It was an ah ha moment for me and has now helped me rethink my long form/short form blogging strategy.

So in reality, it’s not really about the amount of words but rather the topic being discussed. This works especially well with list-based articles, as lists are often very thin in nature. But long-form content would effectively allow you to go into vivid details about each item on the list.

Thanks for the great article.

If you are writing about something that goes into lots of detail that people will need, then a longish article makes some sense, although I would rather see it broken into physical sections, either using extra pages, or a scroll-spy element, while having a shorter version on top, perhaps with bookmark links pointing to the rest of the page.
To be honest, I feel that a long sidebar makes me kinda anxious.

Otherwise, we are just wasting our time. The article will be very difficult to maintain/correct and the users are going to skim read it at best or declare DLDR at worse.

At first I though you wrote about those annoying long sale pages, and I got myself ready for a long hateful post 🙂

haha not at all… youre right. I actually meant they will “try” to do what is better for people. So if you write for people, you have nothing to worry about. (theoretically of course lol)

Hey Konrad.

Nice to see you here!

Personally I try not to read too many blogs. If I am reading a long-form piece like the New Yorker article that I mentioned above it will be because I’m genuinely interested in it and will read the whole thing.

Same goes for tutorials if I’m trying to learn something. But, on the whole, it’s rare that I’ll just browse a post for the sake of it.

Hi Bob.

Wow! That’s a lot of content.

I haven’t really thought about it deeply but my first reaction would be to give out enough quality information that it gets your name out there and a base for promotion, but not so much that you don’t have anything to sell.

My second reaction would be to make it into an email course with a funnel on the end. So you’d perhaps have a 3 week course that they get via automatic emails once they sign up, and then at the end you promote the paid product to them.

Hope helps.