L is for Length and Other Lessons

I manage the blog for Little Pickle Press, and using some of the techniques I’ve mentioned in the past days, we’ve managed to consistently achieve 100-200 visitors a day, and now have a Google 3 ranking. Because the LPP Team shares lots of information about children’s book publishing (and environmental sustainability), it daily becomes more of an authority blog, with lots of guests from related industries. One of the challenges I encounter editing guest posts is length.

How long should a blog post be? 350 words is probably optimum for an average post. 500 words is getting too long and probably should be split into two consecutive posts. I also try to mix it up during the course of a week. It’s better to have five posts day-after-day, rather than two long posts during one week. So think about this when planning your weekly posts. Are you driving your readers away because it takes too long to read what you have to say?

The average length of time a visitor will stay at your blog is 1 ½ minutes. That’s your window of opportunity so grab them and impart your message. Or lose your reader. It’s not a lesson you need to learn the hard way.