Guilty here
but it's a necessary evil. There are 2 main reasons:1, It REALLY helps with google. If you have longer content you are likley to get higher in google so I am for 1000 words. Also the longer someone spends reading an article the higher up in google it goes as google sees the article as more useful. But you do have to balance it as if its too long people click back in seconds and it harms you in google. In my defense I do only write about the recipe and put up useful and interesting photos, you will never hear me going on about my dog, holiday in France or children or any total wordcrap that no one cares about! I try to make it useful and interesting for readers. I'm always going back and re-writing content or jigging things around to get the right balance. I've got a click to recipe button so people can skip all the blurb and go right to the recipe card.
2, So people scroll and get served a few adverts. My ad company tells you to aim for 8 adverts a mobile user. I know it sounds sketchy but I used to not do this and make a fraction of what I do and it is a full time job so I need to make at least a grand a month. Jack goes on about how she makes all her recipes for free, well we all do it's not special! You don't see recipes behind a paywall as its a struggle to get the traffic let alone charge for it. The longer content does get you more hits from google and more money, but I don't take the piss.
Doing blogging professionally does require a lot of work to research what will do well and how to get people to see it. Don't get me wrong I'm not comparing my job to a paramedic, but it's not a case of creating any old stuff and posting it. You have to really plan.
Vanity bloggers like Jack (and many others on social media) can just adapt any old recipe and post it up without much care and attention or work to promote it.
Thanks for the offers to share my blog that's really sweet, although I would prefer to be save with my anonymity. Covid-19 has really hit advertising rates on my blog - they are down significantly from last year and expected to keep falling lower. But that's fine, it happens and I've made a good living for the last few years for times like this so that my mortgage has been overpaid and I have savings so you won't hear me complain. I view every month I was able to make more money from a job I hated and be my own boss as a blessing. This kind of work by it's own nature is massively variable, you have to take the rough with the smooth. At any time google or pinterest could change their algorithm and half your income.
A brilliant insight. Thank you.
