Sunday, January 30, 2005
How to Write Killer Blog Posts
B.L. Ochman has some compelling tips for writing a killer blog post. Many of them are actually excellent general rules for writing on the web.
Her basic guidelines: keep your copy lively, factual, tight, clear and short and search engine optimized.
Here’s what she recommends you use
- Short, declarative sentences
- Fewer words
- Posts about 250 words
- Complete thoughts in headlines
- Short sentences and paragraphs
- Simple words and sentences
- Simple sentence construction
- Lots of white space
- Lots of links
- Bulleted points
- Subheads
- Bold text and italics for emphasis
- Scannability
- Keep it light (don’t get too serious, or dictatorial)
- Consistent voice
- Stay humourous, opinionated
- Write like it counts
- Keep it conversational
- Forget the rules... except those that provide clarity
Her guidelines for writing killer blog comments are just as good 
- The key is to provide useful, factual information so that, over time, it becomes clear to other readers of the blogs to which you post that you know what you are talking about. In general, it is a good idea to keep your posts short and on point.
- Since blogs are archived online, anything you write in a comment will be there until forever. So think before you write and edit, edit, edit before you hit "submit."
