I started growing Location Rebel during a time where it was all about the “epic blog post.”
The longer, and the more detailed, the better.
Let’s face it, that’s still the general mindset.
I still fall into this trap, and assume that if I write a 5,000 word blog post, it’s going to be shared all over the internet.
Not the case.
Sometime’s that “epic” post your writing also means “bloated” and “boring.
So how long should your blog post be?
A blog post should be long enough to get your point across. No more, no less.
Short blog posts can be useful, easy to digest, and when done right, they don’t make you go sifting through a bunch of extra words to get to the point.
My point? Don’t always try and write the epic post. Mix it up. Your calendar and readers will thank you for it.
This reminds me of the difference among high school, college, and graduate-level essays. In high school, you were told that your essay should be at least 5 pages. In college, you were told your essay should be no more than 5 pages. And in graduate school*, you were told to write essays that got the point across, regardless of length.
*This was graduate school in the sciences, so I’m sure that humanities grad students may disagree. 🙂
P.S. Congrats on the work quitting anniversary!
Thanks Mallie!
You’d think they would all just follow suit and skip to the “just get your point across part”. Seems like thats the better skill to have over the long term 🙂
I recently began limiting my blog posts to 750 words because once I start writing, I keep thinking of more things to add to my post.
Putting a word limit on my posts helps keep the focus tighter.
I also think that people have a shorter attention span for blog posts than for, say, a book.
TL;DR Keep it short. 🙂
Agreed.
I think certain types of posts can lend themselves well to being longer, but if it’s a general opinion piece or something along those lines, it’s easy to start rambling and repeating yourself – which in turn, waters down the message.
Best part about this- you left 5 years ago and are kicking ass!! Congrats man!
Great stuff Sean. Digging the short post too, point made, whether or not it was intentional. 🙂 Personally, I have a short attention span so the shorter the blog post and the more to the point it is, the better chance of me reading it. I’ve always sided with quality over quantity. If 3000 words is necessary to create a quality piece, than great. I always focus on putting out good quality work, and not worry so much about the word count. Congrats on your work quitting anniversary too…. Awesome man! Cheers!
I’m the same way. Even though longer blog posts I’ve found are more likely to be shared, they end up being less useful to me personally because I never take the time to read them all the way through.
Sean,
Congrats on the 5 year mark! I’ll bet it seems like a thousand centuries ago that you were there.
I agree about the length of blog posts, but I just wanted to get your thoughts on the SEO ramifications of writing a short vs. long post. I just wrote a post that was about 2700 words and went in depth on something that everyone else was writing only a cursory amount on. I noticed that my page shot up to number 2 on google for a couple days and then slowly but surely moved down to the bottom of the first page.
Hard to guess why this happened, but in your opinion was this more because of a long detailed write up on the subject, or more because of freshness? It was by far my most popular post.
I guess what I’m saying is that long detailed posts that actually need to be long and contain no fluff are considered greater than short posts that get to the point, in the eyes of google at least.
With SEO, I’ve found frequently Google will bounce posts up and down the rankings before finally settling somewhere lower for a period of time before moving it back up.
I’ve had new posts get up to #2 or 3 for a big keyword for a couple days, before being sent back down to the 2nd or 3rd page.
From an SEO perspective, I still think long posts with photos are going to be better for SEO. However, in terms of engaging your audience with different types of content, and getting them to take action on something – the short posts are better.
So it’s really a matter of deciding what your goals are and what your readers respond to.
Thanks for this post Sean!
This has been one of my dilemmas ever since I started blogging. I’m always asking myself if my post is too short and if it falls below 1000 words, I feel pressured to reach it by adding more details than I already have.
Thanks for sharing this!
Regards,
Noel
Congratulations on the anniversary! That is pretty amazing. Short and simple is sometimes the best answer. I agree that there is no magic number for blog posts. As you said, whatever is best for you to get to your point across in the best possible way.
Sean,
Happy quitterversary. It looks as if you’ve accomplished a ton in the past five years and I’m sure you’ll continue on that track. Success and happiness operate like compound interest, so it should be easy to do 🙂
I was writing a post this morning, and I caught myself anxiously looking at the word count – I was only at 500 words and I had already felt as if I’d made my point in the post. I kept thinking to myself “but GREAT content is often 2,000 words. This is going to be a dud!”.
This is clearly very flawed thinking, so I left it at the 500 words and called it a day. I may be able to cut some extra stuff out too, and still make my point.
Then I logged onto Twitter and saw your tweet about this post, so it’s kismet.
Thanks Sarah!
And yes, I do that all the time with posts, so this was in part advice for myself 🙂
Straight to the point Sean.
Will be interesting to see if you manage to hold yourself accountable to that advice 😉
I’m definitely guilty of writing too long posts sometimes. I try to become aware of bloating up my posts and writing more concisely.
Up to the next 5 years!
Jan
No kidding 🙂 Long posts can be effective – it just isn’t necessary ALL the time.
This is hilarious, I literally just read two different blog posts on this EXACT topic today.
One was saying that you don’t have any business writing short posts unless you’ve written a ton of content, like Seth Godin.
The other was saying pretty much what you’re saying, that a blog post should say exactly what you want it to say, no more, no less.
Weird thing was, the long one (about writing long posts) had over 200 shares across social media.
The other one, had about 50. Both were on fairly largish blogs with a good following. Now I’m not saying causation= correlation, but there is some evidence that longer blog posts get more shares too. Noah Kagan recently had a post over at OkDork that was about Linkedin posts, and they recommended that to get the most shares, posts should be around 2,000 words.
I think a showdown post is in order.
Congrats on the 5-year leaving your job anniversary!! Way to go!!
And I totally agree about making the post as long (or short) as it takes to get the point across. While I love reading useful, very informative long posts, I also really enjoy the short ones that tell me what I need to know without having to read for 15 minutes.
For my own blog, I have a mix of short and long ones! Depends on how much time I have to spend on the post and what the post is about!
Thanks!
People have such short attention spans, and there is so much information out there. Time is critical. So yeah, I agree why use 100 words when 50 will do.