How Long Should a Blog Post Be?

I've received several marketing emails recently with a message header identical or similar to the title of this post, so it seems like a hot topic. As the author of more than a hundred thousand blog posts (more on that below -- this is the 3,712th post at KN@PPSTER alone, and my recollection is that I'm the author of all but two), I feel qualified to weigh in.

Some marketing gurus say "the shorter the better" (people don't want to read long posts -- show them some sizzle and then move them along to whatever you're selling).

SEO gurus tend to say "the longer the better" because that way a post will vomit up more terms for the search engines to lock onto and rank the page for.

Blogger opinionators of all kinds tend to say "it depends." I concur.

"Blog" is nothing but a publishing format/content management convention -- reverse-chronological posting of content. Its early usage was for personal journals, but these days the format/convention is everywhere, in use by publications of every type imaginable. Wordpress and other blogging applications have become full-featured content management systems.

So, how long your blog post should be is a function of what you're trying to accomplish.

I've published (as mentioned above) more than 100,000 blog posts at Rational Review News Digest  (more than 11,000 in its latest Wordpress database, which will turn one year old on Friday, the day before the publication itself turns 15 years old in its current format). Those posts have a preferential length of 150 words or less and a semi-hard limit of 200 words. Why? Because they are excerpts from and links to Other People's Content and we want to stay in "fair use" territory.

At The Garrison Center, my posts invariably run between 400 and 500 words in length because I'm actually writing for the newspaper op-ed market and that length range has, in my experience, proven itself the "sweet spot" for working that market.

Here at KN@PPSTER, anything goes as the spirit moves. Sometimes I link to something I like with a short comment and the post comes to fewer than 100 words. Other times I reprint an old article or essay of mine that was originally published elsewhere and the post comes in at 3000+ words.

So, form should follow function. If you have a good reason to pay attention to post length, by all means do so. If not, don't sweat it.

The KN@PPSTER Android App is Here!

Maybe. I can't get it to run properly on my device ("closed unexpectedly"), but that's not unusual, as my device is an older, modified/semi-proprietary Android 2.0 ("Eclair") ereader that does seem to have problems with some apps.

If necessary, I'll download the SDK, set up the emulator, create a virtual device, etc. ... but IMO I'd then really only know as much as I do now. Probably simpler to put the thing out for download and ask y'all to let me know if it works. Click the screen shot or click here for direct download (this is not through Android Market, it's a direct download of the APK file):

... and let me know how it goes. It's not a complicated app -- just this blog, packaged up for Android.

One request: Please don't download the app unless you plan to actually use it. The development package I bought from Publish5 supports up to 1,000 users for a very reasonable one-time fee of $19. More than that, and I have to upgrade to a $15/month plan to keep growing the user base. Which I don't mind doing if they're real users. If it's 1,001 people who download the app and then forget about it, not so much.

What's in a word?

The New York Observer's Dan Duray on The End of Blogging:

Whatever blogs have become, there seems to be universal agreement that the format that made them ubiquitous -- the reverse-chronological aggregation accompanied by commentary -- is not long for this world, and Mr. Denton's scoop-friendly redesign would seem to be the best evidence of that. In fact, the decline of the blog has come so quickly, one has to wonder whether we ever really liked the medium at all.

Which misses the point entirely. It's like asserting that the key to the printing press's ubiquity was some particular characteristic of the D-K typeface that Peter Schoffer designed for Johannes Gutenberg, rather than the fact that Gutenberg's invention meant manuscripts no longer had to be copied out by monks in longhand. "Reverse chronological aggregation" was really just an incidental, if noticeable, feature of blogging. As Robert Stacy McCain points out, the real key to blog ubiquity was:

that software companies had created free (or cheap) online publishing tools which didn’t require advanced technological skill to use.

Blog software (and the content management systems it evolved into) made it easy and inexpensive for virtually anyone to pop up a web site -- not just a home page with some links and cheesy graphics and maybe some other pages nested beneath it (if you could keep track of them and remember to link them and so on), but a site automatically organized and indexed in a way that made intuitive sense.

Remember what a revolution that was?

If you were on the net 15 years ago, you likely "marked up" your web pages by hand in a text editor (or at best using a fussy "WYSIWYG" web editor which usually didn't give you "what you saw" if it was any more complicated than "this is me and here are some pictures of my cat"), then logged into a Unix shell account and uploaded them via FTP. You had to keep your site organized manually and God help you if you lost track of what you were doing.

If you worked for a commercial outfit, they might have a primitive CMS -- custom-programmed for their site by programmers who charged hefty hourly fees for design, improvement, maintenance, etc. But if it was personal or if you were trying to start something up on a shoestring, you spent a lot of time futzing around with the technical side of things.

Now you log into Blogger or Wordpress or Drupal or Joomla or whatever and go to town. If you do any manual HTML markup, it's because you're just used to that (I resemble that remark). On the design end, pre-fab "themes" get the job done with little or no customization unless you're getting bizarre (I recently had to learn and implement some PHP because I am bizarre -- and whined incessantly about it the whole time).

I suppose it's possible that the word "blog" will fade into history, but the revolution that word represents is permanent, barring worldwide technological catastrophe.

Bottom line: Caveat emptor

The Daily Caller offers up a lurid tale of bloggers corrupted by political cash ... or something like that [hat tip -- The Other McCain]:

Katie Couric once described bloggers as journalists who gnaw at new information "like piranhas in a pool." But increasingly, many bloggers are also secretly feeding on cash from political campaigns, in a form of partisan payola that erases the line between journalism and paid endorsement.

Well. That doesn't sound too good, does it?

But frankly, I don't see the problem. Or, rather, I don't see that the problem exists as framed in that paragraph.

First of all, most bloggers don't pretend to be "journalists." We're opinionated SOBs, and what we're purveying is our opinions. Some bloggers actually are journalists by current or former trade, and most of those (the aforementioned Other McCain being a prime example) take care to visibly separate the "just the facts, ma'am" stuff from the opinion stuff.

I won't say that we can't be bought, but if we're bought, there's about a 99% chance that what we sold was the opportunity to have us say what we were going to say anyway, albeit perhaps at a higher tempo and/or with greater apparent conviction.

To put it another way, I don't think there's a brown paper bag big enough to hold the cash it would take to get (to pick two more or less at random) Pamela Geller to endorse Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf for Congress or Markos Moulitsas to come out for Palin/Tancredo 2012.

It just ain't gonna happen, and if it did happen their credibility and their audiences would evaporate like a saucer full of water at noon in Death Valley without moving the polls so much as a millimeter their corrupters' way.

Should you read blogs with wary eye for hidden agenda stuff? Sure.

Should bloggers be honest, and perhaps even "transparent" via disclosure to a degree, about how they make their money? I think they should be, I try to be myself, and I think most bloggers are actually more honest than most "mainstream journalists" about their motivations ...

... but most of all I think that any mechanism to compel those things would cost more in chilling effect on honest opinionists than it would gain in compliance from dishonest political whores.

Showed Me

Just got back from spending the day at the Show-Me Institute's Missouri Blogosphere Event.

No, I didn't actually see Dana Loesch Naked there, but that seems like some pretty good SEO territory to stake out. So I am.

A very well-done event with lots of highly competent panelists covering various blogging-related issues, both philosophical and technical. I'm embarrassed to admit that this is the first time I've made it out to a Show-Me presentation, despite persistent invitations from Eric Dixon. It won't be the last. I learned quite a bit and plan to put that new knowledge to good use in the near future.

High point (and the deciding factor in whether or not I'd make it out for this thing): A visit from the Motorhome Diaries crew. I know Jason Talley (on the left) from the old Free-Market.Net/Henry Hazlitt Foundation days, when I was managing editor of FMN and he was launching Bureaucrash under the HHF's auspices, but hadn't met him before. He ended up roping me into sitting for a video interview a la MHD when he should have been working his way through a bucket of beer instead. Don't know how it came out (I'm sure we'll see), but hey, it was a chance to show off the new trademark tie.

I hadn't met Pete Eyre (on the right in the photo above) or Adam Mueller (solo in photo to the right), either, but naturally wanted to after following the MHD saga. Also, I wanted to get Pete alone, kill him and stuff his body in a dumpster out behind the Sheraton, thus removing an important obstruction on the path to Allison Gibbs' affections. Apparently he'd been tipped off. He stuck to well-lit areas and hinted several times that anyone who screwed with him could expect a visit from his close friends at the Jones County, Mississippi sheriff's department.

Observation: If Jake Wagman decides to change career tracks from journalism to acting, he's a sure thing when they cast for the role of Harry Dean Stanton in a biopic.

Yes, the cell phone photos suck. Sorry about that. I'm going to have to invest in better equipment.

How to get like a bazillion hits on your blog

Just so you know, I'm testing a theory here -- the theory that writing an article about how to get like a bazillion hits on your blog will result in me getting like a bazillion hits on my blog. And since "bazillion" is "a very large indefinite number" (emphasis mine) I can rightfully lay claim to have already reached it.

If you're looking for a tutorial with a more specific and successful pedigree, I highly recommend The Other McCain's How to Get a Million Hits on Your Blog -- not only because it's a damn good article by a guy who got a million hits on his blog in its first year, but because every time I link to him I get a Full Metal Jacket Reach Around (see the article) which itself brings in some small portion of a bazillion hits back to me.

But anyway ... where were we? ... tap, tap ... is this thing on? Oh, yeah, like a bazillion hits. As of this writing, KN@PPSTER's had 656,074 Sitemeter-counted visits, which at a conversion factor of 1.2 page views per visit (which seems about par for the course) translates to not quite (there's that "indefinite" fudge factor) 800,000 "hits." That's over the course of about five years, but I think things are starting to pick up. So, here's how I'm doing it.

- First, blog. If not several times a day, at least several times a week. The more you blog, the more readers you're going to have. Your regular readers will visit more often to see what's new, and the search engines will have more stuff to index, which means they'll send more people your way. More on that last bit below.

- Second, promote. Sign up with Technorati. Join Networked Blogs on Facebook. Google "free search engine submission" and use one of the services you find to make sure the search engines know you're there. When you blog something you expect will be of interest to your friends on the Obsessed With Plushies listserv or the Got A Model Train in Mom's Basement Yahoo! Group, send a a note. Plug your posts into the various social networks and bookmark services -- and make sure your readers can, too, by pasting the "Add This" gizmo into your blog template.

- Third, promote some more by interacting with other bloggers. Plug the ones you think are good, attack the ones you think suck, but link, link, link, and make sure those other bloggers know you're linking. If they don't link back, then by God ask them to link back. The worst they can say is "no" (okay, they can say worse things, but those worse things are all variants of "no").

Now, a note on the search engines. Like I said, the more content you have, the more people are going to see your site. It can be the gift that keeps on giving. Four years to the day after this post, I still get five or ten visits a day, every day, from it because junkies never stop trying to figure out how to get high and they've learned how to use Google.

I'm not going to tell you to game the search engines, but it never hurts to know what key words and phrases people are hot on. If working "free non-alcoholic beer" or "Lichtenstein cameltoe" or "live nude alpacas" into a post is feasible and if you think it will attract readers, knock yourself out (here's an online keyword suggestion tool for your convenience). Pictures of nekkid women (with a headline like "Pictures of Nekkid Women") and stuff like that may help, too.

And that, my friends, is how to get like a bazillion hits on your blog. Matter of fact, I see a very large, indefinite number of you heading this way right already.

Sunday bloggish navel gazing

So many writers have said it in so many ways that I can't remember from whom I first picked it up (I can remember when -- I was 12 -- just not from whom): If one wants to be a writer, one must write.

I took the maxim to heart immediately, starting with club notices for my local newspaper, and in the 30 years since I don't think I've ever gone more than a few weeks without buckling down to write "seriously." The last such period which comes to mind is December of 1990, when I was just too damn busy (Camp LeJeune, North Carolina, getting read for the Big Show in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait; once we were over there, I got some writing done).

Writing is what I do. I write -- sometimes badly, I'm sure, but for the last ten years I've been able to call myself a professional writer with a straight face. When I'm not writing (under my own name, or under someone else's), I'm editing (my own work, or someone else's).

All of which is just a long, boring lead-in to the analogous rule: If one wants to be a blogger, one must blog. If one wants to be a successful blogger (as measured in any number of ways -- traffic, links, money, etc.), one must blog regularly and frequently.

I became neglectful of this rule, and as a result, traffic at KN@PPSTER fell by about 80%, and Technorati "authority" (a status measurement reflecting the number of recent links from other blogs) by about 75%, over the course of a year. Income fell, too, but since it wasn't a major income source even at its previous height, I can't offer exact statistics.

That doesn't work for me. I've decided to get born again hard on the blogging thing. That means blogging every day (at least two posts per weekday, at least one each weekend day) ... and if there's nothing in particular I care to blog about, I'll by God blog about blogging, just to cultivate the habit. Which is what I'm doing right now, hopefully with a helpful veneer of industry news in the "I am the Blogosphere, and You Can Too!" vein.

Three basic rules:

1) Blog -- every day.

2) Promote -- in every way.

3) Monetize -- as much as I can get away with.

That third rule leads me to a matter of actual current interest to at least one reader, "steven," who writes:

[I]s there anything you can do about that goddamn ad page that comes up when I click on your website? I don't mind having to click on "skip the ad" to get back to you, but several times now I get stuck on that page with no way to get back except to log all the way off the internet and get back on (which I always do because I like your site). It's just a royal pain in the ass.

I'd love to be able to accommodate that request, steven, but Rule #3 says I can't just knock off those particular ads.

Here's the thing: In recent correspondence with a blogger whose traffic numbers were better than mine (that's changing, fast, now that I'm back to regular blogging), he mentioned his AdBrite revenues. They were all out of whack with mine, even allowing for the difference in traffic. I'm talking a full order of magnitude here -- mid-single-digits for me, low-triple-digits for him. The difference between his implementation of AdBrite and mine? He runs those funky "interstitial" ads.

We're looking at a potential revenue difference here of $90 or more per month. That's big money to me, and if I can grab it without burning my own house down, I'm going to.

I hope you'll stick with me, steven. I've sent AdBrite a note about the problem, and if there's anything I can do to fix it, I will. In the meantime, you might consider following KN@PPSTER via RSS -- Feedburner offers several options (My Yahoo!, Bloglines, etc.), and a supportive user has also syndicated it via LiveJournal. I hate sending readers off-site, but that's the only alternative I can think of to removing the ads, which I'm unwilling, for the moment, to do.

All right, then. Weekend blogging quota met. Take that, Anthony Trollope.

Blogging goals and baby steps

Last week, I decided to get back to blogging here at KN@PPSTER regularly, with an eye toward turning it into a money-making proposition. Not necessarily a "get rich" proposition, but at least renumerative enough to keep myself hooked on it instead of moving back and forth between "blogging a lot" and "I wonder what's on the Discovery Channel?"

The Reign of the Terrible Ads has returned. Yes, I know the "interstitial" ads where you get taken to another screen and have to click to get back can be annoying, but it needed to be done. I recently corresponded with another blogger whose revenues from AdBrite were substantially higher than mine in a way not explained by the difference in traffic numbers, and I want a piece of that action. They're set to only do that to any given user a maximum of once per six hours.

My politics aren't going to change, of course, and I'll continue to offer boooooooorrrrrringggg trenchant commentary on the issues of the day and the occasional boooooooorrrrrringggg enlightening theoretical piece. However, you'll also see more of the stuff I've been doing the last few days (like this), when I decide something like that is interesting. Why? Simple -- it gets eyeballs here, those eyeballs see ads, and I make money.

Ditto for the occasional and seemingly gratuitous use of phrases like "donkey sex" and "Britney Spears sex tape." Eyeballs and ads, folks, eyeballs and ads -- and I'm going to follow scripture on the eyeballs end of the process.

Short-term goals:

- As of today, KN@PPSTER is averaging about 300 visitors per day (up from less than 200 at the beginning of last week, and down from about 1000 during its last Golden Age). By the end of July, I want to be at 1,400+ visitors per day (10,000 per week). If you've got friends you don't mind pitching stuff at, please send them the URL.

- As of today, KN@PPSTER's Technorati "authority" is 52, down from a height of nearly 200 during the aforementioned Golden Age. By the end of July, I want to see it back at 200. If you have a blog and don't link here, pretty please with sugar on top do so. And if I'm not linking to you, let me know in comments or via email and I'll hook you right up.

Long-term goals: Donkey sex! Britney Spears sex tape! World domination!

Update: Maybe I should have gone with "John Edwards sex tape." Or, rather, I guess I just did. But ... ewwwwwwwww.

Some thoughts on advertising

Some KN@PPSTER readers may have noticed that the Blogads strip in the right sidebar has been replaced by an AdBrite strip. It seems worth explaining why, if for no other reason than that many of you are bloggers as well ... it's always nice to exchange ideas on how to make our guilty pleasures pay off.

I used Blogads on my sites for several years, and have no complaints whatsoever about the experience. Their system works, their customer service is great, their commission isn't onerous. They're a good, solid advertising option.

I'm not going to tell you I didn't make money with Blogads, either. I did, and sometimes it was pretty good money, too! What it wasn't was consistent money. I might sell three ads one month, then none for three months after that, then one or two per month for a few months ... it was a crap shoot. A lot of the time, I contented myself with running ads for my own projects or giving friends "complimentary" ads for theirs.

That's not Blogads' fault, of course. If KN@PPSTER attracted a lot of traffic, it would probably attract a lot of advertisers, too -- and it would probably do so on a consistent basis. As it happens, however, KN@PPSTER greets a few hundred unique visitors a day on average, and a few thousand when there's an anomalous spike (e.g. when a popular site links to something here). Instapundit I am not.

After looking over various options, I decided to go with AdBrite. I've worked with them before and know that their checks actually come and actually clear ... and that they'll generate revenue for me consistently, even if at a lower level than an outfit like Blogads would if I could keep that strip full of purchased ads. People who really, really, really want to advertise specifically on KN@PPSTER can still do so ... but any unused space is filled in with "network ads" keyed in one way or another to the site's content, and I get paid per thousand views and per click.

If you run a high-traffic site which caters to an identifiable market niche, you can attract advertisers who are willing to pay a premium to reach that niche. In such a situation, I still highly recommend Blogads.

If your site or sites are of the low- to medium-traffic variety and/or aren't tightly keyed to advertiser-attractive market niches, I believe that you'll get more consistent revenue with a contextual ad service. AdBrite isn't the only one, of course, but if you're interested in them, well, of course they have a referral program:

A wee bit of navel-gazing

Ah, the joy of playing the dozens in comments. Yo mama and all that. I'm going to go serious with it and run with it, though. Time for one of those little "why I blog" essays, opening with the obvious:

I blog for myself.

That's intended neither narcissistically nor solipsistically. What I write isn't right because I wrote it. It's right (or, on occasion, wrong) because that's what it is. Nor does the earth revolve around yours truly. If I stopped blogging tomorrow few would notice, fewer would care and the earth would continue in its courses.

I blog because I enjoy blogging.

If I didn't, I wouldn't (and when I don't ... I don't!).

That doesn't mean I don't appreciate the readers. I appreciate you when there are 100 of you on a given day (which is the more usual case), and I appreciate you when there are 2,000 on another day (which is occasionally the case).

I appreciate the comments (including the critical ones, and even the trolls -- apart from spam, I think they're all good). I appreciate the discussion and the debate. And yes, there are some days when I blog with one or more known readers in mind, or with the intent of provoking a specific reaction from a specific target.

But I still wouldn't do it if I didn't like it, and I'm still going to do it the way I like to do it ... whether you're here or not.

I'm all grown up.

I don't expect to wake up tomorrow morning and find out that Kn@ppster has suddenly ascended to Atrios- or Instapundit-like status. I'd like to get the numbers back up to at least the 10,000 readers per week range, but I'm not going to stroke out over it or anything. Kn@ppster is my soapbox. I stand on it. And I'm comfortable standing on it in the wilderness -- or in the middle of a crowd.

Selah.