Short Posts or Long Posts — Which Are Better?
How do you write for today’s audiences?
Common answer: In short posts of 200-500 words.
Better answer: It depends.
Who is your audience? Are your readers busy people scanning a dozen blogs like yours every morning in hopes of finding one useful piece of information? Are your readers people searching for information that is not easy to find?
One exasperated institutional Church blogger threw her hands in the air. She was following the common advice and looking for guest bloggers among clergy. “It’s impossible to get preachers to limit themselves to 500 words,” she concluded as she waded through the lengthy submissions.
Getting people who tote Bibles to limit their message to shorter thoughts is a new discipline—and there is value in it.
But wait! Who made this rule? The fact is there is no rule. Some of the most popular bloggers take a thousand words to introduce their topic.
Most blog posts that are bookmarked are probably those that truly define an issue.
More people may be attracted to shorter posts, but serious readers (the kind you hope will consider you an authority) are looking for truly helpful information. They don’t want to be spoon-fed answers to their questions in five posts spread across two weeks.
The wonderful thing about blogging is that creative people are no longer bound by the costs of paper and production. [Tweet this!]
You can write the article you want to write without leaving room for advertising space within a newsletter’s budgeted pages.
So what happens? We finally have the freedom to do what we want, and the sages come in with new “rules.”
Phooey!
Write with your audience in mind. If your audience is diverse, mix it up. A short post here; a long post there.
Guard against falling in love with your own words, but otherwise, type away.