Authority Sites - Optimal Article Word Count?

For those playing in the authority site area,

what are you finding is optimal article word count on your authority sites?

I'm currently working on a "how to" article - word count for the article is currently 3,000+ words and growing.

so if you had an article about "how to use a blender" and you had it up around 3,000 words, would you:

1) post it (all 3000 words) as "how to use a blender"

or

2) divide it up into 3 articles of maybe 1500 and 1000 and 500 words of "how to use a blender", "how to clean a blender" and "how to fix a blender", with the main article ("how to use a blender") having a summary and a lead in to (but not the entire content of) "how to clean a blender" and "how to fix a blender"

?

Multiple 's linked pages to give you several chances at ranking for similar related terms...

3000 words is too much content on one page for readability. It's better to break it up into chunks - like chapters in a book - so people keep going that little bit further without being put off by the size of the text.

Multiple 's linked pages to give you several chances at ranking for similar related terms...

3000 words is too much content on one page for readability. It's better to break it up into chunks - like chapters in a book - so people keep going that little bit further without being put off by the size of the text.

Click to expand...

appreciated - thinking this way however trying to balance "large quality pages" with word count / duplicating the exact same content on multiple pages (quality vs quantity)

any approximate word count ceiling where readability starts to go downhill from your perspective? 750? 1000? 1500?