So I’m going to try a new trick – write really short blog posts. Inspired by the concept of microblogging I think I might be more willing to write short blog posts – rather than having to worry about writing insightful 1000+ words blog posts with research, graphs and the whole shabang ;)
Well, in microblogging a post can be anywhere from one sentence (with maybe a link or two) to a few paragraphs. So it’s pretty flexible. These short posts, or microposts, should take less than 30 minutes to write – well, they should probably take less than 5 minutes but you shouldn’t have to worry about time restraints. The idea is to just get the idea out there as quickly as possible – it doesn’t even have to be grammatically correct, you can just edit the typos later on – when your visitors point them out ;)
But sometimes when you start out writing a micropost you might get more and more ideas while writing and you’ll be inspired to write a full-length post – and that’s definitely a good thing :)
It might be appropriate to set up to handle these microposts – to separate them from the “real” posts. I might also consider using any of the microblogging services out there to write short posts (and maybe import them into this blog).
The only problem with short posts like that is that it’s not so easy to add in-content AdSense ads when the content is only 2 sentences ;)
This post is kind of a micropost – I wrote it fairly quickly (although it took more than 5 minutes) and only read it over once. What do you think – is this a short post or a normal post? Maybe it’s just somewhere in the middle…
What do you think of the concept of microblogging? Do you think it could help you blog more frequently (which means more content on your blog = better chance of ranking in the search engines for cool keywords)? Are you going to try writing short posts every now and then? Oh, yeah, of course – even though I’m going to try writing more short posts it doesn’t mean I’ll stop writing full-length posts that I put a lot of work in :)
Also, in short posts I might not explain everything in detail – so that’s an excellent opportunity for the readers to post comments and ask questions.
9 responses so far ↓
// Jan 29, 2008 at 2:53 pm
Blog is a clever tool for Internet Marketing and handling such king of trick is to done with more conscious because they may mark you as a Spammer and also spread to others to whom they exchanged the links.
Hannes Johnson // Jan 30, 2008 at 12:55 am
I don’t see how this “trick” can be marked as spam. Can you elaborate?
// Feb 1, 2008 at 10:43 pm
Great post… I have not gotten into true micro posts like twitter, but I do think this type of post is very useful. I too struggle with regularly putting out huge detailed post , so I have decided to start doing what I would call a flagship post maybe every other week, with shorter posts that share a brief concept or link to another blog or incitefull thoughts that I think of through out the day a couple of times a week, and then to fill out the week the micro posts that are sometimes as simple as check out this cool tool I found, and then a question to inspire comments.
// Feb 6, 2008 at 2:16 pm
Small posts can be a good idea and can be implemented quickly. Drafts and saved half finished posts can actually loose their importance after some time, or may no longer be important when you actually plan to complete them and publish them. Great post :)
// Mar 4, 2008 at 1:45 pm
I think it’s a great idea to have short posts as long as they have quality content and keyword optimized. And yes you should still post the usual long posts as they are the pillar posts that all experts recommend.
Peter Lee
// Jul 6, 2008 at 7:20 am
Great work! I agree 100% with this. It has just freed my mind up from the idea of writing long posts.
I never thought about doing short posts but I can see the benefits plus I seem to get a lot more inspiration to write shorter posts.
Short pithy articles are more readable anyway. Thanks for this… a good tip for sure!
Greg Martin
// Jul 6, 2008 at 8:41 am
[...] it looks like my brilliant trick isn’t quite bullet-proof – although I have dozens of drafts in WordPress, another dozen of Notepad documents and also physical notepads with half-finished blog posts… But [...]
Hannes Johnson // Jul 10, 2008 at 1:28 am
@Greg Martin: I’m glad to be able to help :)
Some people get stuck with the idea that blog posts have to be very lengthy and that can maybe drain the motivation so they quit their blog after a few weeks/months. I think short posts are better than quitting your blog altogether ;)
// Oct 7, 2008 at 3:22 am
When you say blogging it doesn’t mean that you need to post on a very lengthy post , when you blog feel free to write anything that can be related on what you wanted to spread out it could be in business or on what niche you do.
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