Four Reasons to Write Longer Blog Posts

I saw a post today at Writers' Perspective about how long blog posts should be. The author suggested that blog posts shouldn't be more than 300 words long. My first reaction went something like this: "300 words? Holy Truncated Blog Posts, Batman! That's too short!" Then I thought about it a while...and I realized that I agreed with myself. Three hundred words is a bit short. Here are the reasons why I fly in the face of convention and prefer blog posts that ramble.

You give your reader better value. How in-depth can you really be in 300 words? If you're just writing a filler post to get something out there, 300 words is fine. But if you really want to explore a subject or teach your reader something complex, 300 words might be too tight a space. Many readers come to business blogs to learn something--and if you're serving up puny posts on a daily basis, you run the risk of disappointing readers.

Miniscule blog posts make it next-to-impossible to put content first. One of the other pieces of blog dogma out there--one that makes a lot of sense to me--is the commandment to put your content first. You can promote the heck out of your blog, but if your content isn't great, you won't be successful at building an audience. At 300 words, it's extremely difficult to offer in-depth information readers will come back for.

Readers don't necessarily hate longer web writing. I wrote an entire post on this back in this blog's infancy: according to a Poynter eyetrack study, people are actually more willing to read online articles in depth than they are with print articles. This held true with long as well as short articles, which were read to completion online 63% of the time--compared with 40% of stories in broadsheets and 36% in tabloids. This turns on its head the old chestnut about how online articles must be short and sweet to get read.

Other bloggers are doing it. Check out some of the top flagship blogs out there--are they keeping their blog posts to 300 words? Here's a recent example from Problogger. This article is in-depth, interesting, well-written...and 1,080 words long. A quick check around the website shows that many of their blog posts are around this length; while a few are short, a lot are longer. Here's one of today's most popular posts from Copyblogger. It's 931 words long. Taking a look at all the other posts listed under "popular," it looks like only one is under 300 words long.

Speaking from personal experience, many of my favorite bloggers write posts both short and long--but I tend to enjoy, and return more often, to the blogs that have longer and more in-depth posts more often. In the Writers' Perspective article, the writer suggested paring down your language to get to 300 words. I agree that extra adjectives and flowery prose are bad--but I also think that when you edit a substantive post that closely, you can't help but snip off the meat of the subject as well as the fat.