It's Too Long She Said!
She was writing a piece for her dissertation and the intro was too long...
BUT I bet you've asked yourself:
How long should it be?
There's always a debate going on about how many words make good reading. I remember when I started online back in 2008 a blog posts, ezine articles even Squidoo lenses were 300 words - 400 words.
In turn that meant that the online word was optimized to the max for potential keywords - now called stuffing.
These days 5 years on it's not only our blog posts and articles that have been scrutinized for maximum effect (BTW 1600 is the benchmark)
[This doesn't mean we should all start forcing our posts to be 1600! There is huge variance. Great posts perform well regardless of length, and bad posts certainly don’t get better when you stretch them out]
Above is a quick view of what's good according to Buffer the social sharing platform. Below is a link to the article that explains a whole lot more in detail
Can you do me a favour PLZZZZ
Answer this Question...
Does it take 7 minutes to read your blog posts?
Recent Comments
7
I like to get to the point ! If I read a post that is huge on any website and its long and takes forever to get to the point I X out. I like things short and to the point so readers don't get bored. The only exception would be training some don't give enough and others stray and go long.
Hey Tony. I guess it's horses-for-courses. I'm always 400-500 words, for op-ed, simply because I believe anything else is just going to get skimmed. I also self-reference, noting how often I click away from lengthy content. However, a training piece could easily run to several thousand words or more. R. x
Looks like you fall into the majority me thinks, 400 - 500 is what seems to be the norm for most articles.
I'm also one that has a slight frown when I see that I've 7mins read ahead of me.
Cheers for your input R x to you too :o)
Hi Tony. No it wouldn't take 7 minutes for most people to read my blog posts but that's because I don't write a lot of pillar articles. I don't agree with their assessment that "1600" words is the "ideal" length - particularly when I read how they came to their conclusions.
Beverley
I tend to agree with you there Beverly. I don't think its a good benchmark. Most of my posts are probably half that.
Cheers for the input.
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I think 400-500 word is enough to say what on your mind.