Savvy Affiliate

Writing a Post of the right length is important, too short and you don’t get any attention, too long and you’ll lose your audience

 When you are blogging it is important to keep your post length in mind.  In order to maximize the benefit for everyone visiting your site, your post should neither be too short nor to long.  There is a wide range of people who you are targeting your post towards, keeping them all satisfied can be difficult.   Here are people you should keep in mind as you post

• Subscribers - Your subscribers came to your subscribed to your feed because they like they topic you are talking about, and think that you are an expert.  They will read long detailed posts.  If your posts are too short or too basic, it will turn them off, they will have already gotten that information from any of a dozen different sites.  Your goal is to keep the subscribers around, and not annoy them with your content.
• New Visitors - New visitors to your site haven’t decided whether they like it or not.  Chances are they are not as expert in the topic you are covering.  They are more interested in shorter posts that get to the point quickly.  They may be looking for some quick tips that they can apply to their own life, without having to become experts on the subject.   Your goal is to intrigue your new visitors with your content, and keep them subscribing or coming back.
• Search Engines - Search engines index a post and tag it with certain keywords and a topic.  If you have too long of a post, especially a rambling post, the search engine won’t know the topic and will be less likely to rank it.  If you have too short a post you won’t have enough keyword density to get to the top of any search.

Alright, alright, but what’s the magic number?  Although there is no one magic number for posts, and how long yours should be depends on your niche and your writing style, I have found that posts between 500-1000 words tend to perform best.  Right around 750 words is the sweet spot.   In school, we generally considered on page of a report (12 point, double spaced) to be 250 words.  A 750 word post is equivalent to writing a 3 page report on a topic.  Enough space that you can put out some interesting ideas and arguments, but short enough that it is easily read.

But why is making it longer bad?  If your primary objective of your site is to make money, you want people to come to your page and read your entire post because most people click on ads after they are done reading a page!  Think about it, what do you do with a site that you don’t enjoy?  Do you click on the ads or simply hit the backspace key and leave?  Very few people will lose interest in a post and then click on ads on that page.  If people don’t like a site or are bored by it they escape the by the quickest means possible.  If you want to make money, you have to keep a readers interest until the end of your content, and then shunt them off onto your advertisers.

How does a visitor decide if he like a site?  Your new visitors will be faced with a decision, did they like your site or not.  Should they come back or not.  They will make this decision whenever they finish reading a page.  If they do finish, they will likely decide they enjoyed your post.  If they don’t finish, they will just assume your post wasn’t worth reading, and neither is the rest of your site.

Additionally, right sized posts are more linkable!  If you want other bloggers to link to your pages, they will likely have to have read your post and enjoyed it.  If they only got halfway through and found themselves drifting off, they will assume their readers will do the same.   Even if the first 1000 words of a post are good, if the last 1000 are bad, you’ve lost your link.   So don’t take that risk.  Cut your post off and benefit from it.

For reference, this post is 729 words.  Might have got a little tedious if I kept going on eh?

What’s your average post length?   Short or long?