Read This or We Will Kill You!

(AKA: Belle and Aaron Take on the Blogosphere)

We have decided to co-author a post about blogging. In particular, we're talking about what makes people want to read or not read a post. (We realize the irony in writing a novel about why people tend to ignore long posts, but this should be useful information for our blogging buddies who routinely write long posts and lose our attention!)

There are three ways that a post can be successful:

1. It's well-written and thought-provoking


2. It's a popular read or humorous


3. It generates a lot of discussion

It's one of those classic trianglular relationships, where you can have two of the criteria going for you but hardly ever all three. Think about it, a seriously profound blog usually doesn't generate many comments because the author has already covered all the bases. If it's a new angle, that's when it gets linked or quoted on other blogs. On the other hand, when a topic is left open to discussion there's no telling what might happen.

When a blogger chooses not to allow comments, they are accepting a huge challenge because every post that they write needs to be thought provoking or entertaining in order to keep the blog popular. Some bloggers have figured out that they don't need to do hard-hitting analysis, so long as they have something amusing to talk about. In fact, going for a laugh is often much easier than trying to draw people in with profound insight. Eyes glaze over very quickly.

Curb appeal of a particular post is often inversely proportional to its length. As bloggers, we may have to accept that we don't have a lot of star appeal and most of our information is still coming second hand from the MSM. Except for the occasional someone-who-knows-something scoop (like the Bush National Guard story), we're providing commentary on the news but not TRULY breaking it.

That isn't to say bloggers can't MAKE news, because they do. It's because of the the blogger audience demographic: other bloggers and people who are genuinely interested in current events and politics. These are motivated individuals. All they need sometimes is a little spark to get them going. People read blogs to see what's going on. Then, they decide for themselves whether what they read is important.

You can't take offense as a blogger if someone does not share your ideas on what's important. But, you do need to realize that you may have to market your opinions. And, the key to marketing is repetition, repetition, repetition. It is extremely surprising how many times and how many ways an idea must be expressed before it catches on. Everyone absorbs material in a different way.

Why are you writing all this, Belle and Aaron?

Good question. We have something to admit to the Cheddarsphere

We're addicted to headline scanning.

That's right, we have a problem -- we don't read long, drawn-out blog posts.

C'mon, give us a cliff's notes version of what you're trying to say. If you can't say it in one screen's length, then we're not interested. Sorry.

Consider it blogger ADHD...give us a shot of ritalin, people. Seriously...

It's not that we don't care or like what you have to say -- it's that we can't stay focused on your post when there's long, dense paragraphs of text. So, here's some hints for how to retain blog readers like us:

• Use more pictures -- They're a great way to break up long sections of text, and they add more character to your blog.


• Use some type of rich-text editor -- AKA, use bold, italics, underline, color and text size modifications.


• Write shorter paragraphs -- Think about it. It's all about the white space. If you can get your message across in three sentences instead of seven or eight, those extra three-four sentences are just fluff. We'd rather you had shorter paragraphs and longer posts than to have long paragraphs for shorter posts. You need some white space and shorter paragraphs create more white space.


• Try to say it in the title -- This is the first (and maybe only) thing we'll see. If you get our attention with the headline, we may actually read the first few sentences (even on long posts).

So, in review, we ask you to keep 'em short and sweet people. You'll thank us later.

Thanks,
*Belle* and Aaron

[Cross posted @ Leaning Blue]

Update: Fixed my links. Sorry.