fluent in mumble

Why bloggers should be better writers
by Nathan Howe for the Internet Marketers United Group Writing Project

The internet is full of garbage. Anybody who has been online longer than five minutes knows that the information you want is a speck adrift in a sea of irrelevant content. As bloggers, it is quite possible that our content will be read by nobody. If you have a long-established blog, you are more likely to have readers blindly stumble into your site because it’s in the search engines, but if your content is lacking, your readership will be sparse.

In other words, only your mother and your stalker care about the intimate details of what you had for breakfast.

Now, if you are blogging as some type of therapy with no desire for anybody to read what you write, you can do whatever you want. If, however, you are blogging with the hope that somebody will read, you must write something readable. Start with these tips:

• Look professional. No matter what your blog content is, you should come across as an expert. This may mean eliminating internet slang from your blog’s vocabulary.
• Make each post a cohesive thought. Don’t write about your Aunt Minnie, your Cooper Mini, and Frosted Mini Wheats in the same post unless they are strongly related. Tell one story, make one main point, or give one piece of solid advice in a post.
• Write as correctly as the subject warrants. Again, not all blogs are the same. You wouldn’t use the Queen’s English in a blog about deep urban hip-hop music. You wouldn’t use the language of hip-hop in a blog about the Queen. However, your language should be one step of formality above usual verbal speech about your subject. Take the time to polish.
• Make the information accessible. This is key. No matter how great your ideas are, nobody will read them if they are presented in huge blocks of text. Find ways to break them up, including bulleted lists, bold headings, and breaking large subjects into small serialized posts.
• Be brief. Most blog readers aren’t interested in a long treatise. They are looking for useful information quickly. We can write for our readers by using short sentences. Obviously, the introductory paragraph to this post does not meet that standard. Avoid using big words just to sound smart. Write intelligently and succinctly.
• Write with purpose. A post just for the sake of posting is good to start the habit of updating a blog, but frequent posts without much content are boring and drive away readers. Write something that means something.
• Develop your voice. A good writer is recognizeable because of his or her style, developed over time. As you become established as a writer, people will visit your blog because of you the person as much as your content.

The biggest reason for bloggers to consciously improve their writing is that words are the most flexible way for us to communicate with visitors to our sites. The way you write will determine what your visitors think of you, your blog, and your subject. Don’t allow your words to disrupt your communication and drive them away.

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Copyright 2007 Nathan Howe, Grate Media. Reposting without permission is prohibited, but permission is pretty easy to get. Contact me through gratemusic.com.