Writing high quality blog posts demands a subtle blending of intuition and style. With a finger on the pulse of all that is trending, the greatest blog writers are also great blog readers. They research each site they want to write for and develop a sense of the audience’s expectations. They also have a strategy in place for fulfilling all the blog posts in the most appealing way possible – styling the text and maintaining clean code that is simultaneously easy for search engines to crawl and index, and pleasant for readers to enjoy.
Here are five systematic strategies you can use to make your blog posts more engaging and easy to read. They can also save you time once you form a habit of practicing them in order.
1) Write the entire article first. This should be a clean draft with no hyperlinks, no subtitles, and no title. It is essential that you finish writing the article before you decide what the most attention grabbing aspects of it are. Once you have the draft in order, you can move on to analyzing the post.
2) Give the post a title that captures attention and imagination. Naturally, it should have to do with the content of the article. Using strong words will help draw readers in and generate interest in what you have to say. Once you have a catchy title, you’re ready to tackle formatting.
3) Make use of headings and subheadings in the body of your articles. These are briefer than the main article title, and they break down various sections of the writing by summarizing the most important aspects of paragraphs. Asking a question instead of making a statement can be a strong way to encapsulate an idea. Take some time during this stage to ensure that you have divided your article into logical and flowing sections worthy of the subheadings you compose.
4) Go back through your article and look for places to provide citations or relevant hyperlinks to the sources of the information you provide in your post. This will enhance the reader’s experience and give credibility to your writing. It will also reflect well on your blog, or the blog you are writing for. You don’t want to stuff your post full of links to support every single point you have made, but a few well placed and helpful links to outside information are always a good idea.
5) Conclude with a call to action. Invite the reader to leave a comment or interact in some way with you, with other readers, or the site owner. Include information about yourself, too, in the form of a short author biography. People respond well when you reveal yourself as a person.
These are five best practices for writing great blog posts. I hope they have been helpful to you. Please let us know if you have additional tips to share, and happy blogging.
By Guest Author – Melonie is a technology writer who maintains a tech blog of her own and currently writes in promotion of DirecTV packages for direct4tv.net.
