Number 3 in a series, Business Blog FAQs, culled from my business blog consulting practice.

Advice for Blog Post Writing

To thine own blog be true

To thine own blog be true

You don’t have to be William Shakespeare to be an effective blogger. In social media, content counts more than style, originality and passion count more than vocabulary and grammar. That said, a business blog will be held to a higher standard than other types of blogs. After all, you are a business, and business people are expected to be effective and schooled communicators. If you’re new to writing blogs or an inexperienced writer, these blog writing tips should help. (Note to readers – blog post headlines and subheads are topics unto themselves, which I will cover separately.)

Preparing to Write Your Blog Post

  1. Select your topic carefully. What are your readers curious to know more about?
  2. Settle on an angle. What new perspective can you bring to the topic?
  3. Have a point. Nothing is more frustrating than a rambling post. Better to have one point than two or three. A blog post should be more like a shot of espresso than a trip to the salad bar.
  4. Construct an outline. Since your post has a point, start at the end and work backwards. What facts, examples, or opinions support your point? Jot them down – it’ll make the writing go faster.

Writing Your Blog Post – Style

  1. Be conversational. I like to write as if I’m writing a letter or email to a specific person who is representative of my readers (sometimes called a persona). Avoid writing in the third person – it makes one sound stuffy and pompous.
  2. Invite participation. Blog posts are not essays. You needn’t wrap every post into an airtight conclusion. Ending with a question or by asking for a reaction is perfectly acceptable and will foster dialog.
  3. Avoid big, fancy words. Howard Cosell and William F. Buckley made careers out of showing off their vocabularies, but we’re not them. Keep it simple so readers can grasp your point quickly and easily. Most blog readers are reading in a hurry.
  4. Avoid jargon, acronyms, and adspeak. The blogosphere values straight talk. One of the worst mistakes you can make is sounding like a corporate tool.
  5. Keep sentences short. Avoid complex sentence structure. If you need to communicate a complicated set of ideas, use bullet points.

Writing Your Blog Post – Typography

(Making Your Text Easy to Read)

  1. Use bullet points to list examples and connected ideas. Not too many though – 10 or more bullet points may overwhelm readers.
  2. Use a dash instead of a colon or semicolon.
  3. Use a font size large enough for your readers to see clearly. This becomes a serious issue for blogs aimed at the over 40 set.
  4. Don’t underline text – readers will mistake it for a hyperlink.
  5. Use ALT tags and image titles so folks who can’t view your images have an idea of what they represent. (This technique also helps with search engine optimization, or SEO.
  6. Don’t use too many font sizes and colors – too distracting.
  7. Don’t overuse bold and italics – also distracting, and italic text is especially difficult to read on a computer monitor.
  8. Keep paragraphs short. Five lines or less is a good rule of thumb.
  9. Keep lines of text reasonable narrow. Wide lines of text are difficult to read on a web page.

Resources and Tools

  1. The Associated Press Stylebook. Contains best practices for punctuation, abbreviations, and usage. Complete sections for business and sports guidelines. Compact, to the point.
  2. The Chicago Manual of Style. Far more detailed than the AP Stylebook, the CMS contains a wealth of detailed information on grammar, punctuation, usage, and attribution of cited references. If you can’t find the answer to your writing question in here, you’re probably asking the wrong question.
  3. The Free Dictionary. I’ve tried every online dictionary under the sun and this is my favorite. It gives you a one-screen summary of spelling(s), definitions, synonyms, antonyms, and literary citations. A very handy tool.
  4. Roget’s International Thesaurus. If you need a word to distinguish subtle shades of meaning, there’s still no substitute for Roget in printed form.
  5. Flesch-Kincaid readiblity test. After your post is written, plug it into this test to see the comprehension difficulty of your content, expressed in grade level. (If you use Google Docs, this test can be applied directly to your document by selecting Tools, then Word Count.)
  6. Gobbledygook Grader. Plug your content in here to determine how much jargon and fluff your writing contains. Since businesses tend to get caught up in corporate speak, you’ll find this tool especially helpful.

Bottom line – Blog writing isn’t rocket science, but knowing the basics will make your blog take off.

Over to You

Any blog writing tips to add? I know we have a lot of writers who read Word Sell, so it will be interested to see where people agree and disagree!
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