A business blog is one of the greatest tools for reaching potential customers but only when it captures the reader's attention and engages its audience. The best way to achieve this is by adhering to the golden rule that less is more. If you have not reached success with your business blog so far, it may not be due to content at all but could all be down to post length.
A blog post that is too long quickly loses readers who do not have the time to sit down and enjoy a long essay or who are just not interested enough to read long posts all the way through to the end. Recently, a clear trend can be seen favoring short blog posts, the majority featuring content that can be read in under a minute.
Your business blog is competing against millions of other blogs on the Internet, some of which may have very similar content. When presented with such a huge choice, users will only read what interests them most. Many readers only skim blog posts, picking out stimulating sentences and useful information. For these readers in particular, long blog posts often bring on the feeling of fatigue from the very beginning.
While the exact length of a blog post can depend on your personal choice, short posts of around 250 to 500 words are typically recommended. This allows you space to introduce the main idea, summarize your key points and form a conclusion. After establishing a suitable length with several posts, it is a good idea to remain consistent in the future. This is also the optimal length for content sent as RSS feed as it can be viewed more easily.
Business blog writing should provide readers with a sample of an idea rather than an in depth explanation. Each of your posts should center around this subject; if you begin to include multiple topics in one post, you will quickly lose clarity. Making a clear plan of what you hope to begin before you start writing can help with this goal as can bullet points, numbered lists and subtitles. Writing short entries ensures you keep your content concise and avoid filling out with rambling, unnecessary details.
It is impossible to target the entire population through your business blog posts. When writing content, it is essential to picture your target audience and write with them in mind. If the topic requires some additional knowledge that may be unknown to some of your audience, imbed links within the text to outside sources or previous blog posts that provide further information. This way, your readers can choose to click on these links if they are interested while the chance of your audience becoming bored of reading a long post is diminished.
Your readers are far more likely to return to your business blogs if they found the content interesting and easy to read. The chance of your readers sharing pages on social media, subscribing to your blog and recommending content to friends and colleagues is equally increased. Best of all, short blog posts have the huge advantage for you, the writer, in that you are able to spend less time working in order to achieve greater success.
The optimal length of blog posts is highly debated. How long do you believe business blog posts should be?