Concise, Brief, To the Point
Now, I don’t mean you should trim your text to the bare minimum. But when writing for an online audience, you have to take a short attention span into account. That’s not to put down our loyal readership out there, but it is a fact that with thousands (millions?) of web pages out there on any given topic, a person has a tendency to want immediate results. So you need to get the point and provide the essential information of your topic quickly. Too much flowery prose will have a person clicking off to the next page in a heartbeat.
People like to sit back and relax with a magazine, and will slowly work their way through a long article as they flip through the pages. Writing online is a whole different ball game.
A rough rule-of-thumb for an online article is between 400 and 700 words, give or take. Longer than that, you’ll start to lose people. Much shorter, and you won’t likely be able to give them enough information. Of course, if you are writing for someone else, they will likely have their own guidelines.
If you really find that you have much more to say, try to break your article into multiple pages with each page covering a distinct aspect of the topic. That way a person can still zero in on what they are looking for quickly.
It can take some practice to keep your word count down, but you’ll find that your readers stick around more often if you do.
