I got a few questions about this so I thought I’d respond on the blog so all the regular readers could get an answer to it.

Since starting this blog (and my old one) I’ve written mostly articles of 1000 words or more. That limited the amount of content I could produce in some ways but it kept feeling natural. My natural tendency is to post bigger articles less often but I’d been getting comments that seemed to put those natural tendencies up for debate.

People were telling me that I was expounding on brevity in articles that could take ten times as long as the usual blog post to read. That point seemed to be a good one. I have a tendency to write more instead of less when I’m in doubt. With those comments, it also made me question whether posting more frequently would also be prefered for the regular readers. Essentially I was wondering, if I wrote it, would they keep coming.

That’s what February’s daily posting schedule was about.

I was running an experiment to see what would happen to the interest people showed in each article. Here’s what I tentatively found out:

1. I love writing shorter articles. This isn’t really related to the readers but I certainly enjoyed writing shorter articles because they allowed me to jump and bob into more topics than I ever could have with long articles.

That being said, I got a few messages suggesting I should have explained stuff further.

2. On a word count basis, those extra articles were less efficient at gaining readers. I thought the increased article count might increase shares and boost views more than my previous articles. That didn’t happen. (I have a few theories to why it didn’t work.)

3. Certain forms of engagement from the reader increased and certain forms of engagement decreased.

Ultimately, the results were a bit of a wash. It seems like the the audience is pretty well mixed about what they prefer. That lead to me extending and adjusting the experiment a little bit. In the next 2 months (currently planned, it may adjust,) I’m planning on writing 1 extra shorter length article every week. I’m curious to see if that’s a little more efficient than daily posting.

Why should you care?

Take note of how unscientific this experiment is. I’m throwing this experiment together with mediocre analytics and a simple plan.

If there is one thing you can always do to improve your own life (or grades or blog or anything) it’s experimentation. You don’t need a perfect experiment to prove what works on a personal basis. You can control 95% of the factors by just being you. (Someone else may do stuff a little differently but you’ll tend to always do it more the same. That controls countless variables to some extent.)

Whenever you think you might have figured out a better way to do something, take the chance and experiment. It’s powerful. And, hell, you might even enjoy it a little.

Do you want to know how to study in less than 15 minutes a night? That’s what this blog is all about. Be sure to follow and check out the archives for all the details. If you are looking to learn it all faster than check out the ebooks in the sidebar.