How long should a blog post be?
Getting the length of your posts right is often overlooked by bloggers but it is an important part of blogging. If your posts are too short your blog can lose credibility. If they’re too long you can lose your readers attention.
Last year Stuart Brown performed research into the ideal blog post length. He measured the 10 most recent blog posts for each of the Technorati Top 100. Stuart revealed that half of the blogs had an average post length of 100 to 249 words, and the majority of blog posts were between 100 and 500 words long.
This got me thinking – What is the perfect length for a PR blog post?
Unlike Stuart, I don’t have the patience to sit down and measure the word lengths of nearly 1000 blog posts. So instead, I took my most recent list of PR blogs and looked at the five most recent posts published by the top 10 blogs.
These are the average word lengths for the top 10 blogs:
1. PR2.0: 1791 words
2. PR Squared: 405 words
3. A Shel Of My Former Self: 372 words
4. POP! PR Jots: 1042 words
5. Pro PR: 172 words
6. PR Blogger: 229 words
7. Strategic Public Relations: 153 words
8. Young PR: 417 words
9. PRNewser: 186 words
10. A PR Guy’s Musings: 210 words
The posts ranged from a short and snappy 27 words to a whopping 4500 words. Overall the average length was 498 words, which doesn’t include content inside videos, slideshows and podcasts used in the posts.
I consider 498 words a good guideline for a blog post length, but ultimately I don’t think the post length really matters. Writing nothing but 498 word long posts won’t get you noticed or attract new readers. It’s the quality of writing, interestingness of content and frequency of updates that make a good blog great.
And yes, I realise that this post isn’t quite 498 words long.
I am convinced there is no panacea guideline when it comes to post length. It depends too much on the field you’re righting about, the topic you choose and personal style. As it happens with frequency, what works for one person would never work for another. As long as the length is not somehow forced (a post being shrunk or extended just to fit a success pattern) and the readers get something out of it, the number of words is simply unimportant.