Long blog posts or short blog posts, which is recommended?

This question of long blog posts VS short blog posts is one question I know that have garnered much attention and heated argument on which is preferable for newbie and even for pro bloggers alike. 

One thing I will like to point out here is that each of them has their own advantages and disadvantages, and I will be breaking them down on the course of this article so that at the end you can pass your own judgement.

There was this particular piece that I wrote on the two best and largest sources of blog traffic and since this current article will be centering more on it, I encourage you to read that article in full so that you can co-relate and understand this one very well, though that is what I will be doing here.

If you will agree with me, that one of the major aims of blogging should be to become successful in it through building of large readership communities, therefore those best and largest sources of blog traffic becomes paramount here. Just as some will simply and rightly put it that a blog without traffic is a dead blog.

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Secondly, another thing that you should always bear in mind while blogging is that you blog for people and not necessary for yourself, in other words your readership community members interests should be put at heart first when coming up with any article for your blog.

We are getting closer to the main topic of the day. In those two best sources of traffic that I listed in the other piece; I did mentioned the search engine traffic and the direct traffic (referral traffic). Maybe at this point, I have kept you wondering on what the relationship between those two sources of traffic could be with this topic….now it’s time to break the ice…I will be starting with the short blog posts.

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It is fact that so many individuals have recently developed poor reading habit, and it is more pronounced in certain regions. 

Contributory factor to this poor reading habit has in large extent directed towards the negative impacts of technological advancement, such as too much use of self-made abbreviations while texting with mobile devices (SMS, MMS), sending out e-mails etc. the use of computers and internet, whereby such individuals now prefer reading short soft copies of books other than voluminous hard copies as were done in the past. 

Getting mastery to those short and summarized soft copies have drastically affected their reading abilities and they now always find it difficult to read in volumes.

On the part of bloggers and their activities, they are not really in the best position to take drastic measures in ameliorating the poor reading culture often encountered in this era but rather they basically take things the way they come and make adjustment themselves with the way they blog.

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Coming back to our discussion, you will notice that for those individuals that have lost their reading abilities, they even consider articles of about 800-1000 words as very long pieces and often find it difficult to read and digest such pieces completely, rather they prefer articles of about 350 words which they can just scan through and move on to their next activity. 

Now if your articles are always long, those individuals after landing on your page and noticing that the articles are long, they jump out immediately thereby increasing your blog bounce rate which is not that healthy for your blog.

Most cases, these set of blog visitors are referred as referral or direct traffic; they come mainly from social media, direct blog url input on address bar, hoping to see short pieces that they can just scan through and continue with their social media activities. 

To some bloggers, they even prefer these types of visitors because it augur’s well for them, since they have been able to turn their blogs into brand that attract such visitors (fans) and to the extent that their blog url has even stuck in the brains of those visitors. These bloggers now worry less about other sources of traffic to their blog.

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The other type of blog posts are the long blog posts. It is in this type of pieces that a blogger can truly express himself/herself very well, give more details to the article for better understanding. 

These types of articles if well-constructed are very interesting, lowers blog bounce rate and increase time spent on your blog by visitors, and thank God that it is not all individuals that have lost their reading abilities. 

We still have handful individuals who don’t mind consuming articles of 1000-1500 words and even still ask for more like Oliver Twist. Once the articles are interesting, they have no cause for alarm reading such articles regardless of the articles length.

So for bloggers that engage in drafting long post articles, apart from captivating their readers with explicitly written contents, one thing again that often rings at the back of their mind as they compose such articles is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). 

Pro-bloggers know that SE loves such writings, no matter how long they may tend to be and since it is not humans that crawls or go through these articles but robots that are capable of crawling and indexing millions of pieces tirelessly. You now see here that SE traffic as one of the best sources of traffic mentioned initially favours the long blog posts.

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Finally, whether direct traffic or SE traffic, since we are very much interested in all these traffic to our blogs and in as much as these visitors do not engage in any illicit activities on our blog when they visit, you can often combine both short posts and long posts on your blog for optimum performance by leaving no stone unturned. In other words, sometimes you chunk out long posts whereas other times you chunk out short posts for you to meet up with your readers’ desire. 

For me, on a neutral perspective, if the question concerning long and short blog posts was posed to me, I will go for the long blog posts ahead of the short since the long posts are often more explicit and add more values, but for blogging sake, I go for the both.

Judgment time and over to you, what are your opinions pertaining long blog posts and short blog posts? The comment box below is waiting for you.