Ideal Length of Post – to divide into parts or leave whole.

  • felicityripley · Member ·

    Is there an ideal number of words for a blog?

    I’ve written (as yet unpublished) a travel memoir which is quite long – about 3000 words.
    I’ve divided it into three posts, parts 1, 2 and 3 and will put links to the other 2 on each post.

    Is that the best thing to do or would it be better left as one long post?

    Reading in 3 parts, it doesn’t flow quite as well but I wonder whether people are less likely to read a post if it’s too long.

    If anyone has any thoughts or experiences on ideal blog length I’d be interested to hear them.

    Thanks

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • dlager · Member ·

    Hi.
    There is no correct answer. its really how you want to present your content to viewers.
    many people will leave enough of the begining of a post to hook a reader, then they will use the “more” tag, to hide the rest of the content.

    http://en.support.wordpress.com/splitting-content/more-tag/

    As for me us the more tag for long post over a 1200 or so words, I also use it to hide photo galleries and video embeds from my home page.
    this will increase page load times, especially for readers with slow internet connections.

  • felicityripley · Member ·

    Hi – thanks for that. I usually use the ‘more’ tag anyway, I’m just concerned readers would see the length of the post and feel they couldn’t be bothered to read it.

  • timethief · Member ·

    Over the years I have found that I have very little inclintaion to read posts that are 3000 words in length. Like dlager I’m turned off at more than 12000 words in any post. Another way you can spilt content within long posts is by using pagination (next page).

  • felicityripley · Member ·

    Hi there – thanks for that information, no I didn’t know you could do that and it seems like a good way round the dilemma.

    Thank you very much.

  • timethief · Member ·

    You’re welcome and best wishes with your blog.

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