Every few months some blogging guru will offer up advice saying that our blog posts need to be longer, or shorter, or that they should be broken up into 10 pages of bite-sized chunks! It can make you crazy.
So what’s the truth? More words or fewer words? How long should your blog posts really be to make it an effective blog post? Let’s take a look.
FREE Download: 21 Days To A Better Blog
How Many Words For An Effective Blog Post?
It would be great if there was a magic number that guaranteed the best results, wouldn’t it?
But that’s like asking someone to tell you how long your conversations with other people should be. Sometimes it’s nothing more than a few words or sentences. Sometimes you have a nice long chat. It all depends on how much you have to say to each other, doesn’t it?
What Have You Got To Say?
The same approach works well with your blog posts. For example, sometimes you’re sharing just a quick tip or a recipe. In that case something around 200 to 300 words will do just fine. Add a pretty picture and call it good.
Other times you want to go into a little more depth.
You want to cover different aspects of a topic, share some examples and give your readers as much information as you can. In those cases make it as long as you need to make it. Long posts are great. They help establish your authority and if the content provides good value, they’re often shared on social media. Plus long posts give the search engines a lot of text to sift through and give you more chances to rank for long tail keywords.
Quality Not Quantity
The best advice is to mix longer and shorter blog posts. It will make your blog seem more natural and organic. Don’t force yourself to reach a certain magic word count if you don’t have that much to say on a topic. Keep it short and to the point. Quality is much better than quantity. And, your readers will thank you.
If on the other hand, you have a lot to share in a different post, go for it.
Break the longer content up into small paragraphs and help your readers stay on track with subheadings and bullet points. Make it easy to scan longer posts so your readers can get an idea of what the content is about before they commit to reading it all.
And if you’re finding yourself writing a few thousand words, consider breaking it up into a series of blog posts instead. It will help both you and your readers from getting overwhelmed with one long post. Link from one part of the series to the next to make it easy for your blog readers to follow along.
Don’t Make Your Blog a Chore
Above all, enjoy the process of writing and pay attention to what your readers prefer. If your short posts tend to do better, consider keeping your posts short and to the point. If you’re getting a lot more engagement and social media shares on longer posts, combine a few of the shorter blog post ideas into a longer one.
And whatever you do, don’t get hung up on the number of words.
Free Download: 21 Days To A Better Blog
Blogs are big, even if they’re small. Consumers prefer to read and view information from fellow online entrepreneurs rather than hard hitting sales pitches they find on corporate websites. Blogging remains a marketing method that costs very little to set up and people from all walks of life have created a money making blog.
To learn more ways to monetize your blog or to improve your existing blog, download my free checklist, 21 Days To A Better Blog. Discover 21 different one-a-day tasks and activities for getting more traffic, more prospects, more customers and more sales.
