For a while now I’ve been blogging a bit and while I am not a professional in this, I discovered some useful tricks which I want to share with you. I will not discuss obvious things like use a spellchecker, on the other hand some things I describe will sound obvious but will need effort to get it done right and therefor is often neglected. Also I will not focus on content that much and focus this list on structure because half of the time I don’t know what to write about and I am not experienced enough to give tips on content writing.

Don’t publish – What are your insane? blogs are all about publishing! What I meant was that when writing your post don’t hit the publish button but instead save your post first as a draft to review it the day after(a few hours is also ok). Of course you just spend some time writing the post and are anxious to publish but when you wait one day you will reflect on what you have written the day before in a more fair way. Therefor don’t publish (directly) and also try previewing your post on your site before publishing.

People love structure – So use this! Paragraph your text to make it more readable. This will also structure your text in such a way people can skip it when they find it boring. Also be not afraid to use lists of any kind because somehow people like reading lists.

Extend your content – You can only make up so much crap therefor try to involve other peoples information as well. Link to other blogs that share or disagree on your opinion, make use of media like youtube and wikipedia. Also include a link to anything you reference in that text itself.

Summarize – Add the end of your blog post ask the readers a question, state the moral of the post, Reflect or express your opinion in one short sentence. This will bring a good ending to the story and might even invite people to post comments on your blog. But never ever end with a question to asks your readers to drop you a comment if you liked this piece of creative(read crap) writing. Comments should be about content. The title & introduction of your post should also give an explanation of what the post is about. The title should be one catchy sentence and the introduction should be one paragraph.

Improve – There will be times when you posted a story which contains errors. The first thing you should do is fix them. There is no need to put update tags on a post where you only fixed some minor spelling errors. If you change the content of your post dramatically you might want to consider this and inform the users of the update in the beginning of the post and at the end.

Of course I often make mistakes myself and do not follow this 100% but it is a good guide to measure your posts. I try to always hit at least four out of five points before publishing my post. This way I make sure the blog post lives up to at least some degree of expectation.