There is a big a difference between a successful blog post and one that sucks. First time bloggers tend to slip up on a few of the essentials to making a blog post great and so today I hope we can make a change to that.
Blogging is about delivering value and educating people about thing. Something I see a lot of people doing is writing with search engines in mind, writing content because they want to get it ranked in search engines, not to help readers. The same applies to those who want to make money from a blog post. If your whole aim is to make money from a post, your message often gets lost. Here’s some tips for those who want to continue to create bad posts.
Use Really Bad Grammar and Spelling
Before I say anything, I know mine isn’t that great. When I hit 20, I sort of just some how got half decent at writing. Up until then I didn’t really enjoy it and I was really bad at it. I had private English tutors for years and didn’t get any good at reading and writing until I took it seriously and that was when I started blogging.
If you want your writing to rock, know the subject and work at it! This post will probably take me a hour to write, I have blogging in my blood! If you don’t know a subject, don’t write about it. If you want anyone to take your post seriously make a big effort to write well.
Don’t Bother Styling Your Posts
The majority of people coming to your site will skim your content. This makes sense, who wants to read 2000 words to find the one line that you are interested in. Don’t make it hard for them to find that one line. Here’s how I break up my content to make it easy to skim:
- Bullet points are good for skimming.
- Each section or point needs to stand out like in this post.
- I like the number sections so people know what part of a post they are at.
- Don’t center text, it makes it hard to read.
- Don’t make your page to wide, this also makes it hard to follow and read.
Make Your Post Really Short
Great things can be spoken with a very small amount of words. However, as a whole, on the internet, we want lots of great content so your 300 word article that is basically an introduction to a subject is not good enough. If your doing an article about weight gain, then don’t just talk about the subject. Give us examples of good diets, link to other great articles, is there exercises we can do that will help us build muscle mass etc. What I’m trying to say, give us the complete answer we are looking for, otherwise we will look elsewhere.
Don’t Put in Images
Images aren’t required for a post to be valuable or successful. However, have you ever heard the saying, a picture is worth a thousand words (of course you have). Well, that’s kind of true with blogging. I like using them because it helps my readers skim to the right parts of my articles and see things visually.
Give It a Crap Title
This is so silly and something I see so many people do. You want to name your post something that’s going to make them excited about the article before they go to read it. Subject lines and titles of articles are so important to the success of my blogs. Every time I email my newsletter subscribers, if I don’t use a good title, I’ll see half the amount of people open the email. The same applies to social media, if it’s a good title or shocks you, your going to click the link and find out more.
Talk About Something Completely Irrelevant
I’m not just a guy who makes money online blogging, I do lots of stuff. However, you are not interested in the majority of that “stuff”, well at least not the majority of you.
Two new games are coming out on the xBox, Call of Duty and Battlefield. I have pre-ordered both and am looking forward to playing them. However talking about them in my blog posts are not going to be helpful to the majority of you. If I give reference to them, you won’t get that reference. If I do an article about why battlefield is better than Call of Duty and I typically talk about weight loss then I’ve just alienated the majority of my readership, thus making my post crap to them.
Don’t Bother Checking Over Your Post
I never use to look over my blog posts before I published them and because I didn’t, I would have lot’s of errors and mistakes in my posts. Mistakes are natural and that’s acceptable, but what’s not right, is not at least running over your post a couple times and trying your hardest to get those mistakes fixed. If you haven’t looked over a post before publishing it, it shows.
Don’t Explaining Yourself
Saying things and not explaining what you mean by those “things”. Let me explain myself (haha). If I was to say, “To do this, you want to start by going to your FTP and then go into your Public HTML file and upload the file there”. I’d imagine a few of you would be lost by what that means. Instead I should say, “To do this, you want to start by going to your FTP, for those who don’t know, FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol, it’s used to transfers files from your hard drive to your web server. When you first login to your FTP, you should see your Public HTML folder. Open that folder and drag and drop the file you want to upload from your desktop.”
If you style a post like that properly, those who are advanced can skim it easily, those who don’t know much about the subject can read every word and complete the task.
Base Your Post on Making Money
This is a real problem for everyone. When you create a post with the intent to make money from it, your going to create a post not as good as it should be. Say for example, I want to promote some fitness equipment that gets me great abs, the best ab equipment doesn’t have an affiliate program but the second best does. I choose to promote the second best when I know it’s not as good as the best. This means I’m not helping my readers as much as I could.
What mistakes do you see bloggers making the most?
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