Writing for Your Wealth

A couple of entries ago, I suggested making things easy on yourself by writing shorter blog posts from time to time (or all the time if it fits your blog). PFincome mentioned that a lot of search engine optimization advice suggests longer posts or articles of 250-300+ words. So can short blog posts rank in the search engines?

As I said in the comments, my short answer is… sure. (Thought-provoking and eloquent, I know.)

Plenty of my short posts come up on the first page of search results for their keywords, and I bet you’ve stumbled on short posts from the big blogs such as Gizmodo or (one I come across a lot doing searches in my home improvement niche) Trendir. Many shopping or gadget blogs specialize in posting frequently and, er, shortly.

Sometimes posts on the popular blogs will be lengthened significantly by user comments, but in the case of Trendir, the site keeps comments turned off, so it certainly appears that short can work just fine.

So, why do many experts suggest longer pages?

My thought is that it can’t hurt, and it can help.

The more times a keyword phrase appears on a page (in the natural flow of sentences, not stuffed in there left and right until the page doesn’t make sense), the more weight the search engines may give your post in deciding where it should rank.

We don’t necessarily need to be thinking SEO with every blog post, though, and if writing short entries makes it easier for you to put out content on a regular basis, that may turn out to make your site more popular in the long run.

SEO and blogging

Unlike with article sites, a lot of bloggers don’t worry about SEO much on individual posts. This is either because a) they don’t care about/know about SEO or b) they prefer to build their sites organically and let the traffic gods judge their sites as they will.

I’m somewhere in the middle when it comes to blogging. I started out with SEO-based article sites and moved to blogging later, so SEO is usually in the back of my mind.

On my home improvement blog, I’ll usually try to put a likely keyword phrase in the title and sprinkle it throughout the post, if only out of habit. However if I’m promoting an affiliate product, where I’m actually hoping to make sales down the road, I’ll actually look up a keyword phrase to target (I stick to less searched and less competitive phrases for individual blog posts, since I rarely go on link-building campaigns for single posts), but for day-to-day writing, I’m often just putting things out there because they might interest folks and to keep the fresh content flowing.

I’ve found that a lot of time the posts like that (not specifically written with SEO in mind) sometimes do well and bring in quite a bit of traffic for a phrase I didn’t intentionally target, while the ones I worked harder at aren’t always winners.

In the blogosphere, what really helps is when an author of one of the big popular blogs happens to like something you wrote about and links to it just because. You can’t always predict what will win the natural links, and those are often the difference between popularity and obscurity for a specific blog post (whether you worried about SEO or not!).

To get back into the swing of things here, I’m going to be answering some reader questions over the next couple weeks. Some have been left as blog comments and some have been sent in. Feel free to use the contact mail link in the header or if you’re on the mailing list, you can just hit reply to an email to send a question.

To start things off, a recent commenter asked…

How can you make money with Google Adsense if you don’t have any money to get started?

As I’ve mentioned before, I make a big chunk of my income from Adsense, so I’m always game to answer questions about the program. If you’re serious about starting a web site (or two or three or ten), I recommend buying a domain name and getting your own web hosting, an investment of less than $20 up front with an ongoing $5-$8 a month for hosting fees.

However, if you’re broke (which I was in the beginning, so I can sympathize!), you can indeed make money with Adsense without spending a dime out of your pocket.

The easiest way is to set up a Blogger account and build one or more blogs there. Since Blogger is owned by Google these days, they make it easy to apply for the Adsense program and serve ads right on your blog (when I got started, you actually had to have your own domain name in order to apply, hmmph!).

It’s actually not a bad idea to cut your teeth on freebie blogs. You can start several on Blogger and see which niches end up keeping your interest, drawing a decent amount of traffic, and making you noticeable money with Adsense.

Remember, content that is closely associated with products and services tends to do best for pay-for-click publishers.

One of the hardest parts of being a blogger is staying motivated to keep knocking out content on a regular basis. (I write this as I notice it’s been two weeks since I last updated this site, ahem.) It helps (immensely) when you start making decent money from a site, but it can take a while before the bucks start flowing in. So how do you stick with blogging in that first year where the rewards often aren’t financial (or at least not financial to the extent we wish!)?

When I look across the several blogs I maintain, I find that the only one I update daily (and have done consistently for more than three years) revolves around short posts. They’re usually in the neighborhood of 150-200 words and focus on one product or one tip or a short series of ideas related to one specific concept.

You’ve probably seen quite a few blogs like this (just think of all the gadget blogs such as Gizmodo and Engadget for starters).

Perhaps the biggest benefit (and what motivated me to write this entry) is that it takes less time to write short posts. There’s usually less research involved, less actual writing, less proofreading, and less all around procrastinating. It’s easy to convince yourself to sit down and knock out a post that takes 10 or 15 minutes to write; finding an hour or more of time can be busy, especially when you’re also working a day job and–we hope–having a life.

There are some other benefits to the short-post style as well:

• More pages of content to attract search engines — If you’re writing the long monster posts (as I’m often guilty of on this site!), it can take a year to get 50 or 75 pages of content out there. Even if you post every weekday (let’s at least take the weekends and holidays off, shall we?), you’re only looking at 250 pages or so in a year. This may seem like a lot, but compare this to a site such as Gizmodo that publishes thousands of posts a year. Now we don’t need to be that prolific (especially since our blogs usually aren’t the work of multiple authors), but remember that every page of content you write is another doorway through which people can find and enter your site.
• Every post is a chance to get noticed — Other bloggers spend a lot of time monitoring their feed readers, watching for news on certain keywords. Professional bloggers, in particular, (those who have committing to posting X times a day for someone) are always looking for story ideas. If they spot your post and use it to launch a post of their own, chances are they’re give you credit for the story with a link to your site. Those freebie links are the best kind!
• Internet readers often have short attention spans — Numerous studies have shown that folks read differently on the Internet. They treat websites more like newspapers than novels. You might even be the same way. You zip through pages, only reading the stories that interest you, and even then you often skim. Maybe you’re reading from work (with a boss who might wander by at any time), or maybe you’re watching the kids, or maybe you’re multitasking and working on some of your own projects at the same time. Anyway you roll it, short posts can be attractive to busy web surfers.

Now, lest this entry itself get too much longer, I’ll end by admitting that the short-post style may not be a fit for every blog. Still there are enough benefits that it may be worth tinkering with on occasion.

Instead of publishing a 2,000-word list of the Top 10 Movies Comic Book Fans Must Rent Right Now, try breaking it across 10 posts and a few days. You might just find the task less daunting!

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