Experience is a good teacher. When I started blogging in 2005, I just plowed in and started writing. That was my first mistake, and my first lesson learned … nowadays, I advise clients to plan carefully before hitting the keyboard! Here are a few more ways my blog writing has changed over the last four years.

Polish is for case studies, press releases, and shoes – not blog posts. Blogs are an informal medium. A blog post should stimulate conversation. If thoughts are too finished, if there’s no room left for argument, you stifle conversation rather than stimulate it. My early blog posts reflected a dissertation mentality. Now when I write, I try to imagine myself in a tavern or a coffee house, talking things over with friends.

Quality of information trumps style. Blog readers are far more interested in substance than style. Whether you write with polish or without it, you have to have something to say. Readers crave information they can use to advance their business or improve their lives in some way.

Follow your writing instincts. Conventional wisdom says a blog should have a narrow focus. In a lot of ways, that’s good. But in my case, I found it nearly impossible to stay within the confines of online marketing and copywriting. Too many other things interest me. I found that when I limited my writing scope, my writing grew stale. That’s not good for anybody.

Let your community shape you. You can’t fight city hall (especially these days). At one point I tried to eliminate my cartoons and humor in general from my blog, and it spurred a modest reader revolt. When loyal readers and friends like Robyn McMaster say jump, I say, “How high?” Back came the cartoons. When Joanna Young and Robert Hruzek encouraged me to tell personal stories, out they came. When Ulla Hennig said my posts gave her inspiration, I looked for inspiring topics to explore.

Ignore everything I just said. Sometimes, a highly polished post is just what you need to write. On occasion, a great post doesn’t contain original ideas at all. At times, you should ignore your instincts and follow the herd. Once in a while, you need to resist the influence of your readers. It all goes back to my first lesson learned – know what you’re after, what you’re trying to accomplish. Otherwise you’ll wind up being conventional for the sake of being conventional, and unconventional for the sake of being unconventional. It won’t get you anywhere. In my case, I want my blog posts to entertain and inform through a combination of my words and reader comments.

How about you? What are you after when you write a blog post?

This post is part of Joanna Young’s Group Writing Project: Writing Lessons.