Tristan Louis at TNL.net does an interesting post today which analyses 5 top blogs (Boing Boing, InstaPundit, Daily Kos, Gizmodo and Engadget) and how frequent and long their posts are.
‘The data became clearer. On that particular day, the top five bloggers created an average of 30 entries, with each entry being under 150 words.’
It’s a very interesting post and one that backs up a lot of the theory that I’ve argued here over the past 6 months. Frequent short sharp posts work on a number of levels:
- Highly Targeted Content – A post of 150 or so words is likely to be pretty targeted on one particular topic. Search Engines love this – they know what it is about and will rank it higher on this.
- Search Engines like shorter posts. I personally think 150 might be 100 or so words short of what is ideal for SE’s but the research shows that shorter posts tend to be dealt with better than longer ones by Google.
- Readers like bite sized content – Research shows that readers scan content and that they rarely read things word for word. They also have notoriously short attention spans online. 150 words is easily digestible.
- High quantities of posts = more entry points to your blog – write one long 4500 word post each day and you create 1 new page on your blog. This is one possible new entry point on your site each day that will be indexed by Search Engines, appearing in RSS feeds etc. Create 30 posts and you can see you increase the chances of your blog being found exponentially. Multiply this 30 daily posts by 365 days in a year and you start the see the potential of such a strategy.
Having argued for short frequent posts I want to stress that there will always be a place for longer less frequent posts on blogs. in fact I personally prefer to read this species of blog and will probably continue to do so. The beauty of blogging is that there is enough room for many styles of blogging and that if you’re considering adding an income stream to your blog that it is not only the short post blogs that are earning good money (at least I hope not – this post is already up to 393 words).
I’ll finish this post by repeating my advice from earlier posts. If you’re a long post type writer – perhaps consider breaking your post down into bite sized pieces and posting them over a few days as a series. Not only will you bring your readers back for more over time – but you might actually tap into some of what these top blogs have discovered – the power of the short frequent post.
