Lessons in Blogging: K.I.S.S.

Lesson One: I talk too much. That about sums it up. My posts so far tend to go about a thousand words, give or take. The first time I actively tried to write a shorter post, I failed. Aiming for 500 words, I fell short—or would that be long?—at 602. I guess I should be happy that I cut over 200 words from that post.

Some topics need to be long—but not all of them. I don’t think I could have done Honoring Our Kids’ First Families justice at 500 words or less. But did It’s in the Bag really need a thousand? My secret fear/suspicion is that I haven’t had many responses to the question at the end because people got bored and stopped reading.

You’ve got to grab them. Based on my own short-attention-span surfing, I should know better. Unless I’m hooked in from word one, I tend to click away any time it looks like reading a post will take more than thirty seconds. I’ve got a nifty plugin, WordPress.com Popular Posts, that puts teasers to popular posts in my sidebar. I’ve got it set to show the first fifty or so characters of the post, which has made me much more aware of the first ten words of my posts.

So, my first lesson in blogging: Keep It Short and Strong. Go long when the topic warrants it, but not every time. Remember that other people have short attention spans, too—or two kids, a husband, and a cat all asking when they’re all going to get fed—or too many deadlines—or too much work to do—or too many errands to run—or too many shiny links to check out—or too much of anything and everything else. Grab them with the first line, and make the rest quick and easy to digest.

Tags: blogging