It’s a tough question to answer, but an important one  nonetheless. Just like finding your posting frequency, post length depends heavily on the depth you go into, niche,  readers, and even your posting frequency. Now, I’ve read a ton of theories that say very short or very long posts are horrible SEO wise, but I believe that finding your ideal post length should again revolve around the topic at hand, the overall niche, and two other variables, so I won’t be touching on SEO here. Maybe another post though.

1. Deeper the depth means longer the length

It seems pretty obvious, but when you look at post length it should mostly depend on just how deep into a topic you go. This post – for example – goes into what I would call some detail, making it an average length, around 500 words long. But if you go into more depth like I did in my post about getting comments on your blog you need to have a longer post – about 1000 words – to cover everything you need to.

2. Your niche really matters

Think about it this way – if your writing news updates, like engadget does, your posts are typically going to be short compared to say a tutorials which usually need to go into a lot of detail.

3. Your readers really matter too

We’ll as long as your writing for people and not search engines your post length should revolve around them. People now-a-days have a very short attention span, including myself, but there are ways around this. You could make your posts readable or at least scanable – which are two very different things – making sure your readers can go through an article and it won’t seem like a task to them.

4. Posting frequency – more posts means shorter posts

Now this doesn’t always hold true but the great majority of the time when people write more posts it means that they are shorter – again think about engadget or uncrate. They post multiple short articles through out the day.

My goal here was to give you a basis of what I think post length should depend on. But in the end it boils down to these two questions, “did I explain everything I needed to?” and “can this do the job in a shorter post?”

Image By lissalou66