Looking at my own stats, surfers click images more than text. I pay pretty close attention to that kind of thing. I write at least the 50 word minimum for blog posts, but usually a fair amount more. So getting search engine attention usually isn’t too difficult. Unless Google is smoking crack again – see the End of the Month thread for more on my thoughts there.

I’ve started experimenting by moving from blogs to 5-8 separate images. Now, I have done better for sales since Friday, but it’s far too soon to tell if it’s due to my image format change.

That’s about the best I can help you with right now dizzers. I can always come back and give an update. Hopefully others will have much more useful feedback for you.

I used to write lots of text, too much really, few are reading it. Now on my main blog I’m usually doing three blocks of collages and three blogs of text in a post and I try to keep the text short. I’ve been doing it for a while and it’s not hurting me. My google traffic isn’t going down and my blog is growing and my sales didn’t fall through the floor.

I decided that I think Google puts more emphasis on update frequency than huge amounts of text. So I was better putting up six short posts as opposed to two very long ones.

But more importantly I just decided that I didn’t really care what Google thought, I made the change mostly because I thought my surfers would like it better. I think they want to see more pictures and they’re more likely to read a couple of lines than six paragraphs.

Honestly, looking at the stats for how long people stay inside a post, especially link list traffic, they’re not reading. They click in, scroll through the collages, and they’re done. Most don’t click a link, lots don’t go further into the blog, they just come, consume, and leave. I think your chances of capturing anything in terms of clicks, sales, or getting surfers deeper into your blog improves with pictures not text.

@Jaym

Ah, I would usually agree with you when it comes to most adult blogs, but I’ve seen considerable differences with longer text, especially those with personality. I’ve also seen great results by adding fiction and experiences to blogs, so visitors click through to read a 700 word piece on a subject in another category. This is a great way to boost time on site and reduce bounce rate.

I’ve actually tried both methods (quality/quantity) and I have seen increases with longer text and fewer posts. It seems to me that in the majority of instances the shorter but more frequent posts gain traffic from other sources, like sharing sites and subscribers, rather than organic. That’s my experience anyway.

Of course, the numbers climb again when I combine the two and create daily posts of 300 or more words with images.

I’ve also played around with adding trailers to another post/page and linking to that from the image and text post, and that also increases time on site and encourages clicking around the blog.

I definitely agree with your point about images encouraging clicks rather than text. This is something I have seen on my own blogs and something I want to increase, with links to other pages coming from graphics within a post. So, I would add a post for a scene and then add a button to encourage clicking through to the fiction.

One of my “trends” for 2017 is the increased emphasis on trigger images. This covers everything from internal linking (almost using gifs and banners to link through to other on-site content) to posting adult gifs on Tumblr tempting clickers in to see more. This is something I really think we’ll be seeing a lot more of in the coming year. Everything is becoming faster, instant, “see it click it”, I think the attention span of the average surfer is becoming far shorter simply because of the wealth of content there is out there. A paragraph of text with a link to your post is no longer gonna cut it, you need action and a trigger to be seen and clicked in a matter of seconds.

Static images might not be enough in the future, and gifs or small images with trigger text will probably be the way to stand out from the crowd.