Knowing Your Size In Your Business Blog

When Success Magazine talks about healthy eating, it’s in terms of "knowing your size".

Since the average restaurant’s serving size of pasta, for example, is enough for five people, the advice Success offers is to order a to-go box with your meal, consuming just one serving’s worth of food on the spot. Then (based on the old forewarned-is-forearmed idea), Success cuts other portions down to size:

• 1 ounce of cheese is the size of a pair of dice
• 3 ounces of meat is the size of a deck of playing cards
• One 12 ounce potato is the size of a baseball
• 1 cup of rice or pasta is the size of your fist

 
When it comes to effective blogging for business, we need to "know our size" as well, exercising "portion control" in the length of paragraphs, of blog titles and of entire blog posts. That’s a hefty order in itself (pun intended), because blogs need to be conversational rather than billboard-style, and be sprinkled with enough keyword phrase use to attract targeted online traffic. Blogging, like food, is about content, and finding the right spot on the less-is-more continuum is the trick.

The professional ghost blogger rule I try to keep in mind and one I teach to business owners is this:
 

"Make each blog post as short as possible, but no shorter."

(Stick to one central idea, and then say it until it’s said.)

Using the Success Magazine notion (if only we realized how much more than our share we’ve been eating at the restaurant, we’d have the strength to shovel the remainder into the box!) here is some measured food for thought about blogs:

• 1 snappy blog post title containing 1 keyword phrase should be no more than 6-7 words long
• 1 350-word blog post might consist of 4 to 5 short paragraphs. Vary the size of your paragraphs.
• Each blog post might contain 4 or 5 keyword phrases.
• Each post might contain 1 – 3 links to other sites or to former posts.
• Beginning sentence should be strong and concise, under 20 words, introducing the topic.
• Ending sentence should leave a "parting thought", and, ideally, be under 20 words.

To produce healthy business blogging results, get to know your size!