You’re ready to start a business blog, but are caught in the eternal argument of long vs. short posts. Which camp is right, which is wrong, and where should you start? We’re here to help.

Quick and Dirty - Short Posts

If the goal of your new blog is to attract followers and provide crucial information quickly to your readers, short posts are the way to go! Short posts are ideal for bloggers who plan to post upwards of three posts per week and hope to gain more readers.

Short posts are quick to write, harder to procrastinate on writing and are easier for the writer to stay on track and not diverge onto too many tangents. This is the ideal type of post for giving readers small bits of important information: they’re quick to read and easy to remember.

Attention spans of readers online have been shortened thanks to social media platforms like Twitter—less than 4% of page views last over 10 minutes (Statistic Brain)! Short posts allow readers to gather information quickly, before becoming bored.

Slow and Steady - Long Posts

Long posts are ideal for more established blogs hoping to convey important, in-depth information, and help improve local SEO (Forbes). Readers coming to your blog for these longer posts are looking for more information about a specific topic—they want an in depth, tactical answer .

A disadvantage of crafting long posts is that they take much more time to write. A long post can look daunting when sitting down at the keys, creating more opportunity to procrastinate.

However, history shows that long posts rank higher in terms of SEO. Simply because of their added length, they’re able to incorporate more keywords, allowing them to rank higher in searches. In fact, the top 10 results that Google returns all have a minimum of 2000 words (serpIQ). Posts with more than 1,500 words generated nearly 70% more tweets and almost a quarter more Facebook likes than shorter posts (Forbes).

Because these longer posts focus information on a more targeted audience, they tend to have better audience engagement, collecting more comments and social shares. Generally, the longer your post, the more social shares you will receive.

So what should you do?

The best advice we can give you is to do what makes sense for your brand. If you feel like a 200 word post does your topic justice, go for it! Alternatively, if you need closer to 2,000 words to truly flesh out another topic, do that too. We recommend mixing it up to see what your audience responds best to. While you’re doing that, of course, don’t forget to measure your results. Check your blog traffic to see how it converts to leads, as well as how measuring your organic results, as those long posts may have bumped you up in search ranking.

The best and most successful blogs use a combination of long and short posts to serve their purposes. It’s a far better idea to focus on the quality of your posts and the information you’re providing your readers than stressing about the length of the post.

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