I am going to start this off as I did in my post about “How often should I Blog”. There really is no definitive answer, and it is up to you.
Since this is a question I get asked a lot, I do usually go in to more detail, and of course, it is on a case by case basis. Let me lay out a few guidelines that I think will help you in determining how many words your business blog posts should be.
Minimum Words for a Blog Post
In order for the search engines to be able to crawl your blog and index your blog postings/pages for SEO purposes, you will want to make sure your Word Count is at least 250. If you are using a popular software program such as Microsoft Word, then I suggest you start by typing your blog in Word, as I am doing right now, and periodically check on your Word Count, which is under the “Tools” menu. A good rule of thumb is to try and keep your blog postings in the 300-500 word range.
Maximum Words for a Blog Post
In order to maintain the attention of your readers I suggest you do not exceed 600 words. As I mentioned previously, 300-500 is most ideal. If you have a long blog post, and find that you really have a lot to say about a particular subject, try breaking it in to two or three posts. The advantages are that you will be able to keep your readers attention, and at the same time whet their appetite for the next part of the post.
An Example Blog Post Title would be: Setting up a Blog – Part 1 of 3
Some other advantages of breaking up long posts are that you can take one topic that you originally thought would be one blog post and turn it in to two, three, or four different posts. This will either give you a break from having to come up with your next post right away, or will allow you some time to build up your pipeline of blogs in your “vault”, which I will talk about more in another post!
In closing, respect your reader’s time, get to the point, and always remember that a lot of people just skim information on the web, so you don’t have very much time to capture their attention and increase your blog traffic.