What is the ideal length for a blog post?

Fairy Blog Mother

The Fairy Blog Mother loves questions (just click on her logo to ask one), and this one was asked yesterday by Susan Perloff, so here is my answer below:

Ideally a blog is meant to be is fast moving and newsy, so posts should not be long, but there are some people (myself included) who get carried away and waffle on for ages.

This is not good. If you have written a long article, it is not best to upload all of it into a post in one go. Divide it up into a series, each post about 5-6 paragraphs, 250-300 words long or within 4 minutes of reading time (this is just a guide), and post them in succession over a period of days. (You can schedule them in advance to do this, read my Scheduling Posts e-course.)

The advantage of scheduling your posts, especially if you can add a cliff-hanger at the end of each one, is that it will encourage your readers to come back to your blog, or subscribe to it via RSS, so they don’t miss the next installment!

As posts are usually read at speed, it’s best to present them so it is easy to glean the jist or subject matter quickly. Once the reader has established this is a post worth reading, and they have the time to do so, then they will settle down to read it properly.

To aid this further, divide your post into subheadings, or use bullet points for emphasis; this breaks up the prose to help the reader digest your post while they read it. Using short paragraphs also makes reading easier, and keep to one subject throughout.

And finally there are some prolific bloggers who only write small posts, preferring to present their nuggets of information and expertise in bite-sized portions. This successfully makes it easy for their followers to read their posts, easy for the writer to produce his posts, and easy for the search engines to index the posts to a higher status. Win win for everybody!

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Alice Elliott

Alice Elliott writes the award winning Fairy Blog Mother blog for beginner and post-beginner bloggers to “explain things really simply” about blogging and WordPress. She provides simple, easy to understand, highly visual courses and tutorials using ordinary, everyday words. Visit her new Beginner Bloggers blog to find her latest learning resources.