3 Blogging Trends You need to Know
The Ideal Blog Length, Using Images, and List Posts in Content Marketing
In the ever-changing world of blogging and content marketing, you have to stay ahead of the curve to stay relevant. Online data, advertising or blogging trends, even professional research can be obsolete in a matter of months if you’re doing digital business. Our industry is a challenging, saturated, competitive landscape that’s always in flux. To run a successful blogging, content marketing, or social media campaign, taking advantage of current and upcoming trends is absolutely imperative.
The Emergent Digital team is constantly producing articles and social media content for our lovely clients, so we like to stay ahead of the marketing curve and pass our findings on to you. A few recent blogging trends have been eye-opening, with digital marketing taking its typical twists and turns in the era of online media. Social media advertising is now dominated by real-time video with the advent of Snapchat and Instagram Stories. Website design and SEO has gone all-out mobile via user trends and the latest Google algorithm updates. Finally, effective blogging has become a blend of visual arts, long-form content production, and online social engagement.
Feeling overwhelmed already? Take it easy, we’ve done all the hard work for you.
1) The Best Blog Posts are Getting Longer
Remember just a few years ago when the ideal blog post was only 400-700 words max? Well my friend, the times they are a changin’. Based on recent research put forth by Medium, long-form content has inexplicably overcome the millennial attention span. Current data shows an ideal blog post length is 1,600 words long or 7 minutes worth of reading.
What may be the most shocking aspect of these findings is that all modern blogging research points to this trend, and it’s not just content marketing for SEO purposes. Users are actually spending more time engaged with the content they decide to read in addition to providing a boost to search engine rankings. Finally, these longer blogs are the most effective for “marketing your content marketing” on social media, as blogs with over 1,600 words are liked and shared much more than their shorter counterparts.
It’s time to roll up those sleeves and light up those keyboards, bloggers!
2) Blogging Trends are all about Images and Visual Content
To make those long blog posts you’re writing even longer on the page, images and visual content are being used more than ever in the digital marketing landscape… and for good reason. Bloggers who use visuals in their posting can generate up to 94% more views than their text-only counterparts. Furthermore, there are now a wide variety of visual content formats being used in the blogging world, including:
- Images
- Video
- Captioned Photos & Quote Images
- Infographics
- Charts and other Visual Data
- Embedded Social Media
- Interactive & 360 Video
- GIFs
- SlideShare Decks
It seems like developing a great blogging skill set has quickly become much more difficult and diverse than just being a great writer. The good news is that there is now a multitude of awesome free online design tools at bloggers’ fingertips. We suggest trying out several methods of creating and curating visual media for your blog to find out which ones work best for your style, skill, and audience.
3) Lists are (still) on the Rise in Content Marketing
Is this the reason we numbered our 3 blogging and content marketing trends in the title of this article? You bet your sweet bippy. List posts can be about anything if you’re a blogger, and these can be incorporated into virtually any content marketing strategy. The main reasons list posts are so effective are:
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List posts are increasingly effective and pervasive throughout the blogging universe. Numbers stand out in headlines and grab your reader’s attention
- Lists provide easily digestible, memorable, and thus valuable information to your audience
- The short nature of bullet-point headings in a list sum up your content succinctly
A numbered list within a list post? We’ve truly gone meta with this one. However, the point cannot be overstated: use list posts in your blogging strategy. This has long been a time-honored tactic in the content marketing world, and the trend is still on the rise.
Questions? Comments? Tips of your own? Leave a comment below!
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