“Cut That Out!” Business Blogging

“If it takes too many words to express a thought, perhaps you need to re-think,” a wise wag remarked. There’s more than a nugget of truth in that advice when it comes to choosing titles for business blog posts.

For one thing, as local small business consultant Lorraine Ball discovered, long titles don’t work well for promoting a blog on Twitter, with its 140-character limit. 

For another, while beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, length is in the eye of the searcher, who is far more likely to scan than to read.  Online searchers become impatient with long-text-heavy blog posts.

The dilemma, of course, concerns SEO, as Ball points out.  Content-rich headlines (especially keyword-rich headlines) work well for internet search if not for Tweeting and re-Tweeting.

As a business blogging trainer, my advice has been to make blog posts as long as they need to be, but not a word longer. In general, I’d say the same for blog post titles.

In fact, musing on this very topic while cutting Halloween pumpkin shapes out of cookie dough, I couldn’t help thinking that the shaping of blog posts – and blog post titles – works the same way.  Like cookies, they’re best when all the nonessential “dough” is cut away!