For those people who blog daily or semi daily is there an optimal post length that keeps people reading regularly without feeling overwhelmed?
I fully admit to being a member of the short attention span generation. My life is busy enough I don’t need long introductions, set ups, or window dressing, just give me the goods and let me move on. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve watched a YouTube video and yelled to myself or out loud “get on with it already!”.
With the exception of the “search industry” most blog posts I come across are in the 200-300 word range. I’m sure this is in part due to contractual obligation, but are people only reading “sound bite” style posts because that’s what they’ve been conditioned to read or does there attention drop off on regular long posts?
From my own experience I skim the titles of all posts if it doesn’t catch my interest in subject or by author I breeze over it. If I open it and it’s too long I “star” it for later. One could argue that with personalized search and authenticated users that would be “plus” for bloggers, but let put that aside and focus on the just the end user. We know form social media that most people don’t read the story, they vote on the title and snippet, the virtual equivalent of the sound bite. Is there an advantage in sound byte style blogging? By limiting your posts to less 300 characters on average can you attract and retain a larger audience, I think so.
From a search engine perspective you could be creating problems. Your unique text to template ratio would be pretty low. You could streamline it with CSS and Javascript but I still think unless you’ve got a decent amount of trust that’s an uphill battle. However if my suspicions about being able to retain a larger audience is true you have a greater chance of getting more links. Chances are that sound byte audience is also more technically advanced and social media friendly and would help you build a Digg culture and get you those sought after links. You authority problem would be short lived once you built up critical user mass.
So for those of you who run multiple blogs, what other advantages are their to “sound bite blogging”?
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{ 8 comments }
One of the disadvantages of short posts is that they don’t get included in Google News (granted this won’t affect most bloggers).
I think the limit is somewhere between 200-300 words but they seem to work on a percentage basis based on the amount of content versus the amount of other stuff on the page.
It doesn’t matter how long a post is as long as its scan friendly. If the opening sentence of every paragraph summarizes the said paragraph, if main points are bolded, or if Key ideas are written as headers, then I can skim a post in under a minute.
on the other hand, if a post not scan friendly, it doesn’t matter if its only 50 words. I’m not going to bother reading it.
I think shorter posts should outnumber longer ones. Case in point, if you look at Techcrunch’s current homepage, there are four shorts post and two longer posts.
I agree with halfdeck above, if it’s interesting enough.
I’ve got a pretty short attention span as well so anything longer than 500 words is unlikely to be read by me unless (a) the title and opening paragraph has engaged me sufficiently to want to read the rest or (b) I’m familiar with the author and know that it’ll be worth the read.
I don’t think a site entirely based on sound bites could ever really get started. If it gets lucky enough to get some diggs, the linkage value is really low, since these links tend to disappear quickly.
There won’t be a lot of additional linkage, because people won’t go to the trouble of linking from their own sites to something essentially contentless (it’s a lot easier to Digg! than to post…)
SEL actually has a pretty good post up today which relates: http://searchengineland.com/070226-040218.php
I typically do 2-3 paragraphs witha total of 200-300 words. It just feels right. Also most of the info is above the fold, which may help click-thru’s.
The subject matter that you are blogging about will certain dictate to some extent post length, but I try to be cognicent of post length and make sure to have a lot of variety.
There are, in my opinion, two types of blog posts:
1. Thought pieces – longer posts
2. News/Update pieces – short posts
Every week you should have at least one thought piece (some have one everyday) followed by 1-3 smaller “news” based pieces per day. This gives you the best of both worlds and have proven pretty successful for me across a couple of different blogs.
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