Brevity Wins the Day

A colleague of mine shared this article on LinkedIn today: How has Blogging Changed? 5 Years of Blogging Statistics, Data and Trends

I thought it was humorous.

You may be asking yourself, “how the hell does he think this is funny?”

Well, sometimes people have a hard time seeing the forest for the trees.

Let me explain.

The basis of this article is about how much longer it takes to write blog posts in 2019 compared to 2014.

The short answer – on average, people spend more time writing blog posts in 2019 than they did in 2014.

What was also shared is that blog posts written in 2019 are 56% longer (in terms of # of words) than in 2014.

Conversely, 52% of the survey respondents said it was “getting harder to get readers to engage.”

I’m not a rocket scientist, but I know that competition for peoples’ attention is fierce and, as a result, people are more selective about how they spend their time and where they dedicate their attention.

People want to get to the point. They want quick answers.

If you are creating blog posts intended to answer people’s questions, then get to the point and answer their questions.

People don’t want longer, more time-consuming content. Google wants this.

More people are writing for Google than are writing for their audience.

This has to stop.

The worst offenders are the people who have food blogs where they share recipes. They think the person searching for a recipe wants to spend 15-20 minutes reading a story about how they made this recipe one time and the stars all aligned and blah, blah, blah.

No one cares. They just want the recipe! Give it to them and cut out the other crap.

The same goes for the content you’re creating for your business. Content is a valuable asset.

It’s a way to build trust and awareness among those you seek to serve. Don’t blow it right out of the gate by showing zero consideration and respect for their time or attention.

Brevity is going to win the day. Being concise and to the point is going to get people to subscribe and want to read more.

Writing novels…that’s going to scare people away.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash