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Article Marketers: Do You Know The Right Length For Well-Performing Articles?

Jennifer Ledbetter on November 16, 2012 at 10:52 am

There’s a very interesting conversation taking place inside Warrior Forum discussing the “right” length for an article being used for article marketing purposes.

The thread started with the original poster sharing a link to a pdf put online by EzineArticles.com. Inside the pdf, the staff at EzineArticles wrote:

**A 500-Word Article Will Always Outperform A 1000-Word Article?**

That statement has caused quite a bit of debate by others in the thread. Is a 500-word article better than a 1000-word article? Or is that nonsense?

With all the crazy updates from Google lately and all the stress put on quality content — wouldn’t that mean that a longer article is better than a shorter article?

At the end, I believe it comes down to this question:

**Outperforms How?**

Does that mean:

More click-throughs on your links in your author bio box?
More views?
Better rankings in Google?
More syndication of said article on other sites?
All of the above?

Article marketing is a very popular tactic for those doing affiliate marketing online. It’s a great way to get more exposure, more back links, and hopefully, more sales.

I am a firm believer that there isn’t a “right” length for all articles. To me, you write what is needed to cover the topic of the article. If that takes 400 words, then that is the right length for that article.

If it’s a more involved topic, the “right” length might be 2000 words, or heck, even 3000 words or longer.

As a searcher, I know how “involved” my question is and about how long I should expect the answer to be. As a provider of information online, shouldn’t my first goal be to answer the query to the best of my best ability, regardless of article length?

And that brings up article syndication — a very powerful performance metric for article marketers.

Syndication basically means that other sites republish your article (and bio box) on their site. This is absolutely within EzineArticles’ terms of service. In fact, it’s why the site was created in the first place: to offer site owners a place to get free and relevant content for their sites. In exchange for that content, the author got their bio box and links on that particular owners site, as well.

Free content for the site owner and more-targeted exposure for the author. Win/win.

In this case, I would think longer articles would outperform shorter articles. As mentioned previously, there is a lot of talk about longer articles being favored by Google. As a site owner, I believe I would be more inclined to put a longer article on my site when choosing between a short article and a longer one.

Would you choose the longer article? Why… or why not?

I absolutely agree that we are “writing for a medium that embraces instant gratification,” but are articles with fewer words the solution to providing that gratification to our readers and getting the performance from our articles that we want?

Is There A “Right” Length Or Word Count Of An Article?

I’d love to hear your feedback on this. What are your thoughts?

Feel free to share in the comments area.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Jennifer Ledbetter

Jennifer Ledbetter aka "PotPieGirl" is most known as an affiliate marketer who went from zero to six-figures a year starting with all free methods (like she teaches at OneWeekMarketing.com).