Writing Your Blog Posts

Once again all my articles are written from my own perspective so some may or may not agree with me but as I develop my own skills in blogging I find that I am asked more often how I go about managing my own blog and these articles are based very much on this – I hope this information will help from an advisory point of view…

When I first started I found I had very little to say and that I struggled to find a topic matter so I just wrote a few “Hi, here I am“ type posts which obviously did little for the blog or for me come to that!

But now as clients, colleagues and people I network with ask more and more questions I find that every spare moment is used writing little article in a huge (now up to 20 pages) word document that when I get time I proof read and then paste into WordPress and then publish.  This saves me oodles of time!

About Writing the Articles…

There seems to be some basic style guidelines when writing blog article which I tried to stick to when I first started writing, I vary a little now – these are:

• Try & keep it direct; declarative is good.
• Link to any other article, book, product, website that you can link to, it provides background/supporting info regarding your subject.
• Write little & often:  You can always comment on responses, but short & succinct is always good.
• Don’t take yourself/your blog too seriously, but never lose your sense of humour:  Don’t get personal; formal writing is for “solicitors”.  Blogs are more informal & friendly.
• Use Simple sentence structures & remember to always read your post out load before you publish it: This helps – honest!
• Bullets are good, so are subheadings, bold & italics for emphasis.

Finally a checklist before you hit the “Publish” button:

• Does the title apply to the content?
• Does the leading para explain what the article is about & why the reader should read &/or care?
• Is it worth reading?
• Would someone who knows nothing about the topic be able to understand it?
• Is it jargon free?  Have you explained the jargon?

Hope it Helps,

Sarah