As bloggers, we often feel as though we have to pen the perfect rendition of a modern day War and Peace for each post. We slave and suffer over word selection, sentence structure, and word count. How long is the perfect post? Shouldn’t they always be over 500 words? I’m stuck… what do I do!?!

First, let me reassure you… every piece doesn’t have to be the perfect piece. They don’t have to be novella length dissertations and you’re not going to fail the class if you don’t get it just right. In fact, short blog posts can be very powerful and many readers will appreciate them. Lets face it, sometimes we’re asking our readers for a pretty hefty investment to read the post we slaved over… so most won’t.

When you need to make a blog post short, keep these key blog post elements in mind:

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Building on a solid start to my Follow Friday meme last week, this week it is my pleasure to introduce you to Andre Natta, a native New Yorker at home in Birmingham. Andre has many, many irons in the fire yet still finds the time to operate three blogs, Urban Conversations, Dre’s Ramblings, and The Terminal.

In his “spare time”, Andre gives back to the community. He has helped raise food and funds for hurricane victims and collected phones for victims of domestic violence just to name a few. He also gives freely to the blogging community by doing things like organizing WordCamp Birmingham! Andre is a great guy and a great member of his local community and our wider online community. You will enjoy following @acnatta on Twitter.

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I’ve spent quite a bit of time talking about how to create and nurture your brand, engage people in their conversations and grow your business by connecting people. I choose to surround myself with positive thinking people and draw from their energy to pursue my own success. Oh sure, the negative Nancy’s are still out there, spreading all their ill will in the world, I just believe in the power of positive reinforcement and that by rewarding right actions, positive things will come from it.

I haven’t done much video here at jtrigsby.com, in fact this may be the first one… but its an important one. The story you will see could be interpreted as big old bad guys taking advantage of little good guys. They’ll even say it in the vid, but I want you to think of something else as you watch. In spite of being substantially out gunned and out-funded, this Matt & Renee of Rock Art Brewery are not going to go quietly. They believe in justice and the moral foundations of this country. They are the good guys, not because they are being taken advantage of, but because they are standing up for what they believe in. THAT makes them both good guys and worthy of our support.

So check out the vid and then read on below the jump.