As a blogger, you determine the length of your post based on how much you want to convey. There’s also your blog niche to consider – some subjects are too deep to be justified with short posts. You have to also consider your reader base and what they expect from you. Even with all these points, the holy blog war between short posts and long posts is still on. What kind of post is better, the long post or the short post? When it comes to short posts versus long posts, both have their pros and cons, as explained below. Many bloggers recommend short, crisp posts using powerful sentences. The idea is to grab enough of the reader’s attention to deliver a good-sized punch in a short time. Are short posts the answer then? Let’s analyze:
Short Posts Pros
- Short posts of 300 words or less are best for those who want to grab as much information as possible within a short period. Such people prefer short posts that convey the blogger’s intent neatly without taking up their time.
- Short posts are best suited for people constantly on the move, who just want to catch up on their favorite topics quickly.
- Short posts take much less time to write and are therefore more blogger-friendly. If you’re the kind of blogger who has to deal with writer’s block and time constraints, short posts are the best.
- When you write short posts, you can upload them more often, keeping your readers more engaged with your blog.
- If you have several ideas about a topic, you can explore them all in a series of short posts. This method works well for pageviews.
- A well-written short post can deliver a quick yet powerful punch and gets to the point without overlapping or boring the reader.
Short Posts Cons
- Short posts don’t do justice to topics that need to be explored in greater detail, such as technical topics, to-do topics, and so on. In such cases, a short post looks like a teaser, making your readers look for the rest of the content.
- Short posts don’t deliver on value; it takes about 100 words to flesh out an idea and to deliver it within the next couple of 100 words doesn’t make reading sense.
- It is hard to explore an idea in full using a short post, enough to get one’s audience to start thinking and responding thoughtfully. It would take at least 500 words just to cover the context of a topic; it definitely takes much more to get people thinking.
Many top bloggers recommend the use of long posts over short posts when it comes to conveying core information. Now that we’ve discussed the pros and cons of short posts, let’s take a look at what’s the deal with long posts:
Long Posts Pros
- When you want to tell a story in detail and provide some truly comprehensive information to your reader, you write a long post. Yes, people do need to invest more time to read such posts, but these are the kind that they bookmark and read time and again.
- Long posts can be used to challenge the way people think. They can make a difference in people’s lives by digging deep into issues and providing solutions.
- Long posts allow the blogger to develop deep and meaningful relationships with their reader base. This is because readers can perceive more of your personality and evaluate your opinions.
- Long posts provide a learning opportunity for both the blogger and the reader and enable them to learn and grow together.
- Long posts get better comments and a more loyal readership than short posts.
Long Posts Cons
- Long posts take longer to write; the blogger has to really gear up to sit down and deliver all their thoughts at a stretch. This takes hard work, dedication, and a real commitment to one’s reader base.
- Unless the blogger makes the post really interesting, they’ll lose the reader halfway into a long post, given the low attention spans of readers.
- It’s not easy to write long posts and the average blogger could end up putting away the task, which might make them miss posting schedules. Readers will know when a blogger is not happy to write and the blog will lose readership over time.
- Readers usually scan long posts and decide if they are worth reading or not. In many cases, readers bookmark long posts and forget to get back to them.
- Long posts require good writing skills; there’s nothing worse than a sloppily written long post that rambles, pontificates, digresses, and theorizes ad infinitum ad nauseum. So if you don’t have the right skills, short, succinct posts work better for you than longer ones.
