The question of how long does an article need to be in order to be successful continues to produce vague answers which keep it popular in the marketing arena. In an article published in Broughton's magazine, Molly Ploe attempts to answer this question.

The bottom line is that there isn’t a single answer. However, we should note that the article is 2,150 words. It manages to shed some light on the question we all have - how long should a blog post be?

To know how many words you should write in each blog post, you first have to decide what the content’s purpose is. The content we write is not always intended to serve only those who read it. Therefore, what is the purpose for which the content was written? Are we trying to get a high ranking on Google? Do we want to establish our status as experts in the field? Perhaps the goal is for the content to be shared as much as possible?

If the goal is for it to be shared a lot, we should focus on long content.

This is not necessarily because someone will read it to the end, but rather because the statistics show that long articles get a lot more shares. BuzzSumo found that articles between 3,000 to 10,000 words were shared more often. In fact, the average for articles that received the most shares is actually 8,859 words!

Digging deeper, even more interesting is that 59% of people do not click on an article before they share it. Even those who do click on the article only read a quarter of it at best.

This means that in general people share articles on social media according to perceived value. That is they share it based on how much they think the article is of quality and relevant.

So how do we produce high perceived value?

We do this by using subheadings, images, prominent lists and other similar easy to digest elements in the body of our text. That way, we can increase the perceived value and achieve our goal of more shares.

Neil Patel says that the recommended number of words depends on the industry. For example, articles about gadgets show good performance when they're between 300 to 500 words long. On the other hand, marketing articles produce better results when they are between 2,500 to 3,000 words.

Ploe recommends using SEMRush or MarketMuse to check the length of your competitors' articles in order to determine the recommended number of words in your particular field.

In addition, Ploe has some great tips for writing long, good articles.

Do this by writing content that answers your audience's questions, referring them to additional sources to help them to deepen their understand, talking to them at eye level, and using data to back up what you say. This article is a great example of this.

In addition, you should make navigating the article simple and easy by using subtitled headers (H2 and H3), images, and anything else that will help your readers easily find the important parts of your article.

Also just as importantly, you should focus on using action sentences in the first third of the article. You can also place it in the rest of the article. However, only 20% of people actually read articles to the end. Therefore, if you only put your action sentence in the end, most people won’t even have a chance to read it.

In conclusion, the question of recommended length for a blog post does not have just one answer. Ploe makes it clear that we should rely less on the word length recommendations online and rather base the length of our articles on through tracking our target audience and adjusting the length based on our specific goals.

If you read this entire thing, we invite you to check out the full article to find out some additional interesting tips and data that Chloe gives regarding the recommended article length.