When you are done reading where to start when writing a blog, here comes the next question: how do you keep your blog devoid of unnecessary clichés blabberings and blunders?
How do you keep it balanced and intact, with just the right amount of intrigue, interest and information?
As much as it is important to know how to writeor what to writeon a blog, it is necessary to knowwhat to avoid as well, to give your blog that professional edge.
Committing to blogging can become a tedious task if you do not know how to proceed. For beginners, it can be challenging to manage both the creative and technical aspects of writing a blog.
Even highly successful professional bloggers admit to having gone through rough patches of writing and re-writing, honing their skills and the art of blogging, in their initial days.
Here are a few often-neglected reminders that would help you gain some insights into the invisible boundaries of blogging:
1. Lacking structure
Writing blogs does not mean churning in mass content to make your presence felt. If there isn’t a consistent format or structure to your blog or series of blogs, your readers would get confused. Any blog or blog series must follow a specific style, format and tonethat tag it to the particular topic/theme/field and sustain its target audience.
You need to prepare a flowchart for your topics and organize them well before jumping in with random content. The flowchart helps you keep a track of all the vital points that need to be covered in a blog or through a series of blogs and segregate the ideas or topics effectively without losing focus.
2. Bluffing
We all think it’s easy, but it is not! Never underestimate your readers and presume that you could bluff them into believing anything. Do not blog on topics you are not well-versed at. Don’t do it because everybody else is.
If you want your readers to respect your writing and come back for more, make sure your writing has depth and solid information.
If you have towrite about something that is trending, acquire sufficient information about it. If that isn’t your forte and you are not confident or interested in handling a particular topic, invite a guest-writer, a domain expert, to write a blog for you. That would make your blog series authentic as well as engaging and also impress your valuable readers with accurate information.
3. Forgetting to credit the resources
We all love a well-researched blog. Adequate facts and figures and reliable information from credible resources will make any blog content richer. However, what if you do not provide or forget to provide credits to those resources?
Why is it important to credit the sources?
When you provide credits, you are backing up your perspective with other relevant sources that have dealt with the same topic.
You are creating outbound back-links for your blog that influence your web traffic.
Not crediting the resources could imply that you are claiming the facts or statistics mentioned to be yours. It is considered plagiarismas per Google regulations and could black-mark your site and its rankings on Google search.
Crediting your resources positively implies to your readers that you have done your “homework” and have researched well on the topic.
4. Missing the mark
We are familiar with the fact that some blogs appeal to us more with their fresh content, interesting information and way of presentation.
They talk directly, to the point and keep us hooked till the end. It is important, while blogging, to stay off from distractions and not get lost in unnecessary details. Keeping your focus and consistency is integral to blogging. You must keep your readers rooted to your focal point and engage them effectively within its boundaries.
5. Being repetitive or monotonous
You must know your audience better than anyone else and have an idea of how familiar they might be with the topic. So skip the obvious and start from a fresh note.
Yes, being relatable is important. You want to sound like you are writing to them. But do not be repetitive unless it is essential; say for a particular technical topic or a relatively new idea.
Engaging your readers is an art and you are pursuing the art of engagement, so don’t be boring! An interactive blog must have all the fundamental parameters: a tad bit of humour, a bit of conversation, relevant personal experiences that readers can relate to etc.
Well, these are a few tips of a huge iceberg!
Constructing interesting, professional blogs require a lot more learning and processing than these and we would be coming up with more segments on better blogging here at: https://www.thependits.com/blog
Every blogger has an individuality that reflects through their writing. Same applies to self-drawn boundaries as well! If you are a blogger and have more points to add on to this list of do’s and don’ts, then you are welcome to share with us. We would love to learn more.
Also, if you are good at writing and ready to try your hand at professional writing, join hands with ThePendits. We would love to have some excellent writers on-board. We are a content writing agency trying to bring in a different shade of creativity to professional, business and technical writing.