Should You Shorten Content? - Should You Shorten Content?
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There are no perfect articles; there are no immaculate blog posts. There are many tips, tricks and tactics you can learn to help you write engaging, keyword-rich content. There is no hard and fast formula to follow to ensure you’ll come up with a winner every single time. But remember to tailor your content to your audience.
And don’t forget that your audience is giving you about one minute, total, to make a great impression with your words. They may not actually read whole sentences, but they’re definitely going to skim headlines, subtitles and visual images to see if anything reaches out and grabs them. The only thing that’s sure to turn them off is an extremely long, way-too-thorough piece of content.
Remember, you’re writing for the Web. You’re not trying to produce a first novel (and if you are, keep it separated into user-friendly chunks of content, rather than presenting the whole piece all at once). Even if links, images, video and who knows what else is brightening up your content, Internet users never want to spend a whole lot of time on a single page. There are just too many other sites to visit, so why should they waste time with yours?
The trick is to keep them from thinking it’s a waste of time -- something you’ll never achieve with incredibly lengthy content. In this virtual world of high speed, traffic appreciates information they can grasp and digest quickly so they can hurry up and move on to something else. Ingratiate yourself to your traffic by providing exactly what they’re looking for - namely, content they can quickly skim, words from which they can learn a little something, and the end of a piece of content. You don’t want your traffic to feel bogged down by your words, even if you think they’re all quite fascinating.
The Internet is all about moving quickly, and that’s what traffic wants to do. Should you shorten content? Ask yourself exactly how long is takes you to get the gist, through a quick skim, of a single piece you’re writing for the Web. If it’s longer than 60 seconds, you might want to think about doing some editing. You can still present the main points of any story without using too many words, meaning you won’t have to sacrifice quality. Tighten pieces up; traffic will appreciate the effort.
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