Writing Better Blogs

By Wade Kwon
www.birminghamblogging.com

Better Writing

Why improve your writing?
- you owe it to your readers
- there's only two kinds of writing-- good and bad
- it's how you stand out among bloggers

Goal review
- what is the goal of your writing?
- what is the goal of your blog?

Read good writing
- blogs
- magazines
- newspapers
- books
- save clips

Practice, practice, practics
- often, daily if possible
- helps writers block
- helps devlop writing skills

Passion is everything!

What does this mean to the reader?
- sum it up in 1 sentence.
- sum it up in 1 word.

Revise, revise, revise
- make first paragraph count
- get someone to read over it.
- or put it down and read it later
- cut by a third
- spell check
- incorporate reader feedback

Tools
- Q&A/ FAQ
- opinion- forces you to think critically
- lists
- surprise--do something out of your box, contrary opinion, original thought,
- humor

Better Blogging

Get organized
- important on a blog page
- include a roadmap if needed
- pick a game plan- sections, lists, chronologically?
- Q&A

Write conversationally
- SEO and Keywords-- make it difficult to write conversationally if you think too much about it.
- Don't use "click here"
- but incorporate links- with headlines, with title tags,

Think Visually
- bullets
- bold keypoints, sentences
- break up paragraphs
- subheads using < h2 > tags

Think about time of your readers
- write a long version, but add a sort version at top
- add "related posts" at bottom

Think Meta
- headline- clever vs. SEO friendly, short vs. long, Think CNN.com,
- sprinkle keywords throughout post- tagcrowd.com,
- use tags

So you might not win the Nobel Prixe, but instead....Recognition, Fans, Satisfaction for a job well done.

good reminders of good writing... and ways to think about writing for the web.