Reasons to Write a 300-Word Business Blog Post

Fascinated by the Writer’s Yearbook 2023 article “10 Reasons to Write a 100-Word Story”, I began thinking of all the discussions around the questions of the optimal length for blog posts. Ran Walker, explaining while he’s stopped writing novels, said “I could no longer bring myself to write stories where I had to expand them beyond what I felt their natural lengths were.” Writing shorter stories forces you to refocus and choose only what’s important, Walker says. Word count matters, but it’s about condensing, not expanding, changing for the better the way you pace your story and what you choose to show the reader. Using just 100 words allows you to “create a resonance in a single moment.” Following is my (under-300-word) opinion post:

How long should your blog posts be? asks Wall Street Journal’s Joe Bunting. When it comes to our writing, we want more, he admits, not less: more readers, more comments, more backlinks, and more traffic. He’s experimented with different lengths, Bunting says, finding that each has advantages. Shorter posts tend to garner more comments, while longer posts get shared more widely. Medium-form posts are good for generating discussion. Very long, in-depth, heavily researched posts (2,400+ words long generate more Google traffic, he notes.

“Though content must be relevant, it might differ in types, mediums, formats, and style in order to arouse interest or evoke debate…but to be read at all, blog posts must always deliver upon their promise,” firstsiteguide.com cautions. “Before blogs became political in the early 2000s, they were merely means to make private thoughts and opinions public. The personal touch, however, remains their vital characteristic to date.”

Opinions have always differed on the optimal size for a blog post. Having composed blog posts (as both a Say It For You ghost writer and under my own name) numbering well into the tens of thousands, I’m still finding it difficult to fix on any rule other than “It depends!” I agree with Ran Walker that purposely keeping content short forces us to choose only those elements that drive home the single point that is the focus of that one post. Research on “duration neglect” reveals that when people assess an experience, they tend to forget or ignore its length, rating an experience based on the peak (the best or worst moment) and the ending. Writing shorter posts allows me to “create a resonance” around a single concept.