I saw an interesting question on twitter and immediately felt that I had to answer it: How long should a blog post be?
I think it\’s great because the person asking it is truly trying to find the magic number of words per post that will help them achieve success.
Perhaps he or she is actually asking this because they are looking for a number that will help them please google.
My answer will hopefully help you decide exactly how long your post needs to be.
In short, your optimal post consists of an opening paragraph, body paragraph(s) and a concluding paragraph.
Here\’s the catch though as I\’m not going to tell you definite lengths for these sections. I can however tell you proportionally what they should look like in comparison to each other.
Your opening paragraph should convey exactly what you want the conversation to be about. You need to tell your audience right away what you want to teach, discuss or question with regards to a particular topic.
An opening paragraph could be a single sentence or ten sentences, but the point is that you leave no question in the readers mind what your topic for the post is going to focus on.
You\’re better off making this section of the post concise and only focused on getting the main idea of your whole article in front of the reader.
This is essential for keeping your audience interested in what you have to say. With just the main point present in the post, your audience will be left wondering how you plan on substantiating your point of view. That\’s what keeps them reading!
You should then create an outline for the supporting paragraph(s) of the post. These could start off as bullet points in a timeline but they should eventually evolve into whole paragraphs themselves. Each paragraph should address a single area of the conversation, or point as it were.
With regards to the length of the post, here is where you have the most lee-way. You could create thirty paragraphs to support your initial opening one and that would be still be an appropriate length for the post.
Why? Because people like to read a lot if each point is valuable and makes the overall idea behind the article a little easier to grasp.
Once you\’ve completed your opening paragraph and supporting paragraph(s), it is now time to bring it all together with a conclusion.
Here you should aim to get something back from your audience. This could be a call for comments, asking them to subscribe, or maybe even trying to get them to open their wallets.
Regardless of why you wrote the post, there should be some action required of the people reading it. Like the opening paragraph, you want to cover one point and make it crystal clear what you want from your audience.
Being concise and easy to understand is the most important part of tying together the ideas in your conclusion paragraph. For this post, I want you to comment on how long your posts are on your blog.