Writing your Blog AND Keeping your Reader’s Attention

Blogging about Blogging: A How-To Guide to Setting Up Your Own:
Part 3 of 3

Consider the following suggestions to find your voice and keep your reader’s attention when writing your blog:

Use your own experiences

People are much more interested in the human experience than research you found online. Supplement your story with internet research, but don’t start with it.

Keep each posting to less than 300 words

You’d be surprised how quickly those words add up! Internet readers have a very limited attention span. They need the information they need, when they need it, and they generally don’t have the patience to sift through a lot of dense material. Keep words simple. Think and write in terms of keywords or tags that go to the very heart of your subject.

Find your format

Bullet points are easier to get through than long paragraphs. Tables are easier to read than sentences. Put similar blog content together into categories.

Don’t over edit yourself (at first)

Allow yourself to write without judgment or preconceived ideas. Then, go back a day later and re-arrange them if you need to. Great writing needs stellar editing. For most professional writers, editing is 70% of the task.

Get committed

You reduce your credibility if you say you will update each week, then don’t. Depending on your subject matter, you may want to have a number of blogs ready to publish before your first posting. These blogs (called evergreens) should be relevant to your topic, timeless in nature and easy to drop into your blog on a moment’s notice.

Good bloggers can engage and build their readership for the long term by sharing experiences (good and bad), writing in a style and format that is easy to digest in a short amount of time and being committed to their followers. (By the way, this posting is only 294 words!)

Next week: A blogging bonus: can your blog contribute to your bottom line? We’ll show you how! In case you missed it, click here for part 1 and part 2.