Reading Makes You a Better Blogger

You’ve probably heard this advice at some point:  “If you want to become a good writer, read everything you can get your hands on” or some variation thereof.  It’s true however - it’s one of the reasons that  people read the work of great writers - in order to learn from them.  This principle also applies to blogging - reading the other popular and/or well written blogs will make you a better blogger.  However, there are few things that are important to remember.

Writing for the web is a little different than writing for print.

For instance, the vast majority of people will not read long paragraphs or large chunks of unbroken content on the screen.  It’s hard on the eyes (wallpapering your site with tons of flash animation and widgets has a similar effect) and it’s boring.  Appeal to the short attention span of the average digital media reader and make your content bite size.  Think sound bite, not manifesto.

How can you do this?  Personally, I like lists, and so do some of the most successful bloggers out there.  Whether you use actual numbers or bullet points, lists are a nice, clear way to organize your content, and most subjects can be divided this way.  Lists are especially useful when you’re enumerating the reasons to do something, i.e. buy a particular product or perform a certain activity.

Another good way to organize your longer posts is to highlight a few main points in bold, perhaps as subject headings.  Really, anything that breaks up a solid mass of text is probably a good idea, whether its relevant images or bold text.

Think of Your Blog as a Book, Not a Journal.

However, some topics just warrant really long posts.  Whether it is something that needs to be described in detail or requires in-depth discussion, consider turning it into a series of posts.  Not only will you then have several posts taken care of, you’ll give you’re readers an incentive to suscribe to your feed or bookmark your blog so they can finish the story.  It might be helpful to think of your blog as a constantly updated serial book instead of a weblog/diary.   

In the next few days, I’ll go more in depth on the “blog as book” topic, as well as listing some of the things not to do on your blog.