Sometimes You Just Have To Take Advantage
I have been back for two days and written two blog posts. Both of them are around the twelve-hundred word mark.
Back in the day, that was a simple blog post. Now, reading back and scrolling for a little bit, I realise that most blog posts or website articles aren’t actually very long anymore.
While there’s an element of worrying about the frayed attention spans of the masses and the implications of that for the future of humanity, sometimes you just have to take advantage.
Take today, for instance; I’m desperately trying to come up with something novel to say. I browse around the few blogs that I still read because they’re decent.
It’s a decent read and I agree that the observations are mostly correct, (as much as can be in a single blog post talking about 25 years of social dynamics.) But it’s not really my thing: dating and relationships have never been a focus on the blog.
Then I browse a little more; one guy who I read and does mostly daily posts continued his streak with a post that’s sub-300 words long and basically acts as a short-form blurb for the fact that if you buy one of his Teachable courses, you get a free mug and a T-shirt.
That’s a clever idea, and maybe I’ll be shilling Vault merchandise when I finally get to launching the thing.
I won’t. It’s enough to write the material. Today I wrote an article about how you can use online businesses to fund ridiculous lifestyles and the tax implications are even better. I took the idea for the article from the old direct response ad headline, “They laughed when I sat down at the piano. But when I started to play…”
My point is here that writing online in today’s climate is very forgiving of short-form articles and even long-form articles that aren’t long-form at all. A lot of the action is going on over at Substack now, which seems to have filled a void for interconnected blogging. Substack is a long-form platform, but the average writer seems to treat it as both a long form writing site as well as a quasi-Twitter replacement.
The high-resolution take on this, and one I’ll write about in detail later, is two-fold:
- Writing online is a lower-effort investment than it used to be and you should take advantage
- Due to the death of Google Search Monoculture, you don’t have to write to the SEO-baiting standards that caused everyone a few years back to write skyscraper bibles with 3% keyword density. That’s yesteryear’s game and there are different ways to play now
Both of these things are very good. I’m quite enthusiastic about adapting to the new way it works.
And because I can get away with it; that’s all until tomorrow, folks.