How to Blog for Your Readers

How many times have you written a blog post and then gone back and read it and wondered what in the world you just wrote.  Maybe its full of grammatical or spelling errors or you got off subject and went on a tangent about something barely related to the topic.  I’ll be the first to say that I do not have a degree in English, so I’m bound to have the occasional grammatical error.  I really do try my best to catch all spelling errors, since spelling is my strong suit.  I feel like if anything I can have properly spelled words, and that at least shows I took some time to proof read the post.

Its hard sometimes, because when blogging, you’re pouring out your thoughts and your brain is moving fasting than your finger can many times.  If you were to slow down, you risk loosing the thought right?  Yes and no.  If you don’t slow down you actually risk mistyping an entire thought, only to go back and read and not remember what you were actually trying to say.  If you do slow down, your able to re-read while in the midst of typing, insuring the correct thoughts are making it into your post editor.  There’s two sides to the token, but the important thing to remember is proofread, proofread, proofread!  In addition to proofreading, I’m sharing a few more tips on how to blogger better, like a reader and not a blogger.

Create a Post Outline.

This will help you layout your thoughts ahead of time and brainstorm new ideas.  Using an outline will also help your posts to be organized, because you’ll be able to see all of the major points of it laid out.  Sometimes its hard to keep up with our points when they’re floating around in our head.  Having an outline can prevent loosing or missing a thought and help generate new ones.

Use online resources to help with grammar.

There are many resources out there to help you edit your posts from a grammatical standpoint.  A few of them are:  Grammar Girl, Grammarly, Copyblogger, but if you Google “grammar for blogging” or “blogging grammar”, you’ll plenty in the search results.  For spelling, if you’re using Safari or Firefox browsers, they have built spell check, so you can catch a lot of spelling errors that way.  You can also install plugins that will spell check your posts, but I honestly don’t feel they’re necessary.  I’ll caution you that they don’t catch all of them, as no “Spell Check” function ever does, so you have to do the leg work and read back through your posts thoroughly.

Write drafts ahead of time.  

When you do this, you have plenty of time to go back and proofread posts. I try to write and schedule most of my posts head of time, for many reasons, but mainly so that I have plenty of time to go back and edit them.  Also, I proofread my posts in the “preview” function, so I can see exactly how they look when posted.  Its also easier on the eyes this way for me and more aesthetically pleasing, than just reading black and white words in the post editor.

Write from a readers point of view.  

Write as is you were reading your post when drafting your posts.  You’re writing for the reader, not for yourself so keep this in mind when writing.  If you write for yourself, it might as well be a diary.  If your goal is to write for other people to read it, make sure your posts are actually doing this.  Make them engaging, interactive, and stimulating at the v
ery least.  You want your posts to start a conversation and build community.

Subscribe to your RSS feed.  

I’ve always done this, because again, it puts you in the place of the reader.  Sometimes, even though I’ve proofread my posts once or twice, I still may not catch something until I read the post in my Feedly or Bloglovin feed.  Seeing your post on a slightly different platform, or even a few hours later can really help you to see things that may have missed during earlier editing or proofreading.

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These tips are by no means all inclusive, but a few things you can do to get you started on the track to better blogging.  Its simple things you can do to save you time and energy in the long-run, and insure that your blogging is as good as it can absolutely be.  Once you get in the habit of proofreading and editing your posts with these tips, you’ll wonder why you weren’t using them all along.

What are your tips for blogging better? – Do you have any specific tricks of the trade you use when drafting posts?