Would you like insight into some fundamental points you should adhere to when making a great blog? Good, because in this article, we’ll be discussing some of the basics you might have overlooked when making your own blog.
We’ll cover a few simple design techniques you should take into consideration when you first start your blog, such as what content management system to use and basic layout, then we’ll progress on to blog post structure and the importance of good grammar and punctuation.
So let’s begin!
Choosing a content management system
Your choice of content management system (CMS) can be summed up in one word – WordPress! You really can’t go wrong with this blogging platform and millions of people from around the world use it effectively every day.
WordPress is undoubtedly the most famous and is an absolute treasure to work with, offering a massive online community for help and advice with plenty of free plugins to do really cool things; from automatically publishing your posts on Facebook to creating an SEO proofed website.
Another big thing with WordPress is the sheer number of free WordPress Themes out there to use.
Blogger is also another option with the appeal of free hosting and easy to use interface.
Building your blog layout
Thanks to the free templates made available by the contributors of WordPress, you have thousands of blog styles at your disposal. The most popular ones primarily present themselves in one of two ways:
• A website which is a dedicated blog, so the blog is actually the website.
• A website that has one or more pages and a blog section installed into it.
If you’re interested in just blogging, which we’re assuming you are, the first one is the way forward.
If you get stuck, don’t worry – go to the WordPress website and ask for help, but scour the FAQ sections and forums for the answers to your question first.
Don’t forget the grammar !
The importance of grammar, punctuation and spelling cannot be underestimated! It would be great if we all had a team of editors at our beck and call, but sadly we don’t. If the grammar is poor, it follows that your blog’s readability will probably be poor too.Check out Top 14 Grammatical Offenses Of Bloggershere on Spice Up Your Blog.
Did you know that even the search engines can figure out the quality of your writing? Shoddy spelling is a surefire way to give Google and other search engines a reason not to bother ranking it highly in their search results. Aim to please the human readers and the search engines will like your blog posts as well.
Suring up your style
The writing style should follow these five points:
Idea – First things first, you need to brainstorm a great idea, which can be done by asking questions about the topic you have chosen to write about. No matter how dry the topic may seem, if you ask where, why, what, who, which and when. Try it out for yourself – think of a topic and ask questions about it.
Title – You need to pick a good title that’ll stand out to the reader and make them feel compelled to read the first sentence, just like a headline in a newspaper creates sales.
Introduction – The introduction should be the next carefully crafted few sentences of words. Start it off by luring the reader into the rest of the first paragraph with something interesting, just like I did with this article.
Body – Make sure you convey your point to the reader in the main text of your blog – you want to prove what you’re writing about.
Conclusion – Finally, conclude your blog post and add any ‘calls to action’ you need in the closing paragraph.
Why successful guest posts achieve that success
A successful blog post will be engaging to the readers. They’ll be captivated by your writing skills and will thoroughly look forward to reading more of your blog.
Hopefully, this brief blog post has given you some inspiration into creating a better blog that you and your readers will enjoy more.
By Guest Author – Rebecca Kingsdale lives in Manchester in the UK and is a copywriter for http://www.directcontent.co.uk/
