Hi Steve,

You’ve helped solve my problem. I tend to write long articles that are relatively easy to break up. I was thinking of breaking them all up.

But

The solution is simple. (It’s obvious the second I read your post)

A number of different categories – a serious longer article section and a quick fix section. This sorts out most types of blogger.

To Ari, “I preferred to publish to separate post, make my reader curios and back to my site.”

I think that writers vastly overestimate how “curious” people are, and how much they care about you. Like this article said, people come with a problem and are looking to solve it. I think if it takes 2,000 words to solve the problem, then just solve it. People don’t come back to have half-answered questions answered, they come back to solve a different problem.

Abhishek – thanks for your praise. Thinking it through I think you’re right. Looking at Steve Pavlina’s posts I realise that the reason they’re so successful is that he puts his whole life – including his unpleasant break up with his wife – into his posts.

I need to be careful as I tend to write long posts and I find it difficult to write the 400-500 word post. This is why this post is important to me.

I also think it is important to link one post to another. DBT and Problogger definitely use internal links. It keeps the visitor on the site.

If someone works with dedication on both the options then it will definitely workout. It would again require huge content to follow both the methods.

Writing multiple post is also a good way to approach visitors through new and different topics.

Thanks
Dipesh Patel

I do think that especially for longer posts it’s good to carefully think
about how to structure your post, for example by making it into one of those well known ‘Tips-lists’ also for longer posts using compelling sub-headings, or things like short bullet-lists to make it
more easy and attractive to read. (BTW on my Writing Lifestyle Blog you can find a lot of other interesting tips, and resources for your writing or share your own ideas with other (blogger) writers.)

While reading your post I thought about an other thing that might be an interesting do do is to do – both – by just once in a while rewriting a bunch of previous short posts – with a specific central theme – and make it into one new big one.

All the Best,
To your Happy – Blogging – Inspiration,
HP

However, if the shorter posts are done well – really well, and allow you to post more frequently, there are obvious SEO benefits. Each post can potentially serve a separate phrase and Google also sees a greater frequency of content change — both of which are positives.

Quality comes first. Then SEO. Quality without SEO is fine. SEO without quality leaves your site looking like a content farm client.

Great discussion !

Hi Mary

I’ve had a quick look at your site and I can’t see how you could write shorter posts.

On a related note (for a different Friday question maybe?), how many posts is too many per day? Some bloggers seem to post once per day. Others as often as 5 times per day. I am annoyed by the second option, but those blogs seem to have the most readers. Did they get this many readers by blogging so frequently, or is that something you do only once you get a lot of readers?

Now, I feel better.

My preferred technique is to do both. That makes things more interesting, at least to me.

No?

People do not want to keep searching for everything, they want to solve their problems as instantly as possible.

This article was helpful and will consider this in my next article.

Steve Pavlina writes extremely long posts and believes he owes his success to long tailed searchers, ie unusual combinations of words – which are more likely to be found in a long article. He does, however, work hard and his website has a couple of million words.

On the other hand Seth Godin’s success is down to his numerous, short posts. I note does tend to write slightly off the wall and again will catch unusual searches.

The again Copyblogger and Daily Blogging Tips tend to write frequent medium sized blog posts.

All are successful and all are rated well by the search engines. All use different techniques of posting.

Being English can I suggest a compromise: write a longish post with your material, but also write a couple other posts. Then link the articles.

Leave it a couple of days and you can usually generate a number of other linked posts to a long article. Build the internet links on your blog to boost its SEO rating.

Then, be a recycler, can I suggest cutting down the larger post a little for a guest post. Then split it down to the small posts, rewrite them and then post them to free article directories. In this way you build one or to backlinks.

No one likes to walk away hungry…they may also think it was a waste of their time.

And we all now how precious time is!

Love the insight on breaking longer posts into smaller chunks. That, I believe, will help your audience consume your message more effectively and provide you the writer content that can be posted over a few days vs. just one.

Makes sense to me – cheers to the recommendations here!

I too have the same observations. In a technology related blog, long posts almost always get more search traffic than shorter ones. So, I guess its good to have long posts for getting a good number of search engine traffic. But I have noticed that the regular readers do not read such posts, unless it interests them at the moment, as reading them takes time.

On a personal blog though, short posts with nice images goes very well with regular readers.

The last approach you mentioned about several short posts and one long post summarizing it all with links back to those short posts, might be the best approach if someone wants to satisfy both regular readers as well as search readers. Thanks for this suggestion, I will try it out.

Destination Infinity

for me, an ideal post length is 400-500 words

I agree, longer posts are generally better as they allow you approach a topic and provide a thorough answer in one fell swoop – and people are gererally looking for an answer, as you say!

BUT if you’re facing having very long periods of time between these long posts, then I think it is a good idea to post a short but informative ‘tip’ or insight now and again. Unless you can pump out the long posts a couple of times a week!

But we should not post too long posts because our readers might just get bored with reading too much info.

I’ve done this myself and have to say long posts works awesome.

Thanks for sharing. Retweeted.

Extra stretching or extra compressing looks ugly. The natural is the best.