The A-2-Z of Business Blog Writing: L is for Long Blog Posts

How long is a piece of…

…ideal blog post?

There is a lot of controversy out there in the blogosphere about the optimum length of blog posts.

It’s tempting to say that however long a blog post is, as long as it’s interesting and continues to grab hold of readers’ interest, its final length doesn’t matter.

But…

…that’s not the case.

Be conscious of your audience’s time constraints

No matter how absolutely fascinating your article is, the sad truth is your readers only have limited time to read yours and any others they find fascinating. You need to be aware of this and show your readers that you are, so they know that you respect their time constraints.

In my bi-monthly newsletter, Blog Writing News (you can subscribe via the box in the sidebar >>>>) I start off with one sentence and then go straight into one-line summaries of about 6 or 7 articles I curate from around the internet that I know will be of interest, followed by one-line summaries of blog writing articles we’ve published here, and that’s it.

I know that’s not a blog post, but an eNewsletter that’s going to be of any value to readers – considering how busy everyone is – in my view needs to be very short, very sweet and sharply to the point.

And to a slightly lesser extent, so do blog posts … even full blown ones.

But what if there’s a lot of good information to share?

Well, you can try to compress it into a shortish piece but as you can imagine that’s neither easy nor satisfactory, really.

About as reader-friendly as a cornered rat.

What I recommend is that instead of trying to shrink-wrap your golden nuggets of information, you write away happily without compressing your text. Compressed text/information is very dense and tends to be about as reader-friendly as a scientific academic essay.

And here speaks the voice of experience as my son has been churning these out for the last three years with me having the unenviable task of proof-reading them.

If they had been blog posts not only would I have been sharply turned off of their subject matter, but also probably would have thrown myself in front of an express train.

So what next?

Simple: split your text into however many “episodes” are appropriate.

The Great Google says blog posts should be at least 300-400 words long if it’s going to take them seriously. That should satisfy its bots and other “prohistoric” monsters. In real life, that’s a bit short: 500-800 words is better, up to 1,000 is best, but more than that becomes a bit of a trek.

With a longer piece, splitting it into two or more “episodes” has more than one advantage:

1.The obvious one – provides readers with a digestible piece of information that they can read or scan comfortably without getting bored

2.Provided that you “top and tail” each “episode” appropriately, you can encourage readers to come back to your blog again … and again …

3.Should you happen to have created a very long piece of work, tutorial, etc., your “episodes” provide a very good basis of an eBook, or white paper (if you still use those) which you can share and/or sell separately

If you want to know about how to split one long article or tutorial into a series, watch this space … it will come up under “The A-2-Z of Business Blog Writing: S is for Series” …

And don’t forget: if you want the latest quick curated news from the internet on how to write better for your business blog, let me have an email addie for you here in the sidebar >>>> and you’ll be a member. No spam, no time wasting, and no bullsh*t. Promise.

photo credit: cdsessums via photopin cc

photo credit: Eusebius@Commons via photopin cc

via Business 2 Community http://www.business2community.com/blogging/2-z-business-blog-writing-l-long-blog-posts-0701191?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=2-z-business-blog-writing-l-long-blog-posts