Are Longer Posts Best?

No matter what you write about when it comes to blogging, and in particular, blogging to make money, there are differing schools of thought. Should you have lots of ads, or only a few, long blog posts or short, daily posting or less frequent posting. Bloggers have an ability to write convincing posts about just about anything and that means readers can be left rather confused.

Take the long posts vs shorter posts for instance. Shorter posts often lead to more frequent posting, which some suggest is the key to getting blog traffic. The shorter posts are easy and quick to read, something that websurfer's apparently appreciate. But...are these really the readers you want?

Longer posts, even if that means you don't post quite as often, have the benefit of engaging your readers, more than short posts. Bearing in mind that in order to engage your readers, the posts need to be interesting, informative and well written. You also need to realize that longer posts will discourage some folks, who will just click on to the next blog, leaving you unread. However, you have to ask yourself, what do you want? Engaged readers who read your entire posts, or folks who skim your short ones, and then move on? It's OK if they move on to your advertisements, but that doesn't always happen. If you are trying to promote a product in your blog posts, the surfers won't likely stop long enough to get to it.

Unfortunately, most website readers are skimmers, they open your page, see a long article and probably won't take the time to read it which is unfortunate. So...that means short posts are the best?

Perhaps, but maybe not. There are things you can do to get readers involved in longer posts. First of all, if you are using a blog platform that allows you to post the first couple of paragraphs of your post, and then a link to the rest of the story, you get the best of both worlds. Unfortunately, Blogger doesn't have that option, or if it does, I don't know about it. I suppose you could work out something, perhaps too blogs, one with the full story and another with only the beginning plus the link. I might try that....

Write Well
Assuming you don't have the "read the rest of this article option" but you want to write longer posts what can you do? Take heart, all is not lost. First of all, write well...read and edit your posts before you hit the publish button, remove all the fluffy stuff you don't need.

Engaging First Sentence
Secondly, strive to write an engaging first sentence and paragraph, get your reader's attention right from the get-go. That is the most important thing you can do with any written article. Look how magazine aticles start out, the first paragraph is written to pull the reader in and make them need to read the rest of the article.

Short Paragraphs
Thirdly, use short paragraphs, these help the skimmers. Instead of having to concentrate to follow each line in your post, their eyes can move quickly over a page, reading the parts that interest them.

Headers
Use paragraph headers where it makes sense. I have trouble with this one, because sometimes I find them a distraction, or make the post look over done. However, they can be effective. I tried some here as you can see.

Personally, I lean toward longer posts. Perhaps this reduces the frequency of my posting, but I think my readers (the ones who take a few minutes to read the post) get more from the posts. I like to think of them as value posts, there is something of use to the reader in the article if they take the time to read it.

I fail to see the point in all kinds of short posts that usually are just links to someone else's blog. I know that in some circumstances these work quite well, and can develop quite good traffic, but it comes back to the question I asked several weeks ago when I wrote about deciding what you want from your blog.

I am looking for readers, regular and otherwise, who are willing to invest a couple of minutes and read what I have to say, even if it is a little wacky sometimes. If you are still with me, and haven't clicked to the next blog, you must be one of those readers....thank you...I am glad you stayed.