When you first start out as a blogger, be it pro, or just for fun, you will want to quickly assess your audience, and get a handle on what they are looking for from your site while balancing what your goals are. Some sites do really well with longer, detailed posts while others do great with shorter more succinct posts.

Finding Your Comfort Zone

You have to decide what you will be comfortable with, and really that is probably going to be the strongest deciding factor. Try out a few lengths and time how long it takes you to write out an article.

Will you be able to spend that long each time you write a post for your blog?

If it is too long, try cutting it back. For your first few entries you might want to take time to edit them down so that you use as few words as possible to convey your idea. As you get more experienced at self-editing, you will get faster at it thus creating better posts.

If you realized that your post only took a few minutes to write, and you wanted to create something longer, don’t fret too much, as you will have days where you will have to research a topic before you can write intelligently about it, and on those days, you will be glad you “gave” yourself those extra few minutes, rather than using all your time writing the actual post.

Your Audience’s Expectations

When choosing the length of post you want to aim for, remember that people like consistency. If you chose to write longer, more detailed posts, then your visitors are going to expect that from you, and might not be responsive to the few posts that are short on details and information.

The same goes with shorter posts though. You will attract an audience over time that expects such things from you, and they might not read a post that you spend an hour writing that goes into great detail, and so once you chose to go “short” or “long”, you will want to try to remain as consistent as possible.

Conclusion

It will really be up to you to decide. From my own personal experiences, I would say that shorter posts are easier to read, as most people don’t like reading large blocks of text online, and doing many shorter, more concise posts can actually equalize out the search engine advantage of doing content and keyword rich posts.

Either way, the goal is to continually, and constantly publish new content for your readers.

Originally posted on July 18, 2007 @ 2:22 am