Shorter Posts vs Longer Posts - Which are Better for your Blog?
I saw an excellent article today on post length, and decided to add my take on the subject. When I write, in a way, the post itself decides how long it's going to be. An account of something has a natural beginning, middle, and an end, which governs just how long it'll be before it wraps up.
The long and short of blog posts
Some of my longest posts are what I call "Life Posts." These are usually articles about events in my life that affected me as a person, or could offer a lesson or solace to others. A good example is the night I was tossed overboard while on a ship in the Navy.
I shared how I was only hanging onto the railing by one hand, and was about to give up and be swallowed by the mighty North Atlantic Ocean. The story of how I survived was so long I was going to split it into two parts. However, that long and very personal story, got almost no engagement or support, much to my surprise, so I never wrote part two.
Just laying out part one of my accident aboard that navy ship, took so much out of me emotionally as I had to relive the whole thing moment by moment. However as it turned out, it was one of those posts that very few people saw. Maybe someday I'll get around to writing part 2, but I don't know if I'm willing to put all of that work in anytime soon on something which might not get read.
That brings up a deeper question of just what we in the Hive community want regarding low vs high effort articles. Write a short post, and they say it's low effort. Write a long one, and nobody reads it. So the presumed answer is to stay somewhere in the middle, say around 500ish words? The problem with that, is that some stories need to be shared in their full "container" in order to allow for maximum impact.
Let the story "speak" to your audience
When I share a story in my life, I want you to feel as if you're right there with me, and seeing things through my eyes. Slicing and dicing that into something really short, strips out the weight and emotion involved. Each story is done when its done, and need not always be rushed or overly condensed.
There's also the benefit of describing the environment around me, so that you have a taste of what I went through. I described the rough, angry seas, with wave after wave drenching me, which weighed me down and tired me out even more. Things like that are important to get across which added to the pressures on me which almost made me give up the fight on that dark and stormy night.
The other reason I like writing longer articles is the beneficial effect they have on SEO. I don't just write for the audience here on Hive and LeoFinance, but I write for the masses on Google as well. A naturally deeper post without added fillers or nonsense just to make it long, gives the search engines more data to chew on, and can give an evergreen post a long shelf life outside of the blockchain.
With a really short, low-effort post, there's not enough "connective tissue" so that your paragraphs show up in more search queries. Say you write a one paragraph shitpost about Splinterlands with just an in-game screenshot. Not much there for Google to chew on, is there? Now expand that to say 1000 words describing your card strategy over a number of battles, and you're going to have more opportunities using natural language, to string together more keyword clusters, which will increase the odds of your post being found in search.
This spot seems like the natural place to end the article. It's just long enough to get the point across without being too long and turning the reader off. However, if it needed to be longer, it would be. One does not need to stuff keywords and phrases in, as an obvious attempt to game the search engines. They know that trick by now. But if you "speak" naturally, with your own voice, in a sufficiently-sized post, Google will find you and send the readers your way.
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