The other day I posted a blog tip about having enough to say in your blog. I just want to clear up one point on this and say that I said this mostly in reference to niche blogs and very narrow fields of interest. No matter how much ad cash you think there is out there in a particular niche, unless you have LOTS to say you ain't going to see much of it. Content is king and you might be better having a slightly wider blog if that helps you post more, especially in the beginning!

Anyway, onto my second tip. Post mainly short posts. The odd long read is OK but I've found on the blogs and sites that I am involved in that people actually spend less time on longer posts. Sounds odd but the stats seem to hold this to be true. I take this as an indication that either readers come along and go "Wow! This is a long post! I don't have time for this now ..." or that they cut and paste the text and save it for later (I don't mind if people do this but if you have ads on the page, they are lost). It's hard to say what a LONG post is but I think it's smaller than what would be considered long for a web page. I try to keep under 800 words or so as a general rule.

Taking this to the extreme by posting whole book chapters Shel Israel and Robert Scoble are finding this out over on Naked Conversations.

"In fact, a few friends have confided that the chapters themselves are just too cumbersome to read. At first they look uncomfortable telling me this, then they promise to buy the book and read it in book form, which is just fine with Robert and me."

This is why I prefer to post tidbits and smaller morsels and let people come back. If I find that I have a lot to say I'll break it up into smaller posts and link them together rather than give the reader a marathon screen-session (much like Darren does over on ProBlogger with, say, 31 days to a better blog).

Which is where I'm going to end this now!
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This entry was posted on Monday, August 8th, 2005 at 11:45 and is filed under Random Stuff .... You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.