Blogs need content: short snippets, articles, and longer feature articles. Here are five tips to improve your article-writing skills; within a few days, you’ll be writing content like a pro.
1. Outline before you start writing – a few points will do
Jot down a few points before you start writing.
Many articles follow this simple format: an introduction, a few points (around four, in an article of 500 words), and a conclusion.
Writing a short outline before you begin the article will help you to stick to the point.
Every article you write should include a “takeaway” for your readers: at least one nugget of information that’s not available elsewhere.
2. Know your audience – who’s reading your blog? Why?
Before you begin writing, think about your reader. Who’s your typical blog reader?
For example, if you’re writing a blog about digital photography, ask yourself whether your current article is aimed at beginning photographers, or at experts. If your typical reader is a beginner, you’ll need to add explanatory material (or links) to your article.
Knowing who your typical reader is will help you to write content that’s appropriate for your blog. Staying with our digital photography example, you could write several series of articles for beginners; these articles would become “evergreen” content on your blog; they’ll always be popular.
3. Create an inviting title: make it a “must read”
When you’re creating article titles, there are two audiences you need to remember. The first audience is your readers. Make your titles intriguing, so that when a reader sees the article in his newsfeed, he’ll read it.
Your articles’ second audience is the search engines. Use keywords in your article title so that they can be found.
4. Use short sentences and short paragraphs – make your articles easy to read
On the Web, you don’t read. You scan. So make your articles scannable: use short sentences, short paragraphs and lists. The easier your articles are to read, the more readers you’ll get.
5. Add links to your articles
Links are important for every article you write. If you’re creating a blog on WordPress, there are several “Related articles” plug-ins you can use on the blog, but especially for longer articles, you’ll want to add your own links too.
So there you have it: five tips which will help you to write a steady stream of informative and entertaining articles for your blog.
Great post! I use some of those tips for my articles. I like to make a short article around 4 paragraphs to cover what I like to say.
Also, sufficient research must be done and on topics that one is unsure, collaboration with other sources available online is vital to ensure the accuracy of information of our blog posts produced.
Another thing is to always conduct a spelling check to dig out some minor spelling errors that might spoil the professionalism of an article.
Great tips you got there! A good introduction before your main topic really helps a lot in catching the interests of your readers.
Thanks for this post it has helped me with my writing a lot.
Great info, i appreciate your kind knowledge
I just read something somewhere "out there" that indicates that throwing out any old blog post, something of dubious quality, is actually very detrimental to one's brand. So, if one is trying to become recognized as an authority, it is important to write quality posts.
So, for that reason, I'd like to hand you some kudos for this very effective post. It lines out exactly what needs to happen to create a quality article. I would only add that folks tend to skim while reading and that bullet points, in addition to everything else, tend to help get the message across with skimming readers.
Thanks!
~cj
Thanks for this post. The tips are really helpful!!
Thanks a lot for this great article.
I would like to add, if you want to improve your speaking and writing skills you should first master the skills of reading and listening.
Regards,
Kirk
Thanx a lot for this post . Its really helpfull…