Some Pointers for New Bloggers — NOT Just Grammar

Hey folks! I’m seeing a lot of new faces here on Blogit (handles, anyway), which is marvellous. But I also see a lot of people making some of the same mistakes I did….I’d like to save you some time, trouble, and embarrassment.

1. Don’t make a whole new blog for each post. Group your posts into general blogs. For example, if you are writing a multi-part story or essay, each chapter or section could be a post in one blog titled “My Story.”
2. Don’t write really long blogs; most people look for half a page or less when looking to read a blog. Five or six paragraphs with fewer than five sentences per ‘graph is great. An exception might be the fiction category, where it makes sense to break by chapters.
3. Do write a catchy headline — “How I Killed My Brother” is far less interesting than “I Shot Him From a Cannon into Rockefeller Square.” And sex, violence, and petty squabbles sell.
4. Do break your posts into paragraphs, check spelling, and use correct grammar. Large blocks of text are a big turnoff and make reading more difficult. Mistakes in spelling and grammar may turn off readers who value effort and professionalism in the material that they read. Too many of either and you will lose clicks, no matter how catchy your headlines.
5. Do use a font that is easy to read. Huge fonts and tiny fonts are really for emphasis. Easiest to read on-screen is a 12 or 14 point font. Script fonts are hard to read on-screen. The best choices of body font are the common ones: Arial, Verdana, Times New Roman, or Garamond. You can use the fancy ones for headlines.
6. Go easy on the emphasis. Bold, italic, underline, lots of bangs (exclamation points), rows of queries (question marks) should all be used sparingly. They create visual clutter that obscures your message. I prefer to use bold and italic together, as I find that the italics alone tend to disappear on-screen. Example: Hi, my name is Editormum. Hi, my name is Editormum.
7. Don’t try to follow every trend that comes up. Sometimes there will be a rash of people posting distribution lists or top ten lists, trash-talking others, or some such business, in an attempt to garner more clicks. If you follow every trend, you’ll get a reputation as a click whore, and your real writing will suffer.
8. Do diversify. Try having a journal blog, an opinion blog, and a blog in your category of expertise (such as “Family” or “Arts.”) This widens your reader base but keeps your blogging organised and manageable.
9. Don’t spread yourself too thin. Some bloggers start a bunch of new blogs only to discover that they cannot keep them all going. Then they have to weed out, move posts, and consolidate to get things manageable again. If you have more than one blog in a given category, you are probably over-diversified.
10. Do remember to read your fellow bloggers, comments on their posts, and create a good “About Me” page. These three tactics can really boost your visibility as you begin your blogging journey.

Tags: op-ed, Typography, writing tips