OK, I admit it, the premise of this post is weird.

After all, why would you want to unlearn the internet marketing skills you’ve built up over the years?

You’ve spent time and money learning all those different parts of the internet marketing jigsaw – creating content, making videos, contributing to forums, maybe guest posting, finding photos and videos that could go viral.

All sorts of stuff.

And some of it is still useful.

But other parts aren’t.

And it’s those parts that you need to wean yourself off and unlearn them.

We actually unlearn things all the time – it’s usually called forgetfulness.

All those dinosaur names that you knew by heart as a child are now occasional glimmers. You might recognise a T-Rex but probably because it starred in Jurassic Park. And you’ve maybe got a vague recollection that a Triceratops has something to do with 3 but you’re not quite sure what. Even though almost any 10 year old would give you the “doesn’t everyone know that” look.

So you’ve managed to unlearn stuff before.

And it’s time to do it again!

Every now and then, it’s worth taking a step back from most things you’re involved with and examining them with as close to fresh eyes as possible.

In a fast paced market such as internet marketing, that’s essential.

What worked yesterday may not be working as effectively today and could be almost extinct by tomorrow.

Content creation is a good example.

A few years ago, you could have churned out short articles and put them on sites such as EzineArticles and GoArticles and got sufficient traffic to earn a good living.

There were online courses galore that told you to write 250 word articles and post them in as many places as possible.

That worked at the time but if you’re still following that method, the chances are high that it’s not really working now.

For a start, the minimum length article that EzineArticles will accept is 400 words and for some niches it’s been increased to 600 words.

But if all you’re doing is the bare minimum, that’s not likely to get results either.

Getting a few hundred words written on sites like iWriter costs a handful of dollars: a bare minimum 400 word article starts at $2.50. Less than the price of a coffee and you don’t get the caffeine rush either.

Things have moved on and the real minimum word count is probably well in excess of 1,000 words. Maybe even nearer 1,500 to 2,000 words or – like some posts I’ve read recently – nearer 10,000 words. The kind of length that would previously have been called a short report and that gets most people who’ve only recently started internet marketing running away because it’s too much and people won’t read that much.

And that’s an attitude to unlearn.

Will everyone read a page that long? Of course not.

But does everyone read a short article that’s been scribbled out on the back of a napkin? No.

Which gives more value?

Almost certainly the longer post.

It gets room to breathe and room to expand on things that would previously either not have been mentioned at all or glanced over in a short sentence, leaving the reader knowing there’s more but otherwise none the wiser.

So if you’ve been inclined towards creating short written content, you need to file that idea in the section of your mind that’s reserved for memories of bygone days and replace that reaction with one that works better now.

In other words, part of the unlearning process is finding new processes to replace the ones that no longer work.

Videos are another area that I suspect will change.

At the moment, most internet marketing products suggest that you create 1 to 2 minute videos.

The logic for that suggestion is that quite a lot of people stop watching after that time.

And, yes, that’s quite likely.

But you can’t deliver much information in a minute or two. Depending on how fast you speak and the final length of the video, that’s maybe between 100 and 300 words.

Notice that’s below the minimum article length on EzineArticles?

Time to unlearn the idea that you should make short videos?

I think so.

You’d need access to YouTube’s behind the scenes stats but I suspect that longer videos are generally better.

I just did a quick search on YouTube for “internet marketing for small business” and the first video is just over 43 minutes long, the second is 7 minutes, the third almost 7 minutes, the fourth 11 minutes and the 5th is 12 minutes.

Do a search in your niche and you’ll probably get similar results.

My guess for this is that it’s moving in the direction of longer videos for near enough exactly the same reason as articles have grown longer: people get more information.

And in both these instances “people” includes the search engines.

YouTube automatically transcribes videos (not always brilliantly well but well enough) and they’re not doing that transcription out of the goodness of their heart.

Sure, a few people will watch with captions and they help accessibility.

Google acknowledge that the automatic captioning is far from perfect and claim that the auto captioning doesn’t get indexed. Being sceptical by nature, I doubt that statement. After all, if it has no use, why spend a lot of computing time and effort doing it?

But that article also says there is an SEO as well as a user benefit in putting up a better transcription – something I need to do as I’ve been lazy and relied on the less-than-perfect auto captioning to date.

Maybe that’s the most important part of this article so far:

Unlearn taking short-cuts!

Almost every internet marketer I speak to (myself included) is forever looking for short-cuts.

In fact, that applies to real life as well.

We watch cookery programs but purchase ready made meals or eat out.

The same happens in other areas of life.

Most of us are time poor.

So – digressing slightly – maybe one thing to unlearn is providing complicated solutions to problems.

I know I’ve just said that longer articles and longer videos are almost certainly the way to go.

And that is the exact opposite of looking for short cuts.

Because logically shorter articles and shorter videos would fit better with the idea of short cuts.

But even a cursory glance at almost any search result will show you that’s not what Google deliver.

And they have enough data to know what we really want, even if we don’t consciously know it ourselves.

They monitor clicks for adverts and organic search results.

They do their best to assess how long we spend on the sites we visit – that part is less precise but enough people use Chrome or are logged in to a Google account whilst browsing or whatever other method Google uses to collect masses of data for Google to know whether people prefer longer or shorter pages amongst all sorts of other information.

Think about your own browsing habits here: if you click through to a result that’s effectively just a short summary, chances are you click back fast. Because even if you don’t read the whole article or watch the whole video, you “could” if you were interested enough.

Maybe that means we need to unlearn how we create content.

Maybe the first few paragraphs of an article or the first minute of a video should be the executive summary and the rest should be an expansion of the introduction.

Food for thought.

And, as ever, there’s not going to be a single “correct” answer.

It will depend on a multitude of factors ranging from what you searched for, how you searched for it, whether it’s a sub-set of another topic and all sorts of other things. Some of which seemingly depend on Google’s mood at the time you searched.

In a lot of ways, unlearning is unlikely. But shelving things that don’t work is easier and is something most people I know should do more often than we do.

If you’ve got any thoughts on unlearning things, feel free to add them below.