5 Ways to Improve Your Blog (Please)

An open letter to blog writers everywhere, from a guy who sometimes reads them.  (Me.)

Let’s be honest: when it comes to writing, I’m neither Shakespeare nor Godin, and neither are you.  But the difference is, I’m not spending all my time trying to convince you that my blog is worth reading.

You, however, are.

And I know you are because you’re constantly linking to your tripe all over the Twitter and the Facebook and the Google — lord, how you love to SEO my Google — and if I’m going to keep finding all those posts you keep writing, you could at least be coherent about it.

Note: this isn’t even about writing well.  “Readability” is a tall order in this age of “just press and publish,” so let’s aim a notch or two lower, shall we?  Let’s simply set our sights on “competence,” and we can worry about the magic later.

5 Ways to Improve Your Blog (Please)

1. Realize that online audiences only ever skim. Life is short, and we all have a lot to say.  Stop taking up my time with pointless lead-ins which you think “add color and context” to your lists and bullets, but which only read like white noise across my retinas.

2. If you can’t say something original, don’t say anything at all. By adding nothing new to the conversation, all you’re doing is polluting my Google returns with your supercharged SEO bait and driving the cogent articles from people who do know what they’re talking about to a sad home further down the page.  Stop hurting America. (And if this means you actually need to start reading blogs in order to know what other people are saying, so be it.  There’s no shame in caring.)

3. If you’re going to include an image to “jazz up” your post, get creative. Most Flickr image searches will return multiple pages of results.  At least have the gumption to pick something from the second page.  By doing so, you’ll have separated yourself from 95% of your competition, who’ve been using the exact same images since the Internet was first hatched.

4. Preview your blog on the page AND read it in an aggregator. Understanding how different people will see your words helps you format your posts accordingly.  By doing so, you can avoid awkward sentence or paragraph breaks that disrupt the reader’s flow.  Beware of pesky image borders that isolate the last few words of a sentence from the paragraph they’re supposed to run alongside.  Your blog may be pathetic, but it doesn’t have to look like it.

(Plus, a bonus tip: in order to read your own blog in an aggregator, you’ll have to subscribe to it, which means you’ll have at least one subscriber listed in your Feedburner widget!)

5. Stop asking me to subscribe BEFORE I read your post. I’m inspired by your chutzpah, but trust me: nobody buys the cow before suckling the teat.  Afterwards maybe, but definitely not beforehand.  That’s just desperate.

And if all this seems beyond you, fear not.  I’m a harsh critic, and I’m rarely pleased — with my work or yours.  Truth be told, almost no one can write compellingly enough, consistently enough, and with ever-increasing relevance, day after day, week after week, and in a lyrically engaging manner that manages to hold my attention for more than five minutes.

But for god’s sake, you could at least try.

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Tags: audience, Blogging, bullshit, common sense, honesty, inspiration, language, perception, Social Media