When it comes to online writing, conclusions are optional. The truth is, readers don’t need them. Especially in an 800 to 1,200-word article, a concl… - Nicolas Cole

First, you never want to have three or more long paragraphs one after another. That style of writing has been dead for years, and anyone writing that way on the internet is clinging to a way things were but no longer are. Second, if you are going to have long paragraphs one after another, you want to find ways to change up their internal rhythm so they don’t feel or sound exactly the same. One way of doing this is by using punctuation. Have one paragraph with a lot of short, strong sentences. Have the next paragraph be one long, winding sentence. This is what makes them seem “different.” Lastly, notice how before and after both long paragraphs in the above excerpt there are single, declarative sentences. This is very intentional. Again, you want to subtly tell the reader, “I’m going to tell you a quick story — this will only take a second,” before giving them their next mile marker. There’s something about reading a single sentence after a long paragraph that gives a reader the same feeling a listener gets hearing a chord resolve on the piano. Let your chords resolve.

The size of your audience is a direct reflection of the size of the question you are answering

Numbers alone tell the story. Inc Magazine averages around 30 million page views per month. Medium, a social writing platform, has somewhere around 30 million users — and Quora is about 10x the size of Medium, with 300 million users. Side by side, my Inc column never once outperformed my exposure on Quora or Medium. A really great month writing for Inc Magazine, I’d bring in 300,000 views. On Medium though, 300,000 views in a month was considered average. And between 2014 and 2018 on Quora, 300,000 views was considered a monumental failure. I consistently averaged over a million. Even still today, my Inc Magazine reports tell me my 409 columns continue to generate around 80,000 views per month, passively. Meanwhile, my content on Medium and Quora together generates between 500,000 and 1,000,000 views per month passively. Publications “seem” big, but in reality, their distribution is rather small.