3 things to consider

Clients ask this question all the time.

“How long should our blog posts be?”

My answer? It depends.

As a business owner or marketing professional, you’ll need to make a few decisions in order to know whether short or long content works best for your situation. The good news is once those decisions are made, you can have greater confidence your content will get read and do the job you put it out there to do.

That’s all you really want, right? Let’s talk about the three main considerations to determine content length.

What are your goals?

This is the first and most important question to ask. What are your goals for the content you’re writing? Do you want to build authority? Just entertain? Provide valuable information? Attract more readers? Increase social engagement?

You probably have more than one goal for your content,
but choose the most important one and focus on that for now.

If your goal is to build authority to establish yourself as an expert in your space, longer content is critical. You’ll need to create quality, sometimes detailed content to show that you know your stuff. You can’t do that with a 500 word post, unless what you sell is incredibly simple and easy to sell.

The secret to creating content that builds authority is to arouse emotion in your readers, keeping them on your site longer. How do you do that?

Tell a story. A good story.

Weave the depth of your knowledge into the story in a compelling way, and you’ll grow your audience because they’ll see you as a credible resource.

As you’re telling the story, keep your content focused on one topic. If you flop around from one topic to another or try to cram too much into one post, your readers will feel overwhelmed or worse, annoyed. Pretty sure you don’t want to do that.

Creating longer, high quality content that tells a story will generate more social engagement and shares. We all want more shares, right? Yep.

The problem is some studies show very long content (over 3,000 words) gets the most shares. Most businesses just aren’t going to write content of that length. And many audiences won’t read it. The best you can do is test your audience (more on that later).

Longer content has also been shown to produce better Google ranking results than shorter content. Google is looking for quality content to fulfill the desires of readers searching for information.

If your content isn’t long enough, Google will shove you down
the rankings, and all your SEO efforts will be lost.

There is a caveat to everything I’ve just said. If you have lots of authority already, you may be able to write shorter content.

Let’s say your business is well established and everyone knows you as THE authority in your space (think Nike or Disney). This situation allows you to create shorter content to keep your readers around because you don’t need to teach them about your topic or your brand. They already know you.

However, even if you’re in that enviable situation, you must know what your audience prefers. In fact, every business needs to know what their audience wants from them. That’s your next consideration.

What does your audience like?

You need to know both what your audience prefers and what they need from you in order make them your fans. If you’re new to the scene, you might not know. Try checking out your successful competition to see what they’re doing. If they write short content, this may indicate that your audience will prefer short content.

The best way to know what your audience likes is to test different types of content. If you’re wondering what length of blog post will be most effective, write several longer posts and several short posts. Then watch your stats to see how they compare to each other.

Does the longer content get more shares, keep readers on your site longer, or turn readers into customers? Then write more of it. Keep in mind you won’t need to post every day if your content runs in the sweet spot of word count, between 1,200 and 2,000 words. Once a week is usually enough.

It’s also important to know where you are in the process of building an audience. If you’re just starting to build your tribe, you’ll probably need that long content to establish your authority and attract attention.

However, if your audience is well established and you can produce remarkably effective content, you can pull off shorter posts. The down side here is you must post more often, probably daily.

Now for the final question: do I have time to do this?

Can you create it?

If you couldn’t guess, long content is more time consuming to create. It requires research. Sometimes lots of research. And it should tell a compelling story to keep readers interested.

A fair amount of writing skill is required to pump out great long content. It’s easy to lose readers halfway through. Hooking your reader early is crucial to keeping them on the page reading your content. Your writing must be high quality, concise, purposeful and focused.

If you can’t get them all the way to the end where your call to action lives,
you’ve lost the game.

And don’t be fooled into thinking writing short content is easier. The fewer words you use, the harder it is to get them right. You’ll have to hook your reader, give them something of value, be memorable, and end with a call to action they’ll want to answer, all in under 500 words. Not easy if your writing skills aren’t up to par.

If you feel like you can pull this off yourself or someone in your business can do it, get to work and start testing your posts. See what your audience likes. Try not to have any preconceived notions. Be open to whatever comes and work from those results.

Do you already know you can’t do this yourself? OK. Don’t panic. There are plenty of talented freelance writers our there to help. Ask your trusted colleagues for recommendations. Talk to a couple writers to find someone you’re comfortable with.

If I can help, I’d be happy to chat with you about projects you need to get done. I just asked my husband if I’m “mostly likable,” and he said “yeah, mostly.” Maybe I can be your “mostly likable” freelancer. I’m definitely your no-drama freelancer. Call or email anytime.