Every writer facing a blinking cursor has thought—with varying degrees of distress, directly proportional to how near the deadline is—about how long their post should be. The most common question from my fellow writers before we launched the blog at my last employer was, “How long should a post be?” The irritating but honest answer is: as long as it needs to be. Depending on the topic, this could mean just a few hundred words. Or it could mean 1,000. The secret is there’s no such thing as a perfect blog post word count—much more important is the relevance of the words themselves.
On one hand, it can be tempting to write everything you know about your chosen subject—particularly if you've just launched your blog or content-creation efforts. Resist this urge. Let’s say your intended post will offer some do-it-yourself garbage disposal repair tips. Your readers doesn't need 1,500 introductory words on the origins and evolution of garbage disposals in the modern kitchen, how to choose the best one for their home, and so on. They just need the 300-400 words that actually reveal how to safely remove the hopelessly lodged Lego currently making the disposal sound more like Aunt Ethel’s 1970s Buick. If they can't find those key, sanity-restoring words pretty quickly, they'll likely go on to the next search result, and, in addition to missing out on their undying gratitude, you'll also miss out on the audience-building opportunity.
To be fair, maybe readers can’t fix the garbage disposal without some introductory context. No problem. Write all the context in separate posts—however many makes sense—and then link to them where relevant as you walk through the Lego-removal process. Or if someone else has kindly, if unintentionally, done the heavy lifting for you, link to their piece. This approach saves you effort and allows you to get to your point quicker—for which your readers will thank you (again, sanity restoration).
On the other hand, consider that an effective post can be as brief as a good chart or illustration and a couple hundred words explaining it. There are myriad downsides to society’s collective inability to focus for more than 10 seconds at a time, all beyond the scope of this piece—but one upside is short, pithy posts are likelier to be consumed by your audience. Even in today's inflationary world, a picture is still worth 1,000 words.[i]
The right length for your post is one that achieves balance. Does it say enough about your topic that your audience can follow you? (Having someone objective give your draft a read helps answer this question.) Or does it say so much your audience gets lost or abandons it before you reach your thesis? If you struggle with structure, the five-paragraph model can be a helpful starting point—though we're much more in the realm of pirate code than rules to which you must slavishly adhere, so don't let arbitrary guidelines force you into a post that tries to do too much or that doesn't accomplish its goal.
Once you have a decent draft, achieving balance becomes primarily a matter of rigorous, ruthless editing. Start by ensuring you can easily identify your thesis, and then make sure all your paragraphs, however many there are, support that thesis. For any ancillary content that doesn't directly support your thesis, ask yourself whether it’s critical to understanding the thesis. If so, can you link to something else you’ve written or someone else has written? If not, maybe you have some groundwork pieces to write first. And if it’s not critical, hold your breath and cut the paragraph, no matter how much you like it. It's worth remembering more isn't always better—sometimes, it's just more.
[i] Once an economist, always an economist.
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