“Ahhh, Just Right”-Sizing Your Blog Posts

Opinions differ on the optimal size for a blog post, with one "rule" I read being to keep the post short enough so that the reader needn’t scroll down the page. Having composed blog posts (both as a ghost and under my own name) numbering in the thousands, I’m finding it difficult to fix on any rule other than "It depends!"  I think maybe Albert Einstein said it best: "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler."

On the one hand, online searchers tend to be scanners more than readers, and it’s now or never in terms of engaging their attention. You don’t want to crop things too close, though. My realtor friend Katrina Basile agrees, because she sent me the Tucker Talks Real Estate newsletter telling me not to cut my grass too short.  "Higher heights look better, help a deeper root system develop," the article advises.  There’s an analogy here: your blog’s "root system" consists of the links to other sources and to back issues of your own blog posts; you won’t have room to do this if the post is overly short.

Bloging guru and business marketing consultant Seth Godin talks about the length of business meetings.  "Understand that all problems are not the same, so why are your meetings?  Why is there a default length?"  Good question.

In blogging, I’ve found that as long as you stick to a central idea for each blog post, you need to "say it until it’s said", making your post as short as possible, but not shorter.

Mental Floss Magazine has a short piece about length in its Physics section. Two scientists from California have confirmed an important mathematical truth. After 3415 videotaped trials, putting heaps of string in a box and shaking the box, they confirmed that the longer the string, the more often it becomes tangled. Tangled logic is not something you’d want for your blog!
  
If it’s beginning to sound as if shorter is necessarily better, remember you need plenty of room for key words. Your blog post needs to have some length on it in order to make your use of those key words flow naturally.   (Key words nd phrases are what the search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN use to match up what your blog has with what searchers are looking for.)  If your blog post is very short, you’ll be sacrificing readability by cramming in key words to the point that your content makes little sense.

Remember Goldilocks and how she tried sitting in each of the Three Bears’ chairs? After rejecting the first two chairs because they were the wrong size, she tries the third:

"Ahhh, this chair is just right."  That’s exactly the sensation you want your reader to have about your blog post!