Martin Kihn at Gartner claims that the #1 thing that makes a successful blog post is longer content. He explains that the reasons for this are:

• SEO
• Necessary effort
• Time fatigue (people want to read substantial content)

It might seem strange to promote this using a Passle blog - after all our USP is to create content easily on the go. Yet, ease of creation doesn't necessarily mean short and rushed content. I actually think that Passle is well suited to medium-length posts, not only because it's extremely easy on the eye....

I had a quick look at our most read posts on this blog since September, and they're all quite long. The most read post,The Top 5 Content Marketing Books of 2015 is 501 words long for instance and took longer than the average Passle post to create (you have to count all the reading time for one!)

The second most read post is my colleague Connor's How to Differentiate Yourself on LinkedIn(330 words), and the third is 5 'Boring' Companies that are Rocking Instagram (547 words). Again, both are considered pieces of average size.

What conclusions do I draw?

Well it seems clear that odd-numbered lists are still popular! More importantly, what these three posts have in common is that they're actually useful and/or interesting. So I think I'm in agreement with Kihn that content-free content is not the way to go: whatever sector you work in, readers are going to want to read something that stands out from all the other content.

So go forth and be different!