Short blog posts are more likely to be read

 

One of our proofreading course students was working on her career blog recently, and was puzzled when I told her to keep some of her posts to roughly 100 words long. She said such a low word limit didn’t allow her to express herself.

I told her not to decry lower word counts. Short blog posts are usually the most effective.

Statistics show that shorter posts are read by more people and a greater percentage of the content will be read than with longer posts.

In other words, the longer it is, the less of it will be read.

Less is best.

But short posts are much harder to write. That’s why people don’t like writing them! It’s easy to ramble, but challenging to get well researched, valid points across quickly and with an effective writing style.

Every word and fact, must justify its place.

In fact, when I came to read this student’s post, I found that she could have said more by writing tighter – there were around 75 unnecessary words in it. So she could have included some of the content she deleted after all.

It’s important to identify topical subjects that many readers will relate to, and do some research that enables you to inject originality into your content. The challenge is to make common subjects interesting, create reader engagement by asking questions and prompt readers to reflect, recall and react.

All in 100 words! It can be done.

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