Just the other day one of our veterans, Rambling Redshirt wrote an article about choosing how to format your posts. In it, he gave his opinion on whether or not he thought it was a good idea to have single or multi-topic articles when writing for your blog. As one of the long tenured bloggers in our little community, I thought I would give my thoughts on the topic as well.

To me, blogging is a form of journalism. How many of you veterans have written a blog post that would be worthy of a larger scale news site? I’d wager most of you have. Some bloggers that run in this circle have already spread their work out onto other sites like MMOGames, MMORPG.com or even Massively Overpowered. If you pay attention to those types of sites or even more traditional news sites, they tend to have designated columns for designated subjects, which can be either single or multi-topic. News sites tend to focus on one story at a time, but then have columns such as “not so massively” which is a semi-off-topic post that collects news stories about various games that wouldn’t fill up a whole post on their own.

It is my opinion that you can have both single and multi-topic blog posts on your site, just like these news sites tend to do. What I have done over the years is to think about the things that I’d like to write about, and then proceed to determine if a single or multi-topic post is more appropriate. I have also come up with running columns that have been dedicated to both single and multiple topics. If you head up to the top of this blog, you’ll find the “ongoing series” tab, where I have collected these columns for easy access.

I write about more than just gaming so I feel that having a column with a particular name will indicate to your readers if this next post is going to be something that they would be interested in reading. For example, my “By The Numbers” column is all about professional football, so if you aren’t into that sport you can skip those posts. I had a similar column about Fantasy LCS. I have also had a column called “State of the Game” that was a round-up post of sorts, where I collected information about all of the games I was currently playing that week and talked about them all in short bursts.

The general rule of thumb, is to find the word count that you are most comfortable with writing and releasing. If you tend to write 1k word articles, you may want to get really in depth on one topic, or talk about multiple subjects to fill up that word count. If you write smaller articles, you might find that single topics are all you have room for. Generally speaking, it’s what you want to write about, so there aren’t any rules to follow. I have just found that my preferred option is to write about 1,000 words per post, so I tend to make single and multi-topic posts that are about that length. There are exceptions to every rule of course, and this post is likely falling short of that 1k mark, but that’s okay.

If you want to follow my lead, then figure out what length of posts you prefer. From there, you can determine how many topics to include depending on how much you want to say about the subject. If you tend to write about a similar subject often, try to come up with a catchy title and make a little banner for the top of those posts so that your audience knows what to expect when those post titles come up. That’s really all there is to it. Hope this helps.