't be very critical so you might not want to let her read it but you might want to find someone you trust who can't read it and consider building graphics I hope you tell the story if you have something really complicated to explain instead of spinning paragraph after paragraph try and work together a middle just a jpeg that you can take in the mail and say well as you can see this just goes like that and that'll make your reader something to look at it's visual if they're visual learners and it can help you save that space if you tend to write a blog if you write short and you want to make it longer add a personal narrative in fact this is a good tip for a lot of writing a lot of readers when they come to your blog they want this sounds weird to say but they want you in it like they want to hear your voice they want to see the parts of your life that maybe reflect theirs but they want a narrative they want a human voice they want to know that some robot is cranking this out so putting your personal narrative in it if you write about you know making nut bread tomorrow but like this funny thing happened with your sister when she called you right in the middle of it and it's so relevant I would probably put that in I found a good craft blog where the author made her fireworks but the author had like a bloopers section in the bottom here's what I did wrong don't do this and I thought her craft was wrong that was a really good idea did it have pictures? yeah well it was a pink thing and there was white paint which you put in on white paper the first time and that was a bad idea but it showed you that in a simple paint project people would get it wrong the first time and learn from her mistakes I didn't see the pictures but I still feel like I could mess up the painting more than she did I just I'm just imagining reformat just to make it look longer if you're a type of person that just writes one big paragraph for your short post try stretching that out if you've got one sentence a whole bunch of things that are common so if you make a polluted list instead of just one sentence different headings can also help through your flow through your post we could probably do a whole session on how to make your posts look pretty that would be all you she's our asset addition is that the word? sure as much as graphics and video has everyone designed a logo for their blog? do you have a specific look a graphic that is just yours that is on your twitter from your facebook they have a new blog that's a great way I think a lot of the blogs we do even WordPress has the little W you see that W on someone's windshield so it works it doesn't have to tell you it tells you we have a logo everything you need to know there's resources out there if you're not a graphic designer by shape or by hobby sites like ANIMA C-A-N-P-A is a good one they've got templates that are already sized for social media so that you can put images in your posts that share well on your social media channels with that so now the element oh no I messed up because remember at the beginning of this I said we have two elements your audience do you guys think about what they want to be? we have this graphic online the site we've got references in our slides but this site called your 1,000 true fans everybody wants to be in the red section it has huge like popularity even with a few products but most people end up in that long tail and this post recommended that if you could you can find your 1,000 true fans or your 102 fans if you're just getting started if you're 10 true fans about that age 20% of your readers are consuming 80% of your content they're the ones that you want to market towards and they're the ones that will help you generate your profitability how are you going to consider that to be for your club whether it's monetization or product sales whatever you're measuring those true fans are going to be the ones that come back over and over read yourself by your book the 1,000 true fans theory is from this blog on the Technium by Paddy and Kamen Kelly who in 70's helped put out a whole earth catalog which is really cool if you ever see any of those old ones and then he later moved on to be one of the members of Wire Magazine and this is on his blog and it doesn't just go for readers but 1,000 true fans is enough to support yourself at a job it can be your job to have 1,000 true fans if you can get your 1,000 true fans to buy into you at $100 a year whatever that is, take sales, both sales whatever it is then that's not $100,000 a year that's a good mine especially Hashtag so that's what you buy this is your conclusion it's not the link it's what you do in it so we recommend that you consider your topic, your blog, your readers as you go along and again if you're looking to two circles if you just want to get more comments then you can adjust your link to those but we recommend keeping your readers in line so really in conclusion we told everyone coming in here to blow up the link but we didn't really do that a lot we didn't really talk about link that much it was kind of like a side topic do you think they feel cheated? both of them are there any questions? I have slide references which refer specifically to slides that one has to post and some additional reading including our other sites but this is us and if you want to be one of our 1,000 true fans you're welcome be our 1,001 is that a word? 1,001 1,001 so we have I guess about 10 minutes if anyone has a burning question that they will not feel good believing about I think the question is how many blog series have other posts? well blog series I think have a couple of benefits one if it helps it helps break up your ideas instead of that each blog post has a more focused topic which if you do your SAO correctly you can help you with your duty and it also helps you create internal links within your site and makes it more likely that if people come into your site in the one post that they skip around to the other ones too because they see that they're all affected and they read the first one and you say part two who is coming in a week and a half they're going to come back because you won't be welcome and they can't wait that's been the exact statistics but for some reason series do really well they get hired through some of the exact staff but they do well yeah that's an interesting question it was our post this year because of Twitter and that could be something but as we saw before it seems like the really long form stuff is what people are sharing on Facebook and Twitter I think that shorter posts have a more direct call to action that engages the readers like the one we showed the title of the post was literally so readers go into it already with their own idea in mind they read this short little word that says you think it's this one what do you think I agree with you I think that I don't really call it the Twitterization of the internet but ever since Twitter back in 0304 blogs were very solid go-to form and then Twitter now typical log would be here's five cats that remind you of your Thanksgiving dinner with your parents and like it's just five here's a cat here's a cat and that's a long one so I kind of agree with you that we have you know across the Rubicon on that like I don't know how you can buzz speed without words I think it's the Tumblr page they take busty articles and they take the photos and they get out of them and just leave you whatever's left and it's literally five cats that remind you of Thanksgiving here's the cat, here's the cat, here's the copy because that's all they have here's the cat and then a photo here's the cat and the photos they take the photos out and what you're left with is really nothing substantial because a lot of those can have 14 words so I kind of agree with you I think we I don't know are just going to be unsure yeah I think it all depends on what your goals are if that's what you're focused on if you're focused on being people who engage directly in the site or if you'd rather have your Facebook rankings on or if you'd rather just move on that extra place on Google I think you have to weigh your goals with your strategy has anyone seen the movie Julia Julia is that the movie Julia Julia are you? yes I've seen it and there's this great scene where her vlog or who vlog gets to be one of the top five on salon or I forget whatever who's writing the vlog and she's like I have dozens of comments which means think of all the people who were who did comment I think so every one of these metrics I want to say every one of these metrics is its own trap in a way I'm going to be careful of saying that but like you know if you're just going for comments if you're just going for click-throughs if you're just going for rest and you're okay drinking they can become their own trap in themselves so I think that's what we kind of wanted to demonstrate is that length is definitely an important factor and there's statistics to back up why you should go one way or another way but if you're just focusing on one factor then you're missing out on all the others to give you the holistic growth that means more in the long run or what is your topic for matchmaking for camp in 2016 did you turn your blog posts into those books and if so then did you remark them back in your face? These books know we wanted to do something these books were not a project initiated by us we were kind of just co-authors they are movie reviews and it was orchestrated by the college board and the service society that blog about dark shadows so we contributed some movie reviews to these books and they are ours specifically and it was a really good talent for watching bad movies and writing hilarious content about them and I think we did just that we did really bad work Any other questions? Sure So writing styles yeah, we actually had very different writing styles and I think part of that just comes from the topics that we tend to pick up I think you tend to write different paragraphs I'm a little worker though so at least right now and I think largely depends on the topic it came to I also write for my company blog we do marketing for private colleges and so I try to be a little more professional a little more traditional with that than we would do for the monster blog for sure I say your content or the form of your content I really think you should have ownership of a blog you name it, you create it you curate it you give it this look and feel I don't know if there's a I think that you need to make it your own thing I said I know the ones that say this I will teach you how to get a thousand fans tomorrow and it's this pose and I keep reading and I keep reading and at the bottom he's like here's my book we'll try to sell it but we get to the bottom and he's like here's my audio book so yeah I think that's kind of a lead on but in terms of the layout of your post itself I don't know if you went to one of the sessions earlier with e-maps that show you where people's eyes gravity I think the trend towards short paragraphs and spacing things out more is to help your readers scan through it more quickly and headlines do that to you and title, taglines so that readers who are coming to you for specific information that they're looking for can find an appropriate date and it's not lost to this brilliant chopper paragraph that they're not going to be completely yeah I like internal headlines I like three paragraphs then another headline what this is and then another headline that's all I have