Well, I am slacking off. Published late in the day, this post is useless on the 28th for some people. Anyway, this is the last in the Ideas And Updates series. This is the advice.
Here is it…
drum roll if you want and you have drums…
keep things short
That is my advice to you. I should tell you why as well.
Most make money online bloggers sort of target those longer posts, the ones that will have people marvel at their writing skill. They use unnecessary words, to many its and thats and so on.I read posts that if they were converted to a distance, would be kilometers or miles long. Take The University Kid for example. His posts are those page long posts. It takes you a while to read them. They can be good, with lot of information, be he could cut down on word usage. Now Jason’s posts are not usually the ones that use extra words, they are just really long. Why target long posts? If you have something really long to say, you might consider breaking it down into other, smaller posts. These three in the series, when I posted the first one, I was originally going to put it all into one huge post, three topics, but I decided to do this series. This, my 103rd published post, could have been my hundred and first if not broken down (more posts doesn’t really mean anything either by the way). So keep things short and to a minimum. Your readers don’t like those kilometer/mile long posts either.
May 29th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
Great point. But I guess it depends. There are some bloggers that write super long posts that I will read because they are so informative. Like Yaro at Entrepreneurs-Journey.com and the new JohnCow.com but there are a lot of bloggers out there that should definately look at cutting their post length!
Tom - StandOutBlogger.coms last blog post..1 Month Blog Flipping Challenge
May 29th, 2008 at 5:49 pm
@Tom - Yes. It does depend a lot on who the blogger is and their style. But even if informative, people might break it up into smaller bits.
May 29th, 2008 at 7:54 pm
My father through out his years of raising me would always, always say: K.I.S.S. And as most of us know it: Keep It Simple, Stupid.
Not to say that a blog’s readers are stupid, but that a lot of people can’t be bothered to do more than skim. Unless you’ve got such a kick-butt post that you can suck your readers in with the first few lines and keep them through several paragraphs, condensing a little never hurts.
On the flip side, you can lose details and I think a few of the quirks that crop up in all of our writing that make it personal, or more human sounding when you slim it down to the barest minimum. It’s a juggling act; some days you get all of the balls in the air, other days you’re scrambling to pick ‘em up off the floor!
May 29th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
@elf fu or Melissa - That was a great comment! That is how to pick people up in the read. The quirks, some blogs really get that. Take lionandmagicboy for example, (the blog you went to after mine), it emphasizes the quirks. That is great. That is the writing style. That is the point of the blog. But on make money online blogs, people emphasize TOO much on the LONG. It is hard to suck people into that post, and long ones you have to draw them in at the beginning of each paragraph. But thank you for reminding me on the drawing people in, I will have to work on that.
Question for anyone who sees this - is my header messed up? On my computer it is, but when I use the other computer it is fine.
May 29th, 2008 at 9:19 pm
Thanks Nathaniel, and I agree. Especially in the realm of money making, keeping it simple is a great way to keep readers. I’ll go out on a limb here by being honest, but most tips on how to make money with your blog aren’t always the most interesting things to read, so by trimming the excess ‘fat,’ so to speak, I think people will help their articles instead of harm.
As for your header, it looks a-okay over here on my end in a resolution of 1600×1200 using firefox beta 3.0
elf_fus last blog post..Chocolate is the best; anyone who likes vanilla is dumb.
May 29th, 2008 at 9:23 pm
Ok. For everyone else the header is fine. On IE it was fine too, there must be something with firefox.
June 3rd, 2008 at 6:59 am
I think I have probably complained about this is quite a few places. It is so common that bloggers try to extend their posts just by filling them with fluff. It drives me crazy and often makes it hard to get through an entire post. I think video bloggers are even worse at this. Rarely do I want to sit on a single blog page and watch a video post for 10 minutes, but they do it anyway. Short and sweet, I agree.
egks last blog post..Mercedes-Benz E Class :: RE: xenon headlight
June 3rd, 2008 at 2:55 pm
@egk - Yes, seeing all the fluff that makes no sense inspired me to write this.:)