Recently I've been researching the art of blogging. Specifically, how to blog. This has led me through many different sites and opinions of other bloggers bringing me to this post. One quote stuck out for me, and that is -

"The Role of a blogger is someone who helps their reader to navigate an infinite, ever growing sea of information."

That's exactly what I think a bloggers role should be. That is exactly what I shall set out to do for my audience.

 

9 Steps To Brilliant Blogging

These are the steps you need to succeed in blogging.

 

1. Read other articles and books

Reading other articles and books will give you experience of writing styles and extra information that other people have discovered. Both of which will be useful to any blog.

 

2. Start and end with a bang

You want people to read your blog, so you want to get them interested as soon as possible. What could be sooner than the very start? Start with a bang. Then to keep the readers coming back, finish with another bang so the readers look forward to your next blog post.

 

3. The more conversational, the better

As you may already know, blogs are typically opinions by one person. Therefore they should be conversational.

 

4. Consistency, then variety

Consistency is keeping things the same, having the same flow, layout and writing style will help your returning readers get more out of your blog post. Variety is also important, once in awhile you should change your layout, flow and maybe even writing style to change things up a little and give freshness, then you should return to consistency.

 

5. Write comments for your posts

This you should see as a little bit of a cheat. Writing comments for your own blog posts is a sneaky way to show that your blog post is interesting and deserves comments. I'd only suggest doing this if your blog is new and your yet to make an impression with a group of readers.

Writing your own comments will then spark conversation in your comment sections.

 

6. Write down keywords and ideas

Search engine optimisation is important to any website, as well as a blog. Keywords are important to search engine optimisation, so you should include them in all your posts. Keywords are generally what you'd expect people to search for. This being a blog post about 'How To Blog' I'd expect people to search for keywords such as 'How to blog' to find information such as this.

Writing down ideas are also important since you always need to know what your writing about. Jotting down some ideas before you start writing the full post can be very helpful, so you cover everything you want to and don't forget anything important.

 

7. Bold first few words of a sentence to show importance

As you've probably seen from my writing style, I like to employ this technique. Did it help you read my posts and find information quickly? If so, you've already seen how useful this technique can be. Maybe you should use it.

 

8. The most important part of a blog post is the title

This step is important! The title is by far the most important part of a blog. This is because people read it first, as you'd expect. This means you need to give the readers enough incentive to read the full thing just from the title. I've written another post on it's own for the subject of title called "How to Write Perfect Titles" I'd suggest you pop over and read that post next after this.

 

9. Readers often scan the post diagonally in a zig-zag, so you have 5~10 seconds to hook them

This step is also very important and deserves it's own post. I'll outline it here and link you to the full post that I've recently added.

Users these days wantgreat information, quickly. So it makes sense that readers have developed a new way of reading quickly. This method if diagonally zig-zagging the information. Readers look for titles, sub-titles, pictures, bolded text, underlined text and anything coloured in the post, quickly. By doing this, the readers grasp the post quickly and decide if it's worth spending time on.

Read the full post on zig-zag readers titled "How to write for modern readers" for more information.

 

Conclusion

Blogging has these days become an invaluable tool for websites. Blogs offer another level of interactivity with the users that expands the options and abilities of information seekers. I'll use the quote from earlier again to highlight it's importance -

"The Role of a blogger is someone who helps their reader to navigate an infinite, ever growing sea of information."

If you're starting your blog, aim to become what the quote points out, follow the steps and you're well on your way to a successful blogging life.

 

Related Posts

5 Tips to Improve your Blogging How To Write Perfect Titles What is Enlightr.com? How to Write for Modern Readers How to Read People From Their Eyes

Craig is a 22-year-old student currently studying psychology at Bournemouth University. He runs a self improvement blog and community filled with useful advice. His main aim is to help people exceed their expectations and reach their true potential. If you enjoyed this post, get free updates via RSS or E-mail.