Last week we covered the immense benefits of building traction with your blog posts. However, one concern we hear frequently from clients is the amount of time and effort it takes to run a blog. This can be especially trying for small companies with minimal staff.

In most every instance, these companies are approaching their blog from the perspective that each post needs to be deep, layered, and complex.

Our advice: stop it!

A blog post ought to adhere to that old adage from your 11th grade English teacher, comparing essays to skirts: it should be long enough to cover the subject, but short enough to keep it interesting.

If you find yourself often struggling to generate a new post because it “has to” be 20 paragraphs long (a paragraph consisting of at least five sentences), it’s time to rethink your writing strategy.

Some things to consider:

1. Visitors to your site scan your posts more than they actually read them – it’s simply the reality we live in these days. Great big blocks of text, therefore, are neither useful nor desirable. Consider shorter paragraphs, breaking up text with headers and lists, etc.
2. By the same token, our ADHD society very often doesn’t have the attention span to read through a 5,000 word dissertation. When we write posts for MWD Web, for example, we aim for an average of around 300 words.
3. Some of the most successful bloggers out there write very short posts. If you haven’t been there before, take a look at Seth Godin’s blog. The man writes posts that are only a few sentences long, yet his blog is one of the most popular ever.
   He also, you’ll note, posts something darn near every day. The short nature of his posts makes this much more feasible than if he were posting a full-blown article every day.

If you still find that you’re trying to write War and Peace every time you sit down to blog, and can’t get away from the long format, consider breaking that post up into a series. Take our last two posts, for example (this one and last week’s). That could easily have been one longer post, but we instead split it in two. This makes both posts more digestible, and also gives us two posts for the price of one.

Or engage the services of a good copywriter. We’d be happy to speak with you about that service.

PS This post is, ironically, a tad longer than most. If you made it this far, thanks for sticking with us!

Image by Hellmy