Best practices for your content formats

Educate, answer questions, establish expertise, capture search intent, explain complexity, support buying decisions, and build organic visibility.

800 to 2,000 words

A guideline, not a target. Shorter is better for simple subjects. Longer is justified only by genuine complexity.

• Lead with useful information.
• Use short to medium paragraphs.
• Explain jargon when it first appears.
• Prefer concrete examples to general claims.

• Write for scanning as well as reading.
• Use bullets, numbered lists, and tables when they improve comprehension.
• Avoid walls of text and decorative formatting.

• Match the search intent.
• Answer the primary question clearly, early.
• Use natural variations of the topic.
• Use descriptive headings.
• Give concise definitions.
• Answer the likely follow-up questions.
• Don’t stuff keywords.

Professional insight, thought leadership, personal experience, commentary, lessons learned, industry observations, and useful conversation.

100 to 300 words

Longer is fine when the story or the argument earns it.

• Conversational but intelligent.
• Specific experiences beat generic advice.
• Use the first person where it fits.
• Don’t add engagement bait.

• Short paragraphs and intentional whitespace.
• Bullets can help.
• Emojis and hashtags are optional and depend on the brand.

Build an ongoing relationship with an audience and give readers a reason to open the next issue.

300 to 800 words

Longer is appropriate when the newsletter promises depth.

• Personal, direct, useful, and consistent with the brand.
• Prefer subject lines that are specific, relevant, and interesting.
• The reader should get value even without clicking.

• Usually one primary call to action.
• Avoid ALL CAPS and excessive punctuation in subject lines.
• Keep sections scannable.

Answer real customer questions, remove friction, support decisions, clarify confusing concepts, and support search and AI discovery.

30 to 75 words for a simple answer, 75 to 200 for a complex one

If an answer needs more than that, it’s probably two questions.

• Write questions the way people actually ask them.
• Put the real answer at the beginning.
• Use direct, factual language and avoid marketing fluff.

• One question addresses one topic.
• Define important terms explicitly.

• Use natural-language questions.
• Answer directly.
• Don’t combine unrelated questions.
• Define the terms that matter.

Tell users what changed, why it matters, what they can now do, and whether they need to act.

50 to 150 words for a small update, 150 to 400 for a medium one

Major releases can run longer when the length is justified.

• Lead with the benefit to the user.
• Write for your audience, not for developers, unless developers are the audience.
• Use official product names consistently.

• Skip unnecessary technical detail.
• Skip exclamation marks.
• Make any required action impossible to miss.

Social is a parent format with platform-specific rules. A good post is written for the platform it will live on, not written once and relabeled.

20 to 250 words, depending on the platform

The platform guides below give a range for each.

• One idea per post.
• Concise, conversational, and direct.
• Don’t warm up before the point.

• Minimal hashtags.
• Emojis only when they suit the brand.
• Use threads only when the idea genuinely needs them.

Headlines, landing-page sections, product descriptions, sales emails, value propositions, feature and benefit statements, calls to action, and sales decks.

Headline: 5 to 12 words. Supporting copy: 20 to 60 words. Call to action: 2 to 5 words

Used flexibly. Not every snippet needs all four steps.

• Lead with the customer’s problem or the outcome they want.
• Benefits before features where possible.
• Specific beats impressive.
• Remove unnecessary adjectives.

• Use one primary call to action.
• Avoid unsupported superlatives.

Article ideas aren’t articles. The goal is to identify worthwhile reasons to publish.

A few lines per idea

An idea is a brief, not a draft.

• Prefer ideas based on customer questions, product knowledge, industry changes, search intent, and gaps in existing content.
• Also look to internal expertise, contrarian observations, data, customer problems, and emerging topics.

• Give every idea the same fields so the ideas can be compared.

• Note the search or answer opportunity for each idea, but never pick an idea on keyword volume alone.