I hate to sound like a politician but, it depends. At this point, don't worry, I'm not going to start talking politics although if there was any relation to politics then by any measurement, a blog post should be shorter than the Brexit process! How long should a blog post be?The length of a blog post depends on your line of business, what the topic is and what your objectives are.
My strong preference is always to have posts that are between 300-800 words in length. Anything short of 300 words makes it very difficult to get the key message of a blog post over to your audience while longer posts start to lose readers who, like all of us in today's busy world, have short attention spans. If you want your blog posts to appear in search results so that your business can be found then over 600 words is best, although this doesn't mean that every post should be that long/ Still there? What if I can't keep the readers attention? You can keep people's attention for longer with images and titles (like the one above) but longer blog posts tend to be too wordy or lack focus. A good blog post should have a call to action at the end and the more reading and scrolling on a mobile device to read the full article risks the reader losing interest and not getting to the call to action at the end. But I need more words to describe my concept or issue! If you are a rocket scientist (or in the area of anything to do with science!) you may need longer blog posts to explain something. Blog posts can often be used to provide educational or informative insights and longer blog posts may be necessary but this should be for occasional blog posts, not for every post. My SEO guy says they should be 3,000 words long If you are familiar with Search Engine Optimisation (getting to the top of Google or SEO for short) then you will most likely have been told to pack your posts with the right keywords and that the more visitors and the longer they stay on your page then the higher Google will rank your page in search. To this end, you may have been told to write blog posts that are well over 1,000 words. These are valid points but consider these points...
You may want to contrast long blog posts with marketing blog posts from Seth Godin - a well-known marketing guru who frequently writes short posts, sometimes that are less than 200 words. There aren't many marketing experts better than Seth so he must be doing something right. In summary There is no definite rule to how long a blog post should be, but they should be easy to read, informative and add value. They should include headings, images and if possible, video. If you can get the message across in less than 300 words then perfect. If you need over 800 words to do it from time to time then that's fine, but as a general rule, 3-800 words offers a great balance in meeting your objectives. Is it possible to get the message across in less than 800 words? Well, I believe it is. Thanks for reading my sub-600 word blog post! Need help writing blog posts? Contact us
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written byThe opinions in these blog posts are those of marketing expert and book author Darren Hignett. Categories
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