Deciding on the perfect blog post length can be challenging. Depending on who you ask, you will hear a range of 300 – 3,000 words for the perfect blog post size.
How Long Should Make Your Blog Posts?
If you google “blog post length” you are likely to find varying advice from blogging experts saying that your blog posts should be longer, or shorter. Some gurus even say that they should be broken up into bite-sized pieces of information. This conflicting info can make your head spin.
As you may have already figured out, there is no magic number that guarantees the best results. To be honest, asking how long a blog post should be is almost like asking how long your conversations with other people should last. Sometimes you only need to say a few words; sometimes you have a really deep, long talk. At the end of the day, it’s all about how much you have to say.
Blog Posts Are Like Conversations
There will be times when you just want to share a quick message, tip or how-to. If this is the case, try to keep your posts at a minimum of 300 words, throw in a pretty picture, and a really good headline and call it a day.
There will be times when you may want to go a little deeper. Perhaps you want to share examples, break down a topic and really give your readers tons of juicy information. When the time calls for a longer more in depth blog post, come up with a great blog post idea and make it as long as you need to.
The benefit of longer posts is that they help establish you as the go-to expert/authority in your niche. The better the content the more likely your post will be shared via social media. Keep in mind that longer posts give search engines tons more text to go through and so you’ll have more opportunities to rank for long-tail keywords.
Do A Mix Of Blog Post Types
To make your blog content a bit more organic, the best advice I can give you is to do a mix of long and short blog posts. You also need to avoid forcing yourself to stick with a specific word count when you are writing, that can stump your creative flow and stop you from creating good stuff. If you don’t have tons to say, keep it short and sweet.
Then on the posts that you really seem to have tons to say about, write your heart out. Now the trick with longer posts is to make sure you break it up into small paragraphs (as I’ve done with this post). You also should add subheadings and bullet points to make your content easier to read and keep your readers on track. This way scanners (people like myself who like to skim first) can get an idea of what the content is really about before committing to spend their time reading the whole post.
Now if you love to write and find that you often write a few thousand words, you may want to break your post into several smaller posts instead. This will help your readers from feeling like they are drinking from a fire hose, while consuming your content. Link from one part of the series to the next to make it easy for your blog readers to follow along.
If you find you get more traction from your short posts, you may want to do more of them. On the other hand, if you’re getting more interaction and social media shares from your longer posts, you may want to combine some of your shorter blog post ideas into one longer post.
Now it’s your turn: What’s the average length of your posts?
