Blogging
Blog posts give readers a reason to keep checking back for fresh and dynamic content on your site. This is where you can highlight recent work, feature staff voices, and build your organizational personality.
Know your audience
Speak their language. If you’re writing to gurus, use guru terminology. If you’re writing to non-experts, avoid insider jargon and provide appropriate background on new or complex topics.
Check your tone. Effective blog posts often use a familiar or conversational tone, while a printable issue backgrounder might be more formal. If you’ve garnered a close, committed group of blog readers, you might be more casual than when writing for new visitors.
Sweat the small stuff
Invest in the headline. Headlines often appear without much context—in search engine results, RSS feeds, social media, links from other blogs, or even on your own homepage or email. It’s important they make sense on their own and make readers want to click to learn more. Here are a few tips:
- Keep it short and informative. Limit headlines to one line of text. An effective headline is clear and tells the reader what’s to come.
- Tell the reader what’s in it for them. Beyond being descriptive, a compelling headline promises some kind of bene?t or reward for the reader. Will they learn a new skill? Find out something newsy? Be entertained?
- Make it stand out. Being clever, provocative, surprising, or timely can make your headline stand out. Puns, pop culture references, and alliteration are often winners. But don’t trade clarity for cuteness.
Sightline’s 5 Most Popular Headlines (And Why They Work)
1. Lessons I’ve Learned from my Rain Barrel (personal and informative)
2. Two Wheels and High Heels (clever and rhymes)
3. Dogs vs. Cars (provocative and personal)
4. Alley, Alley In Come Free (“punny” and focused)
5. The Great Diaper Debate (informative and playful)
Make your ?rst words count. A common blogging mistake is leaving the best insights for last. But most readers won’t make it to your conclusion, so don’t bury it. Get to your brilliant insight quickly, and then explain how you got there. (Note to editors: Sometimes the ?x is as simple as moving the last paragraph to the top.)
Looks matter
Make your post scannable. Readers want to quickly ?nd the information they came for and move on.A scannable page helps readers navigate the content. Here are some techniques for highlighting key content and guiding readers deeper into your work:
- Bold key phrases. Emphasize the short phrases that you really want to hit home. Too much bold, however, and the effect is lost. Use it sparingly and don’t bold full sentences.
- Use subheadings. Creating a clear roadmap for your writing helps fast-moving readers navigate. Subheadings, bullets, and numbers act as guideposts and help readers anticipate where you’re going.
- Be brief. Blog posts are ideally 300-1000 words, and shorter is generally better. Limit yourself to one thought per paragraph. When you’ve said what you need to, stop.
- White space is your friend. Room on the page makes text look less daunting. It’s OK for a paragraph to be nothing more than one short sentence.
More blogging resources
Copywriting 101
Writing style for print vs. web
How to write headlines that work
Next: A quick guide to Search Engine Optimization
