10 useful writing tips for bloggers

Write about what interests you. The enthusiasm you feel for the subject will be reflected in your content. Don’t feel that you need to restrict yourself to one topic. You might even find new readers if you vary the content.

Note down your ideas for blog posts. It might help to make a new draft post for each one you’re planning to write. Take inspiration from seasonal events, personal experience, objects that you own, history, the news, your health and wellbeing, anything that you would enjoy writing about. You could focus the post in a certain direction, looking at ‘why’, ‘how to’ or ‘top 10’, for example.

Give some thought to the title of your blog post. It should tell the reader what the post is about, which is important if you’re offering advice, a review or a personal experience. If your piece is strongly opinionated, you could reflect this in the title. Alternatively you can have an intriguing or mysterious title, which would be ideal for a creative writing piece.

The first sentence is important because this is what people will see when previewing your blog posts. A blogger’s writing style is evident just from those first few words. This helps readers to decide if they want to read the full post.

Blog posts don’t have to be long. If you have a lot to say and you want to write a lengthy post, that’s great. However, if that’s not your style, don’t worry about how many words you have to write. Quality is better than quantity when it comes to content.

What you write doesn’t have to be ‘complete’. You can focus on a few aspects of your topic; those that seem the most important to you. You don’t have to explain yourself or apologise for missing anything out.

Using short paragraphs, bullet points, bold text and italics can help to structure your posts and emphasise the key points. Try not to have really long chunks of text because this can be difficult to read, especially on a smaller screen. Images also help to break the text up, although they can make the blog slower to load.

Include links to your other blog posts where it seems appropriate. This will then encourage readers to explore your blog. Link to external websites only when necessary, or the reader might get distracted and not return to read the rest of the post. Check that your links are correct before publishing your post.

Remember that potentially anyone could read your blog. Be wary about revealing personal information. Also be aware that defamation law applies to bloggers too. Regarding the use of potentially offensive language, it’s your choice but some readers may be put off. It depends who you want the audience to be.

Check your blog post for errors before you publish it. The odd typo will inevitably creep into a published post, but do check the spellings of names and product titles in particular, because it could be embarrassing to get these wrong. Obviously you can edit the post after it’s published, but the email version will already have gone out to your subscribers.

With thanks to Kirsty T for suggesting this blog post.

I hope this was useful! Bloggers, have you got any more writing tips to add?