As you may have noticed some of my blogposts are not very long.

Some might even call them short.

But is that a problem?

Well, it is for some experts. I’ve been reading several blogs recently which offer advice on the best word count for blogposts.

There seems to be general agreement that a blogpost should have at least 300 words and after that opinions are mixed.

This helpful blogpost from Joe Bunting offers the pros and cons for writing blogposts of various lengths ranging from a couple of hundred words to a word count of more than two thousand.

Another interesting piece is Why 3000+ word blogposts get more traffic  which is stuffed with reasons to write long (very long!!) blogposts and advice how to set about doing it.

Although written a couple of years ago, I particularly like this blogpost from Hubspot.com. In a nutshell the advice is to write what you need to say what you want. The writer references a college professor’s response to  a student question about the length of a coursework paper. “As long as it needs to be”. That was the advice given decades ago when I was studying and I think it remains good to this day.

Of course, there’s a huge difference between those who are blogging commercially and hobby bloggers like myself. Sometimes people read my blogposts and quite often they don’t. (Well, if Google Analytics is correct, they don’t!) Obviously I’d prefer someone to read my efforts but I don’t have to meet any readership targets as presumably is expected of professional bloggers. I don’t have any advertisers seeking multiple hits on their websites and an increase in their products’ sales as a consequence of appearing on my blog.

When I started writing this blog I hadn’t realised that lifestyle bloggers actually give up their day jobs because they can make so much cash from their blogging. Hmmm. Nice work!

So, to answer my own question: how many words in a blogpost?

1. My priority will continue to be to write as many words as are needed to say what I want to say.
2. I’m going to try and write a long-form blogpost occasionally to see if I can.
3. My target when I started this blog was to write a post everyday. So far, I’ve more or less managed to stick with this. But some days I’m really pushed for time so, of necessity, my blogposts will have to be short (very short) on those days. My frequency of posting target is more important to me than conforming to the best practice norms of professional bloggers.
4. I write because I love writing and now I have time to do just that. And that’s that!

I found out something very interesting the other day.

Being ranked 9,783,626th is an achievement!

If you install a Google extension called Alexa Traffic Rank you can find out the ranking of a blog / website compared with all the others.

The top ranked are sites like Facebook, Amazon, etc and the rankings gradually go down to about 9,783,626th. And that is an achievement because after that come all the blogs / websites that don’t get a ranking at all.

I’ve been amazed at how many blogs I follow written by people I “know” on Twitter which don’t get a ranking. This was very heartening because my blogs / websites don’t get a ranking either. As I said, my Google Analytics only shows on average about 10 visitors daily to each blog so I wasn’t surprised that Alexa didn’t recognise me.

The websites I referred to earlier in this piece all received good rankings as you would expect as they’re clearly in the business of offering serious advice to the professional blogging community.

If you want to get the Alexa Traffic Rank extension go into the Manager part of your Google Chrome browser > Extensions and look for Alexa. It doesn’t take more than a few seconds to download. I expect it harvests loads of personal data whenever you use it but it’s very informative and interesting.

Well, if you’re still here you’ve read almost 700 words. So thank you for being interested and hope you find something else you’d like to read here on my 3sixtyfive lifestyle blog!

Hope you had a great weekend.

Here’s a book promo to finish with:

 

Julia’s Room, a novella, is still only 99p.

http://amzn.to/2o676Ve