When blogging for your business, especially for newbies just starting their business blog, one of the toughest things to learn is the appropriate length for a blog post. It seems that the answer is changing, or often conflicting, depending on who you ask or what you're goal is. But, there is an answer to this question, clearing up all the confusion from before. 600-800 words
Seems daunting, but once you get the hang of what it means to write 600 words, it gets easier and easier. Why is the answer 600-800 words, especially when others have said 500-600, or 350 words, or that it really doesn't matter? The reason is that 600 is about the minimum needed to engage a reader, to offer helpful advice, to go in depth into a topic enough to make a point without kicking the dead horse. After all, the point of a blog should be provide value to your potential customer. It shouldn't be all about you or meant to create pages and content for search engines. Search engines don't buy from you, and no one cares about how great your company is. Six hundred words that answers a customer question or shows how to solve a pain point of your customers is much better.
Are Short Blog Posts Bad?
There's have been plenty of arguments against longer posts, that lengthening posts turns off readers by watering down the message, as you risk adding to it for the sake of hitting a word count. Or, that longer posts ruin the chance for you to publish a series of posts on a subject because you put all that information into one post instead of several. Fewer posts means fewer chances to position yourself as a thought leader and to demonstrate your knowledge on a subject. However, those arguments against longer posts are all hogwash, which we'll demonstrate shortly.
To answer the question, no. A 350-word blog post is great for an announcement post, where there may not be much information to convey in the first place. Going longer on a post that's meant to promote an upcoming event really would continue to kick the dead horse. Keep in mind the purpose and the topic of your blog post, which will help in deciding how many words are needed to say something worthwhile.
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Did you see that line? That line marked the 350-word mark (really 387, but close enough). If I ended the post right there, then the reader would have learned that short posts aren't all bad but that the longer ones are more valuable. And, that's it. If I squish everything that I say in this post into that amount of space, the reader also learns nothing as I have to cut out all the good stuff, all the supporting arguments and compelling information that really makes the post worthwhile (like my line). The 350-word post might not have been poorly written, but it's obvious here that you actually water down and stretch your information in shorter posts, not longer ones, busting that first argument about making length.
The second argument about losing opportunities for a series of posts or in demonstrating your knowledge is just stupid. If you really were knowledgeable about whatever topic you wrote about, you could easily find a way to create a series of 600-word posts without any problem. Doing shorter posts for the sake of having more posts only means you have to cut information and put it elsewhere, reducing the value of a single post and creating a series that is only valuable as a collection. Shorter posts simply have much more trouble standing alone, which is why we have a few tricks on how to add length and value to your posts.
The point is that both potential customers and search engines like quality content and quality blog posts, and quality means providing value and offering something new or compelling. It's much more than being well-written and grammatically correct. Doing something more than that, providing the value, is simply harder to do in fewer words, unless each of your blog posts is a poem and you choose to deliver your message that way. We just have a hard time seeing how a 350-word post could accomplish the same thing as a 600 or 800-word post could.