Writing A Blog Post

When writing a blog post one factor that comes in to play is the length of that post. How long should it be or how short should it be? There are a couple (or maybe more) different schools of thought on the optimal length of a blog post. Some will say keep the post short because the average person only stays on a blog for about 96 seconds. Another popular opinion about writing a blog post is that it should be no less than 250 words. Of these two thoughts which one is right?

Let’s discuss the “shorter is sweeter” theory first. I’ll just say upfront that I have a tendency to disagree with this theory. Typically the bloggers who go by this strategy say that the blog post should be 100 words or less. (As an example what you have read to this point is 144 words). If I had stopped at 100 words or less, just how much information would you have gleaned from the post? I suppose if a blog post was using several images and possibly a video, you could get your message across in 100 words or less. That isn’t the norm, though. So, maybe an occasional short post could work on your Beginner Blog or even for us veteran bloggers. I don’t believe it should be the only strategy that you should use though.

The theory that I subscribe to and so do many of the bloggers that I know is the “no less than 250 words” strategy. (We are at 250 words here.) As you can see you can place some nice content at around 250 words but does it get my complete point across? Well, in this instance, it does not. It does depend on what you are writing about but in my opinion there is very little that you can write about and do it in less than 250 words.

When writing a blog post, I would think that you would want your readers to get something out of it. An explanation of something, information about a specific item or even something you want to rant about. My blog posts usually end up at 300 or more words but then I am a little verbose at times. I can see that extra long blog posts might cause a reader to lose interest and leave the page so probably 1,000 words in a post might be overkill. There is no need to make a post long for the sake of being long.

In my humble opinion the optimal length of a blog post should be 250 or more words and as long as it needs to be to give your reader the information they came looking for. If you can do that in less than 100 words, I applaud you! Personally I think you should plan on 250 word or more blog posts as your general strategy when writing on your blog. Just in case you are wondering, this post is ending with 487 words.