Keep it conversational
A blog post is a relatively informal, often fun piece of writing. Although there are plenty of technical blogs on the web, you’ll notice that even these tend to maintain a fairly conversational tone when explaining niche and complex topics.
Notice how most blog posts use the second person and speak directly to the reader. You would never do that in a piece of academic or professional writing. Also notice how plenty of blog posts, on topics ranging from how to finish highly technical projects to completely subjective movie character hairstyle rankings, give you a sense of the author’s personality by including short asides, personal opinions, and sometimes even broken grammar rules to mimic speech patterns.
Keep in mind that breaking grammar rules to achieve specific effects and working your personal voice into your blog post is not the same thing as writing and publishing an unedited post that simply ignores grammar rules. If you’re going to break the rules, you need to do it carefully and with a clear stylistic reason for doing so. For example, you might opt for sentence fragments, rather than whole paragraphs, in certain sections of your blog post because this magnifies your words’ impact. Take a look at this to see what we mean:
I’d applied to 10 colleges in total. Five of them, I knew I was a shoo-in. Four of them, I thought I had somewhere between an OK and a pretty good shot at getting in. And the last one, my holy grail of higher ed, I was all-but-certain they’d never accept me.
Then the envelopes started coming in. Thick ones, thin ones, glossy colorful ones, and nondescript white ones that could easily be mistaken for junk mail.
And then it arrived.
The letter I’d been waiting for since seventh grade.
My acceptance letter from my dream university.
See how this blog post emphasizes key sentences by making them stand-alone paragraphs? That’s one way bloggers make their posts sound and feel like in-person conversations. Also notice how this excerpt includes informal language like “shoo-in” and literary devices like synecdoche (referring to acceptance and rejection letters as “envelopes.”)
Research trending keywords
As we mentioned above, using SEO strategies in your blog post will help it reach a wider audience. If you don’t care about reaching a wide audience and just want to write your blog for yourself or to share with close friends and loved ones, don’t worry about this tip.
But if you do want to reach a wider audience by having your blog post rank higher on search engines, take the time to research relevant keywords for your post. Soovle, keywordtool.io, Google Search Console, and Google Keyword Planner are all useful tools you can use not only to test out how well a specific keyword ranks, but also to find related keywords you can include in your blog post. With these tools, you can also find inspiration for future blog posts through other keywords related to your initial search.
Cut down walls of text
Nobody wants to read a wall of text, but sometimes they’re necessary in academic pieces like research papers.
They’re never necessary in blog posts.
A wall of text is generally defined as a paragraph that takes up several lines. They’re intimidating to readers and when they see them, a lot of people scroll past or even stop reading the blog post completely.
When you find a wall of text in your writing, break it down into two or more paragraphs. By doing this, you’re improving your blog post’s readability score, which doesn’t just make it more appealing to readers; it increases your SEO ranking.
Basically, a good blog post is scannable. As you read your first draft, take note of any spots where you feel slowed down or otherwise like you can’t easily scan the information. Those are the spots to break into smaller sections.
Whatever you write, do it with confidence
Correct grammar and a consistent tone are the keys to not only maintaining reader attention, but also to effectively communicating the points you make in your blog post. After you’ve edited and proofread your post, have Grammarly give it one last look to catch any mistakes or inconsistency in tone so that your blog post reads exactly how you want it to sound.