Why write a blog

These are all questions that having another set of eyes read your work can help answer. Nothing will intimidate or outright anger a reader faster than huge walls of text. Sentences should be as short as possible. Shorter sentences also reduce the likelihood of going off on tangents.

For example, I recently came across a sentence in an opinion piece in Wired that had no fewer than seven subordinate clauses, an editorial sin of almost unimaginable magnitude.

Paragraphs should also be short and sweet. The shorter the paragraph, the more likely your readers are to keep going. I am saying, however, that even the best blog posts could always be better, but time is always against us. You may have forgotten, but I originally included a section in the example outline for this post that dealt with optimizing blog posts for SEO.

I fully intended to write this section, but when I looked at how my first draft was shaping up, I realized this was too substantial a topic to tackle in an already lengthy post. As a result, I made the decision to cut this section from the post altogether. Remember — an outline is a guide, not an immutable series of commandments.

Be ruthless with your work. Blogging is one of those jobs that seems easy until you have to do it. Originally from the U. Home Blog. Last updated: May 17, Content Marketing. Dan Shewan. Sign up to get our top tips and tricks weekly! Sign Me Up! Related Content. For bloggers, the deadline is always now.

Blogging is therefore to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.

You end up writing about yourself, since you are a relatively fixed point in this constant interaction with the ideas and facts of the exterior world. And in this sense, the historic form closest to blogs is the diary. But with this difference: a diary is almost always a private matter. Its raw honesty, its dedication to marking life as it happens and remembering life as it was, makes it a terrestrial log.

A few diaries are meant to be read by others, of course, just as correspondence could be—but usually posthumously, or as a way to compile facts for a more considered autobiographical rendering. But a blog, unlike a diary, is instantly public. It transforms this most personal and retrospective of forms into a painfully public and immediate one. It combines the confessional genre with the log form and exposes the author in a manner no author has ever been exposed before.

I remember first grappling with what to put on my blog. The platform was called Blogger. As I used it to post columns or links to books or old essays, it occurred to me that I could also post new writing—writing that could even be exclusive to the blog. But what? Like any new form, blogging did not start from nothing. It evolved from various journalistic traditions. In my case, I drew on my mainstream-media experience to navigate the virgin sea. I had a few early inspirations: the old Notebook section of The New Republic , a magazine that, under the editorial guidance of Michael Kinsley, had introduced a more English style of crisp, short commentary into what had been a more high-minded genre of American opinion writing.

The New Republic had also pioneered a Diarist feature on the last page, which was designed to be a more personal, essayistic, first-person form of journalism. Mixing the two genres, I did what I had been trained to do—and improvised. As soon as I began writing this way, I realized that the online form rewarded a colloquial, unfinished tone. This is hazardous, of course, as anyone who has ever clicked Send in a fit of anger or hurt will testify.

But blogging requires an embrace of such hazards, a willingness to fall off the trapeze rather than fail to make the leap. From the first few days of using the form, I was hooked.

The simple experience of being able to directly broadcast my own words to readers was an exhilarating literary liberation. Unlike the current generation of writers, who have only ever blogged, I knew firsthand what the alternative meant. Blogging—even to an audience of a few hundred in the early days—was intoxicatingly free in comparison. Like taking a narcotic. It was obvious from the start that it was revolutionary.

Every writer since the printing press has longed for a means to publish himself and reach—instantly—any reader on Earth. But with one click of the Publish Now button, all these troubles evaporated. Alas, as I soon discovered, this sudden freedom from above was immediately replaced by insurrection from below.

Within minutes of my posting something, even in the earliest days, readers responded. E-mail seemed to unleash their inner beast. They were more brutal than any editor, more persnickety than any copy editor, and more emotionally unstable than any colleague. Writers can be sensitive, vain souls, requiring gentle nurturing from editors, and oddly susceptible to the blows delivered by reviewers.

They survive, for the most part, but the thinness of their skins is legendary. Moreover, before the blogosphere, reporters and columnists were largely shielded from this kind of direct hazing. Yes, letters to the editor would arrive in due course and subscriptions would be canceled. But reporters and columnists tended to operate in a relative sanctuary, answerable mainly to their editors, not readers.

For a long time, columns were essentially monologues published to applause, muffled murmurs, silence, or a distant heckle. Now the feedback was instant, personal, and brutal.

And so blogging found its own answer to the defensive counterblast from the journalistic establishment. To the charges of inaccuracy and unprofessionalism, bloggers could point to the fierce, immediate scrutiny of their readers. Unlike newspapers, which would eventually publish corrections in a box of printed spinach far from the original error, bloggers had to walk the walk of self-correction in the same space and in the same format as the original screwup.

The form was more accountable, not less, because there is nothing more conducive to professionalism than being publicly humiliated for sloppiness. Of course, a blogger could ignore an error or simply refuse to acknowledge mistakes. But if he persisted, he would be razzed by competitors and assailed by commenters and abandoned by readers. In an era when the traditional media found itself beset by scandals as disparate as Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, and Dan Rather, bloggers survived the first assault on their worth.

In time, in fact, the high standards expected of well-trafficked bloggers spilled over into greater accountability, transparency, and punctiliousness among the media powers that were. Even New York Times columnists were forced to admit when they had been wrong. The blog remained a superficial medium, of course.

By superficial, I mean simply that blogging rewards brevity and immediacy. No one wants to read a 9,word treatise online. Brainstorming your target audience is similar to creating a buyer persona for your company. Plus, this will give you an idea on what kind of content you want to produce. Once you've started a blog, you'll want to churn out high-quality, consistent content on a regular basis. This isn't always easy. Creating content is a time-consuming task. You want to ensure your content is something your readers would be interested in and hopefully can help with your SEO — more on that in a minute.

To begin brainstorming content, consider what your competitors are doing. Look for gaps in their content that you can fulfill. Additionally, you should also do SEO research to verify that users are searching for and interested in the topic you want to write about.

In order to host your blog, you'll most likely use a CMS. A CMS is a tool you can use to design, manage, and publish on your website. Once you've decided to start a blog, figure out if your current CMS has all the capabilities of hosting a blog. If not, you'll want to review CMS options that might integrate with your site or look for an entirely new CMS to migrate your site on. You can try out our CMS here. Just like creating a business, you can't create a blog without a strategy in mind.

Your strategy should answer questions like:. Then, create an editorial calendar to keep you organized and on track. A calendar will help you track what posts are coming up, ensure writers are meeting deadlines, and assure you have enough content ideas for the foreseeable future. When you're writing your blog posts , it's important to consider the article structure. For instance, are you using subheads to break up the post so it's easy to digest?

Are you using bullet points and images that make the post easy to scan? These are important factors that will help keep your reader on the page. Additionally, you'll want to make sure that you're using calls-to-action CTAs , that will guide the reader on what you want them to do next. This is how you can start making money and generating leads from your blog. Another element of blogging is marketing and promoting your blog posts. It's like the age-old adage -- "When a tree falls in the woods and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?

Consequently, if you write a blog post but nobody reads it, will it have a positive impact on your company or brand? Probably not.

That's why you'll have to market your posts. You can use social media, SEO, your website, or your email newsletter to reach current and potential customers. Like I mentioned above, you want people to read your blog posts. One way to do that is to get organic traffic through SEO.

If you want your blog to be successful, learn how to research keywords, how to rank in search engines, and how to build an SEO strategy. Your blog posts should be interesting to everyone who reads them, and especially for customers who read every single post. For those that are active followers and ambassadors of your blog, you should use a variety of blog post styles so your blog doesn't get stale.

Consider using how-to posts, list-based posts, or thought leadership. Producing blog content consistently can be hard. But you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time you write a blog post. You can update old blog posts to keep them accurate and comprehensive. Additionally, you can use other content of yours, perhaps a YouTube video or a podcast, and repurpose the content into a blog post.

To understand your audience, run a competitive analysis on your top blog competitors. This will help you identify trends, uncover gaps in the content in your industry, and give you ideas on topics and ways to promote your blog. With a blog, the sky's the limit -- and so are the benefits for your business. Editor's note: This post was originally published in February and has been updated for comprehensiveness. Here's why I would still do it and why I think anyone can and should start a blog : Blogging teaches you discipline.

Having to sit down once a day or once week or at whatever frequency you do it and write is an important skill. It forces you to learn the difficult lesson that some of the best things in life happen as a result of delayed gratification. Writing is one of those things, but there are others. Blogging teaches you introspection. I've already shared how blogging helped me understand myself and my place in the world. But I'm not the only one. My friend Scott Dinsmore told me he didn't know what he wanted to do with his life until he started a blog.