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Every few months we get some new advice from a blogging guru 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. There was a time when we were told all we needed was a introduction paragraph and we could list our products to feature for sale or affiliate income. These trends come and go. But really, how long should your blog posts be?
It would be great if there was a magic number that guaranteed 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 talk. It all depends on how much you have to say to each other, doesn’t it?
How Long Should The Blog Post Be? Can We Really Know?
The purpose of our blog post is to have a conversation with the reader isn’t it? So it makes sense to treat them the same way, right? That is why this same approach works well with your blog posts. Sometimes you’re sharing just a quick tip or a recipe for example. 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 is great, they are 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.
Having more text in a long post gives you more opportunity to add in some SEO value to the blog post. You have more opportunity to add in the keywords for that blog post without sounding too repetitive. Having a long blog would require you to break the content up with subheadings and images. These are excellent spots to add in the keywords so the blog post could rank better in search engines. And certainly a great technique to use when you want to know how to get more traffic on your blog.
Can We Say How Many Words Should A Blog Post Be Then?
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. 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.
The number of words your blog post has doesn’t matter. What matters is how much information you are sharing within the post. What matters is, are you answering your reader’s problems in your blog post? Are they seeing clarity while reading your blog post? Do they have all the information they need from the blog post? Use the number of words it takes to get your point across.
Is There Such a Thing As A Blog Post Too Big?
If you find 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. We are living in the age of skim readers. Therefore, writing an article that is way big would not reach your audience well. They would just see the sheer size of the blog post and click away without even reading it. You can get the point across to your target audience when you break the giant blog post into a blog series and connect them together.
A good blog series of related blog posts is also a great opportunity for some interlinking within the blog. You can now link from one part of the series to the next to make it easy for your blog readers to follow along. Interlinking the blog series also increases the SEO power of the website.
When you create links from one blog post to another within the website, the posts become more and more relevant to one another, making your website stronger and tighter. This attracts the search engine bots, as well as seems more relevant to the readers who come across your website.
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. Be sure to remember your audience’s preference when determining if the blog posts on your website should be short or long.
Learn The Art of Creating Blog Post That Converts To Sales
Remember once again, there is no magic winning number. Be sure to create blog posts with the content in mind, and your target market’s preference. Please your readers and, as a bonus, the search engines, when you create blog posts of the size that is the right for your website.