Guidelines for writing good blog posts


Creating the title

Let's start with the very beginning, with the title you assign to each post. The title is very important, as it factors heavily to the post's searchability and, in many RSS and Atom feeds, might be the only part of the post that readers are first subjected to.

Besides, the title of the blog post is like the title of the newspaper or magazine article or even a print advertisement; it's what attracts the reader's attention and persuades these phones read the text that follows. To that end, you have to write powerful, compelling titles for those your posts. The title has to draw the reader into the post. It must be interesting and informative in its right, as well as descriptive from the post itself.

There are lots of ways to do that. You can and probably should communicate a person benefit in the title. You can also pique the reader's interest by asking an issue, or making a provocative statement.

It goes without saying that power words should be a part of your title-writing arsenal. You can't go wrong by including words like "free," "bargain," "new," "discover," "easy," and so on in your titles.

You also need to include your most important keywords in your title. I'm talking keywords that describe the post content, obviously, but also keywords that apply to the blog itself or to your company or product. Now, you can't pack a lot of keywords into a title, so you have to choose judiciously. But titles are what count most when the search engines are indexing blog posts, so fitting in the primary keywords is essential.

The challenge in accomplishing all these goals is that the title of the blog post has to be relatively short. While there are no practical limitations on the period of a blog post title, you need to understand that search engine results pages will only show the first 65 characters approximately of a post title. Anything past that 65-character mark simply gets truncated. So you can go long if you wish to, but a lot of people won't see the words at the end.

Writing the blog post itself

Effective blog writing is conversational yet direct. It must reflect the personality of the contributor, while still getting over the company message. To that end, the author's voice is important; the writing must be personal, not corporate.

Getting that personal feel is important. A blog post shouldn't sound like a regurgitated press release nor like a piece of catalog copy. It will sound like a letter from the trusted friend a little chatty, perhaps, but full of useful and interesting information.

Blog posts also need to be relatively short. Not as short like a tweet or Facebook status update, obviously, but not near as long as a magazine article, for instance. We're talking posts that are measured in paragraphs, not pages. Write too much and no one will read the complete post; write too little and the post won't be informative. You need to strike a middle ground fit for that short attention spans of today's Web users approximately 250 and 1000 words.

Regarding how fancy the writing should be, the important thing descriptor is "conversational." You also need to know your customer base and gear the writing to that level. There's nothing wrong with aiming in a fifth-grade reading level, which seems to be the American average these days, but you can notch up a tad if you have a more educated or technical audience.

By the way, remember that a blog post doesn't have to be text only. You can include pictures and videos in your post, each of which can help to humanize the knowledge. There's nothing like an image of someone making or utilizing a product to grab the reader's attention and pull him to the process.

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This article was sent to us by: Kenneth Anderson at 03192011

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