The best tactics for blogging are the least popular, according to Orbit Media’s annual survey of bloggers. Now in its 12th year, the poll of 12,971 bloggers shows that driving results is getting harder, and highlights a range of best practices in content creation and promotion that may have passed you by:

• Length: Posts are getting shorter, but high-performers are more than 2000 words.
• Influencers: Few bother to include content from leading voices, even though this is such a powerful tactic.
• Frequency: Bloggers are posting less frequently but multiple posts per week does best.
• Images: Richly illustrated posts outperform the standard one picture per post.
• Analytics: Bloggers are still not spending enough time looking at their data, and those that do report the strongest results.

What makes a high performing blog post?

The three most important measures reported by survey respondents were traffic and visibility, business leads, and brand building. And on average, 21% said they got ‘strong results’. That compares to 30% six years ago, and underlines the challenges of getting blog posts to cut through.

1. The importance of writing in depth

Since the last survey, the average length of posts has fallen 3.4% to 1333 words. And yet, writing posts more than 2,000 words is now the single most important performance factor.

Most people I talk to have become convinced that with attention spans falling, writing short is essential. But the counter-argument – that people are seeking trustworthy, authoritative content, which tends to be longer – appears to be stronger.

Search engines prefer longer material; length appears to signal quality to the algorithm. And longer pieces are much more likely to answer all the obvious questions – to the satisfaction of search algorithms and real users. Finally, one way of dealing with increased competition is to create richer, more in-depth material.

2. Collaborate with influencers

The term ‘influencers’ can be a bit confusing. We’re not talking here about wannabe models or political firebrands, but subject matter experts who can add depth to your content. The two most obvious use cases are inviting guests to your podcasts or, more straightforwardly, including responses from your conversations with them in your blog posts.

By including the thoughts of others, you validate their expertise; they will likely share the resulting content with their networks.

3. Publish multiple times per week.

The proportion of bloggers posting multiple times per week has halved since the survey began, but over the past year, this factor has jumped in importance. The question of publishing frequency is a tricky one: if greater volume equates to poorer quality, there may be no net gain. The authors of the report note there is little overlap between those who post more frequently and those who write long. There are two separate strategies here – those who go big on length, and those who go big on volume. Both appear to work.

I’m a little surprised by this finding – it’s the only one that does not involve higher quality content. And it will be interesting to see if this is such a strong performance factor when next year’s results come in.

4. Use more images

Only 19% of bloggers use four or more images in their posts. And yet they are much more likely to report strong results.

There are a couple of factors at play here. The first is that images are a signal of quality – they indicate that care has been taken and recognise that most people find visual material easier to digest than text. The second is that social media has conditioned us to view streams of text and images, and we are more likely to stay with a richly illustrated post that looks a bit like a social stream.

5. Check the analytics

Checking analytics regularly to see what works and what doesn’t makes a huge difference. It’s the only way to get a feel for what’s working and what isn’t. Those who always check their analytics are 50% more likely to report a strong performance.

Given this, why don’t most bloggers bother? It feels like such a natural thing – to check how your work has been received. But it also involves looking at charts and tables in systems with lots of options. For many, this is a mind-numbing technical task. And it’s true that to get a real sense of what’s driving performance you need to devote some quality time to this.

6. Use paid promotion channels

Paid promotion amounts to buying success. But it comes relatively low in the list of performance-enhancing tactics. Effective paid promotion needs to be extremely well targeted, and that tends to be expensive. I’ve worked with a number of organisations with poorly defined ‘cheap and cheerful’ targeting who have been simply wasting their money.

7. Spend 6+ hours per article

The average time spent on posts has fallen for the third year, and AI appears to have accelerated the trend.

Those taking six hours or longer do as well as those who use paid promotion channels. Again, this is a quality issue – writing long, getting the visuals right and packaging effectively just takes time.

The good news is that AI is helping to speed up most aspects of content production, and the survey shows that those who are ignoring AI are under-performing.

Working with professional editors was sixth most effective tactic last year, but does not appear in 2025’s results. This is down to the growing use of AI as an editorial aid.

8. Write guest posts

Writing guest posts on other platforms doubles your chances of high performance. Guest posting is a highly targeted form of content marketing that gets you introduced to new audiences and helps to establish authority. It can be time-consuming, which is why it’s a minoirty activity.

9. Add video to articles

Video is under-used in posts. It has an outsized impact on performance but regarded by many bloggers as too complicated. But here’s the thing, you don’t have to create video yourself, you simply need to embed it. The content needs to be relevant, but using a YouTube embed will suffice.

What’s surprising is that audio does even better.

10. Research key phrases

There’s a very clear correlation between high-performing bloggers and their use of SEO tactics.