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Short blog posts best for your law blog?

February 28, 2007

Andy Merrett at The Blog Herald asks are super-short posts good for your blog?

Andy cites Darren Rowse of Problogger that short posts are the secret of successful bloggers.

The conclusion drawn was that posts of 150 words or less are not only indexed better by search engines, but appeal to those with a shorter attention span, as well as allowing a much greater number of highly targeted entry points into a blog compared with longer posts.

Andy also mentions Michael Gray’s post at Webpronews on ‘Sound Bite Blogging.’ “By limiting your posts to less than 300 characters on average you can attract and retain a larger audience…”

I have never counted the words in my posts but my preference is to be short. Why? Because that’s how I like blog posts. Short, sweet, and to the point. Better yet, ones with a clear title that tells me what I am going to get.

I use RSS feeds of blogs and keywords as intelligence agents so I get the news and information I want in an easy to digest manner. I monitor over 400 feeds. I look at titles inside of RSS feeds broken down into folders by various subjects. Most of the posts I have no interest in opening and it only takes me seconds to skim through a list of titles. When I open one, I have no interest in reading an ‘article’ length post.

For some law blogs, a little longer may be better. How can I argue with the success of guys like Bill Ward, publisher of the NJ Eminent Domain Law Blog and Steve Jakubowski, publisher of the Bankruptcy Litigation Blog? They’re knocking the ball out the park with their detailed and in depth posts. Bill says some posts may take as a long as a few hours but as he gets plenty of work from the blog, it’s worth it.

Bottom line, do what you believe is working. In the case of law blogs, depending on your audience, detailed legal analysis requiring a little length, may be needed.

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