“How long should a blog post be?”

“What's the ideal length of an email newsletter?”

I get these questions a lot. Maybe you do, too.

In the first edition of this book, I was prescriptive about it: I gave you data from studies that analyzed the high performers, based largely on how well things performed for search engines.

Eight years ago I told you exactly how long a YouTube video should be (3½ minutes!) and how long a podcast should be. (An average 22 minutes, because that's the average commute!)

Here in the second edition, things are less straightforward. There's no “right” length anymore. (Also: In a post-Covid, hybrid-work world … what's a “commute”?)

The question “How long should a <insert your content asset> be?” is harder to answer, because it is no longer the best question to start with.

In a very few cases: Word count matters. (See box at the end of this chapter.)

In most cases: Your reader doesn't care about word count.

Sure, there is sometimes a correlation between search engine performance and length. But what Google really rewards isn't length, it's how helpful something is. How much it resonates because it answers the right questions with genuinely useful detail. If you're doing your job right, you will rank.

That's why puffing up a 500-word piece to 1,000 words just to hit a “perfect length” word count is useless.

Ultimately, content ranks because “it goes deep into the subject matter, answers questions from every angle, and makes a sincere effort at producing the best page for the topic,” says marketer Andy Crestodina.

You know what word I love paired with “marketing”? Sincere.

We don't hear “sincere” and “marketing” paired often enough. We need to.

Two more points about the “perfect length” issue.

Your audience does not care about length. I'm repeating this again because I said it as an aside above. It deserves its own paragraph. (Or two.)

Your reader will love a 2,000-word email newsletter if it doesn't feel like 2,000 words—if it feels instead like a fun, useful inbox romp.

Your prospect will watch your 30-minute video if it's interesting to them.

Your 12-part tweet thread gets tagged and saved because it's wise and good … not because it's a certain number of parts.

All this is why the advice you've already read in this book is more helpful than any number of best-practice guidelines around length I could give.

Search ranking and page views are overrated. It's far more important to be loved by a few than to be familiar to many, says Andy.

For most of us, size truly doesn't matter.