How long should your web pages be?

Is 200 words enough?

Maybe 500 words?

Or a thousand words upwards plus maybe a video or two?

The glib answer is they should be as long as necessary to get your point across without boring your visitor.

And that’s a good starting point.

My average word count on this site is probably 700 to 1,000 words per post.

WikiHow when I last checked is around 600 words per post but visually their pages look as though they’re only a couple of hundred words at most.

And that’s a clue…

Visual presentation is everything!

I tend to use lots of white space – short sentences, short paragraphs, bullet pointed lists occasionally.

Which means that even if the scroll bar seems to go on forever, the page doesn’t look daunting.

It also depends what you’re talking about.

Some subjects don’t lend themselves to long discussions.

If you’ve ever searched for the calorie content of an item of food, you only want that result (and Google probably gives it to you without you even having to leave the search results).

But if you want an explanation of, say, the Theory of everything then the nearly 5,000 words that Wikipedia gives is probably only a starting point.

A good system is to figure out whether your reader is likely to be yawning by the time they get half way through your article – not a good sign unless you’re selling a “get to sleep fast” product – or if they’re hanging on your every word.

You can use pictures and videos to break up the content

As you can tell from my site, that’s not something I do very often.

But let’s give it a go here:

That’s a video I shot that talks about letting your personality shine through in what you write.

Think about the people you know:

• Some you can’t wait to get away from
• Others are OK in small doses
• Others entrance you and you’d like to stay in their company longer

Ideally, you want your website content to be in that last category.

And also enticing enough to leave people wanting more!

That’s nice.

Wikipedia does it well – it weaves relevant links to other content and lets you decide which ones to click off to.

Chances are that you don’t just browse one page on Wikipedia very often.

Which is a good plan for your own website.

Put links in your content to more content.

Not just affiliate or product links (although obviously they’re nice to have too)

Eye candy depends on your readership.

Sites like Buzzfeed specialise in that. To a fair extent, they’ve taken over the role that the weekly printed gossip magazines used to fill.

But they’re hard work to keep going, especially if you’re owner, content creater, chief cook and bottle washer.

You need a team to create that kind of site.

So unless you’ve got more energy than Tigger, I wouldn’t suggest that you create that kind of site.

Instead, make it informative and content rich without the content looking as though it’s a dull text book.

And if you’d like to know more, including how you can apply these ideas to affiliate marketing, then watch this free video.