Blogging is a great way to share anecdotes, information and ideas in an informal setting, but writing for your business is a slightly different task. What you write will affect your business, if it didn’t then why would you write it, so you need to make sure that the effort you put into blogging translates into a positive effect.
Blogs are designed to be written by opinionated individuals, they are by nature not simply the imparting of impartial information, so you have to walk an interesting line of being able to share information and opinions, keeping your audience engaged but not alienating them.
So here are 5 quick tips to simple blogging.
1. Develop a Good Writing Style
Use good grammar and spelling and don’t use text abbreviations. If your writing is sloppy then this will be reflected on your organisation. If you sit at a table in a restaurant and its sticky and dirty then your opinion of the restaurant is going to go down. If the blog is haphazard or poorly written then this is going to reflect badly on your organisation. You use an informal, relaxed and laid back style, of course, it’s not going to be a marked essay, but it does need to obey the rules of good written English.
2. Be Consistent and Write Regularly
Google likes regular content. Your readers will like regular content. If you regularly write 10 posts per month and then stop for a couple of months any readers you have will drift away and Google will stop visiting as well. Blogs with big holes always look like the company concerned just had better things to do that look after their customers, like a shop with no-one at the till. So pick a number of blog posts per month you have time to write and then stick with it. If you can’t keep it up then lower the number of posts, but keep going and try to be consistent.
3. Stick to the Topic
Stay relevant and on the topic you started with. A blog’s not your life story, it’s a single idea explored in a bit of detail. If you move around different themes within a single post then you are going to lose your audience. Similarly, if you go into too much detail in a single post your audience will not finish the post. If your article is more than a couple of pages in Word (around 1000 words) then I tend to think that you may have more than one blog post there and it is worth splitting it out into a series of posts. You can list them over a few days.
4. Link to Relevant Additional Information
Links within a blog can offer more information about something you are describing or you might want to point at a product you’re promoting. Also, since I just gave you a max of 1000 words and you need to be concise within your blog, then appropriate linking will help your readership find out more or buy that product if they want to. You can link within your own site or you can link to another (non competitor) site. It all helps demonstrate your knowledge, inform your readership and with your SEO.
5. Have a sense of Humour
When you’re writing your blog, try not to take yourself too seriously. You may cover a serious topic that requires a certain gravitas, but on other occasions, if you can submit your information with a light hearted and laid back tone then your readership will find it easier to digest. Try to bring some humanity to your writing and try to connect to your readership.
So the key to good blogging is, use good English, stick to one topic per blog and keep it short and sweet. Write regularly and write with a sense of humour. Hopefully some new bloggers will find this helpful in their early days, I sure could have done with a few pointers when I was writing my first blog.
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