The Search For The Perfect Amount Of Words For A Post
I've been spending a lot of time stressing about optimal word-count for blog posts. I decided to do a little research and share my findings. If you Google "how many words should a blog post be", you get 75 million hits. That is a lot of info to go through. Luckily Google "attempts" to put the most relevant information(based on some magic algorithm) on the front page.
The first site we visited, Joe Bunting says:
So then what’s the perfect length?Well… it depends. I’ve experimented with a lot of different lengths, from 100 word mini-posts to 2,000+ word encyclopedia entries. Each has different advantages depending on what you want to get out of your blog.
So that does not tell us much. But, at least now we have a range. This guy thinks a post should fall between 100-2000 words. Okay, lets search around some more.
Neil Patel posts this summary about length of posts on his blog:
If you’re looking for numbers, a post that is above 1,500 words seems to be in the zone of ideal length. I’d shoot for that if I were you.
Okay, this is good, now we are zeroing on a specific range. But wait, 1500 words is a lot. This entire article up to this point is only 216 words, and that is including the quotes. That means a post would have to be 7x longer than this to be optimal.
Back to Google, and we found a post by Darren Rowse on ProBlogger.com. Rowse says:
The biggest question I get asked though, is how long should a post be? My answer to this is usually “write enough to be useful, and then stop”.This, of course, means that a post can be any length, and I certainly don’t follow a set formula. You can be useful in 500 words, or you can be useful in 3000 – it all depends.
Grumble, grumble, now we are "back-tracking" again. This guy puts the range even larger than the first. In his opinion, anything under 500 may be too short, and anything over 3000 may be too long. There is the reoccurring statement across all of these articles though. They all say that there is no exact number. But that's not fair. I want an exact magic number that will work every time. Let's go back to Google and see what else we can find.
Marieke van de Rakt on Yoast wrote this post:
Your blog post should always contain more than 300 words, otherwise your post will have too few words in order to rank in the search engines. If you’re an experienced writer you could write very lengthy posts containing more than 1000 words. Make sure structure and readability are flawless. If you aren’t the best writer, try to maximize the words of your post around 700-800.
I like this answer the best out of all the articles. It gives a good range, and explains why too much, or too little, can be bad.
Conclusion
All of the articles seemed to agree on one thing, do not make posts shorter than 200 words if you expect them to do well with readers, or search engines. The large range varied from 700-2000 words, but all articles seemed to agree that anything over 3000 words is much too long. After 3000 words your article becomes more of a short-story than an article.
Less is more, except when it's not.
I'd say it's all about what you are trying to achieve. More informative posts will of course be longer. Some little jokes on here could just be a few words or even a photograph. That is why I love this site so much - there is no minimum word limit.
Short posts should be profound to get my upvote. Long posts should be interesting enough to keep me reading. I'm looking for new and useful information, things that make me think, or that make me laugh. That's it.
Finding that space between underwhelming and overwhelming while making your point and capturing the reader.
I posted a short article and had no problem at all doing so. It was my first here on Steemit. However, I have been trying to post a 74-page article since yesterday, and I am having no luck at it. Do you know what I could do to get Steemit to accept it?