Archive for the ‘ Running Your Blog ’ Category

How long is too long when you are writing a blog post? Can a blog post become too long and uninteresting? Do you need to write more to make sure that you get the message across?

Some times when you are writing, whether it be a blog post or an article, then to get through the full amount of detail that you need is going to take a lot of writing. You could be writing a very detailed post about a complicated subject, but does it really need to run to several thousand words?

Why write one post, when you can write two?
If a post is going to be long winded, then why not split it down? Two posts, three posts, maybe more? Start with a high level overview that describes everything in summary and then links to the all important detail posts that look at just one area and cover it in detail. Although, even some of these can link to further detailed posts.

This way instead of getting one post that describes your content in detail, you have a series of well organised posts that link together and guide readers to where they want to be. But at what point do you start this? When is enough ‘enough’ and when is too much too much?

When is “too much”?
Many article sites like to work on a guide line of around 400 – 500 words per article as a minimum. These guidelines that the different sites work to aren’t randomly issued – they are worked out from experience. They have worked out that readers and search engines like articles that are that size. Much smaller and they become worthless – the search engines might not cache them, they are not focussed on a topic and the reader does not get out of it what they want.

So let’s flip this around. If 400 – 500 words is a good minimum and it is better to split information into a high level overview and a more detailed series, then if your writing is getting in to the order of 800 – 1000 words then it is time to split it down. Split it down into 2 different articles and even write a third that overviews the whole and acts as an overview.

A step further
I would go even further than this and say that if a post hits the 600 – 800 words mark then it is possible to split this successfully as I have already described – by the time each part has an introduction and summary and maybe a lead into the other half, then you have the suggested post size of 400+ words.

When is too much “too much”?
To me, it is anything over around the 500 word mark. Odd posts will exceed this point, but not too often. Keep the posts short, keep them organised, keep your readers interested and use shorter posts to guide them around your blog.

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Stuck For Something To Post About?

Have you ever sat down ready to write a post or two and not had any inspiration as to what to write about? Possibly even got up an hour later with nothing written? Take some inspiration from here!
By Keith Lunt, ©howtostartmyblog.com

Your Traffic Logs
If you haven’t done so recently, then the look through your traffic logs and look to at the search terms that people are searching on to find your blog. Sometimes these will match previous post titles, frequently they will not.

Go through the list and for every search term that can either be used directly as a title or just changed slightly to make a title, open a new post, give it the title and save it as a draft. I like to insert a hyphen in front of the name so that I can see those drafts that are waiting to be written and those that have been written.

I also do this weekly, looking back over the last week’s traffic. If you haven’t done it ever, then look back as far as you can. On a good week I can create 20 new titles and these are based around search terms, so you are helping your search engine optimisation as well.

Your Popular Posts
Look at which posts are getting the most traffic. Were they written a while ago? Could you rewrite them with a slightly different slant and a little tweak to the title? Doing so will generate a few more titles.

Give A Post A Different Feel
You can also completely turn around how you have written popular (and not so popular) posts in the past. If it was a discussion post, could it be rewritten as a list of Frequently Asked Questions, a Pros and Cons post or just a simple refresher article with a few bullet point lists?

Bring Together Your Best Work
I tried this one in the week and my traffic increased overnight – not because I was getting more visitors, just because the visitors that I was receiving were spending more time on my blog. And it is very simple to do.

Just look for a few of your most popular posts and choose several along a theme. Maybe add some not so popular posts as well. Maybe pick 5 – 10 posts, depending on how you feel. Then write a post that just briefly brings these all together and links to the individual posts. I gave a summary of the post name as a title then a paragraph about the post. This was easy as it was on a home working blog and I just picked 7 of the best ideas I had posted about and wrote an introduction on each one.

Look At Google
Go to the Google keyword selector tool, type in a search word or two that is relevant to your blog and look at the results that come back. Making some of these into article titles is usually very easy to do.

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