I was speaking to the brilliant Roger Wolfson last year about writing styles and how they could best be applied to the web, something which has altered writing very dramatically since its inception. Roger is a genius when it comes to writing and he is someone who throughout his career has had to change the delivery, the style and the tone with which he writes.
Roger has worked in law, in television and he even has a column online, which is particularly why I wanted to pick his brains about online writing and that is what has inspired me to write this piece about what you need to include in the perfect blog post.
Broken
Always remember the importance of the planning phase here, the structure of your piece should be carefully laid out in the beginning. When you come to working out that structure it will be vital that you remember the importance of breaking up the article to make it more easily digestible. This is something which so many are guilty of and the result is this stream of consciousness which people just don’t have the patience to work through. Use photos, sub-headings and whatever else you can find to keep that article broken down into pieces.
Fun
Not every blog post will be based around a fun theme but you should always look to keep the tone light and easy to read. People don’t want to invest huge amounts of time and emotion into a blog post, so bear that in mind. Now if you are delivering some story or some news which has a sombre mood to it, look to lighten things by the end of the post so that the reader will feel as though they are taking a journey, one which leaves them with a smile on their face at the end.
Value
It is absolutely essential that you are providing your readers with value, this is the most important thing during your writing and without it there is little point in starting off in the first place. The be all and end all to your blog is that people read and in order for them to do that you must be able to provide them with some real value. Now it isn’t important whether you are making them smile, cry, teaching them something or giving them any other emotion to take away, the key is that you give them something to take away.
Assuming that you are able to put a big post together which is accurate, which is providing value to the reader and which is easy to read and digest then you can all but count on people enjoying your blog post and most importantly that they will share that post. In doing this you will get people coming back to the site, enjoying the site and they will do this because they are going to know that coming to your site will give them the value that they need.
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