Freelance Writing

I have been reading a lot lately on how long blog posts should be. Some bloggers say that more words are better, whereas others are of the thinking that fewer words help to get to the point sooner. Personally, I am a bit divided on this subject. For this reason, I tend to mix in both long and short posts, and really never think about this when I am writing.

When I am composing content for this blog, I do not constantly think about the word count Instead, I concentrate on the overall quality. But even then, having an idea on the average length of each blog post is very important.

As you may have noticed, I began to post more than one time per day as of late. In fact, some days I have posted as many as five times. And if everything stays on track, I plan on continuing at a rate of two or more posts per day for the foreseeable future. Obviously, with posting so many times per day, the length of each one is something that I want to get right.

The majority of my blog posts as of late range from 350 to 700 words. Of course, sometimes I only hit a couple hundred words, but other times I close in on 1,000. I have come up with several pros and cons for both long and short posts.

First off, let’s take a close look at shorter blog posts. The main advantage is that your readers will not have to sift through information that they do not want to read. In other words, you can get right to the point without rambling on. But at the same time, can you really say what you need to in only 200 words or so? In some cases, the answer may be yes. Just make sure that you do not end your post without telling readers what they want to hear. Leaving them unfulfilled is never a good idea. This is something that I am working on with each post that I make.

On the other side of things, longer blog posts have pros and cons as well. To combat what was said above, a longer post allows you to include more information. But again, this information is only useful if it is fact filled as opposed to fluff or filler. A big downside of long blog posts is that they take longer to write. In turn, you may not be able to produce as much content as you would like. This is why you will see that some blogs only post twice a week, but they are in excess of 1,000 words each time.

All in all, I do not think that quality and length are directly tied together at all times. Many bloggers will tell you that shorter posts are not of high quality, but I do not feel this way. As long as you are offering useful information that is interesting to your readers, you should feel as if you are achieving a high level of quality. 

By the way, this post came in at right around 500 words.