Blogs can be a great way of promoting your book, your work or your brand as a writer.
Here are a few tips for a more effective blog.
- Make it compelling. You want people to read your blog, don’t you?
Boring content will put people off. Using images and even video can make your blog look much more appealing. Write posts that will spark a reader’s interest or contain relevant information about a particular subject.
Free Images is a good place to get free royalty free images from.
- Keep it short and to the point. A blog doesn’t replace a book. Writing thousands of words isn’t appropriate. It’s best to aim for just a few hundred instead.
Reading off a computer screen is more difficult than on paper. So it’s best to just use small blocks of text as it makes for easier reading.
- Write in a friendly tone, don’t be too formal and don’t use too much technical language.
Use the same style as if you were sitting down in a café with a friend to chatting over coffee.
- Try to update your blog on a regular basis. It’s best to try and post something every day, but if you don’t have the time try to post at least once or twice a week.
- Read through what you have written. Correct any mistakes and grammatical errors to ensure it all makes sense.
- Link to other material. Use your blog to link to other material on the web. This could be the website of the organisation you represent, or information about the specific services it provides. Or provide links to your book.
- Know your target audience.It’s hard to write a blog, or anything for that matter, without knowing whom you are writing to.
Sit down and write a profile for your intended audience: age, occupation, wants needs, aspirations, etc. Once you have defined your target audience, you can then write content that is relevant and meaningful to them.
For example, if you are writer like me you may write tips and information that will be helpful to other writers. Or information about your books for your readers.
- Write a list of blog topics. I find a good way of coming up with ideas for new blog posts is to write a list of topics. This can be anything from writing tips, to blogging, proofreading or things about my book.
- Create a blogging calendar.Prepare a monthly blogging calendar that includes deadlines for drafts and posts. This will give you time to prepare and edit your pieces and then you will always feel one step ahead.
- Research before your write.It can be tempting to write blogs strictly from your head, but it’s also useful to do research to enhance your posts.
This way if you don’t know very much about a particular subject you will learn more about it and get your facts right.
Photo by dimnikolov
Dora Moua
Thanks! Since joining the 30 day blogging challenge, I’ve made it thus far but I’m coming to a bit of a wall. I love how you shared about planning it out & doing your research. I may start practicing that so that I can continue to share my content with readers.
Mary, Living a Sunshine Life
I disagree with the post length only being a couple hundred words. Too often I find blog posts too short and unfulfilling. My blog posts average about 1000 words, but I use lots of photos and make sure I don’t have extremely long paragraphs (because that does get hard to read). My advice is write enough to make sure the message is meaningful, break up the paragraphs with photos and quotes, and make sure paragraphs aren’t too long. My most successful blog post is 2000 words, mainly because the post has a lot of valuable information that is presented in a unique way, and it’s something that was lacking in the community it was targeted at. It’s been going strong for over 3 years now, and still gets comments thanking me for writing it. In other words, compelling content is much more important than length restrictions.
ByBeck
Awesome tips, definitely key tips for blogger 😉
tiffanyshand
Thanks!