Blog Tip 20. Short Posts
If you don’t have much to say, don’t say much.
Resist the pressure to have to fully unpack every aspect of every topic – instead let your readers unpack a topic for you with an invitation at the end of your post.
Web readers are notorious for having short attention spans and staying on websites for very short periods of time – so a short post can be just as effective (if not more so) than a longer one.
They can also give bloggers block a good hiding also as they take the pressure of having to have massive depth in every post you write off a little.
Very good idea. I always want to go into some depth with my posts, and I’ve realized I simply don’t have the time for it! So I’m trying to do more shorter posts.
The benefit of a short post is that you can focus on any given point more clearly as oppose to raming 3-4 points into one post. Breaking a long post into multiple post can also be extracted from this tip.
I would love to know Steve Pavlina’s comment on this:-) (his posts are notoriously long but his blog very successful). I guess sometimes the rule “do the opposite of what everyone does” just works.
RC – yeah there is an exception to every rule and Steve is one of them.
There’s nothing wrong with long posts – I have written my fair share. However mixing it up can be a good idea for many blogs too.
This is something that I really struggled with for a long time. I wanted to make every post spectacular – full of research and opinion. Part of me thought that “what if this is the first post a reader sees – it has to be special.” Inevitably I’d go 3 days without posting because I’d never have time to finish the post. In the process I’d shortchange and alienate the readers I already had.
I still do the long posts when the material and my time warrants it, but I’ve finally come to the point where I’m comfortable doing a one to two paragraph post.
The other tactic related to this, is that when I know I don’t have time to do a long in depth post, I’ll break it up into several shorter posts. It keeps content coming for a couple days until I can think of something else to write.
[…] If you have a blog, the pressure to write longer than you should can be pretty intense. Darren Rowse of Pro-Blogger urges readers to resist the urge. Don’t write more than necessary. […]
The “If you don’t have much to say, don’t say much” rule usually works for me to overcome writers block.
Most days, I have no idea what I’m going to write about. When I get stuck, I just commit to one sentence. Once the sentence is written, the rest flows fairly quickly.
After a few hours, I look up and: Lo! An essay!
Hey you are rite.
I generally used to write full text blog explaining each and every nook of the stuff that i’wud be writing about.
thankz for the tip, i’ll make use of it.