"Lazy Bastards: How We Read Online"

“Lazy Bastards: How We Read Online,” Michael Agger’s article on Slate.com, gives some good tips for grabbing your online readers’ attention. He reinforces points I often make, including the value of using:

• White space
• Bullet points
• Informative subheadings

Agger also sends you over to “Long vs. Short Articles as Content Strategy” by website usability guru Jakob Nielsen. Short articles beat long articles most of the time, says Nielsen, especially if you want to maximize your readership numbers.

On the other hand—and this is important for financial advisors—if you want people who really need a solution, focus on comprehensive coverage. This is a good strategy if you sell highly targeted solutions to complicated problems.

Still, in Nielsen’s example, “short” is defined as 700 words and “long” as 1,000 words. One thousand words isn’t long compared to some pieces that I’ve seen.

For a competing opinions on going longer or shorter, read my post, “What’s too long for a blog post?“

Note: I updated this post on Jan. 23, 2017.