Did you ever consider starting your own blog? Or maybe you thought about joining an already existing one alongside a writing team? You can become an actual writer on a smaller scale when you produce blog articles, but you’ve got to know how to write a successful article instead of a lame one, and we’ll teach you how.
Writing is pouring your thoughts, your ideas and your soul into a blank page. Writing is fun, it stimulates your creativity, it gives you a chance to express yourself, it is therapeutic for many people.
Nowadays, it seems like everyone is entitled to have their voice be heard through brief – sometimes irrelevant – tweets. Over the last ten years, the art of “blogging” got lost under the pile of overrated, mass-loved social networking platforms, which replaced the blog in the post sharing department.
Managing a blog involves a lot more work than managing a social media profile: good writing skills and good articles are key here. As a blog article writer, you have to keep your audience invested, grab the user’s attention, know how to write interesting or useful stuff, and these are qualities that not many people possess. So these people resort to flocking to Twitter or Facebook, just to name a few, to put their thoughts into a short, low-effort post that provides their audience with immediate satisfaction and doesn’t take a careful read to understand.
Therefore, producing good articles for a blog will make you feel more accomplished and, not to sound too overdramatic, but it will be of better use for the whole of humanity.
What to do if you want to create a blog
If you desire to start your own blog, we advice you look into the most popular websites for blog-building: WordPress and Blogger.
WordPress is a free, open-source content management system that was originally created with the purpose of blog-hosting, although in recent years it became much more, since it was upgraded to support other types of web content, including more traditional mailing lists and forums, media galleries, membership sites, learning management systems and online stores: by using WordPress you can build pretty much every kind of website.
Blogger, on the other hand, is a service specialized exclusively in blog-hosting, and it is free as well. It has many template customization settings and it is very easy to use, but it is not as versatile as WP in the case that you wanted to turn your blog into a professional, full-fledged website. We could say that it is more indicated for playful, careless writing than anything else.
Now, moving on to the gist of this article, let’s take a look at what writing a good blog article is about.
Tips for writing good blog articles
One of the most important things to consider before writing an article is if you are actually capable of writing in the first place, since this is something that doesn’t quite come naturally, contrary to what you may think: you have to know how to structure sentences in the most effective way, what kind of punctuation to use and where, how to divide the discourse into sections in a way that makes sense, etc…
Choose a strong, captivating title
The article’s title must be compelling, eye-catching and flashy, it must make people excited, if you will, about what’s to come. An interesting title makes the difference between your article being straight up ignored and it being clicked on because someone’s attention has been successfully grabbed. When people run into an article, their eyes linger on the title (or, more specifically, on the first words of the title) and they decide if they’re going to read the article or not in a matter of a split second, so be smart and choose your headlines wisely.
Establish the main topic
Establish the central theme of the article in the introduction and develop other minor, accessory themes around it. Avoid going off the rails by talking about irrelevant stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with the main topic. Maintain the primary focus on the head argument.
Do your research
The information in the article must be accurate and true. Trust in sources with a certain authority, and also check many different sources to make sure that you correctly understood what you are going to write about.
Don’t be messy
Organize ideas in an orderly manner, avoid messy, cluttered writing. Don’t go back and forth between themes, meaning that you’ll need to be done with talking about one thing before jumping to the next. Be linear, concise and coherent, don’t transform the text into a confusing stream of consciousness.
Good word selection
Using key words is a key factor to boost your article for search engines, along with choosing the right tags. The fact that your article looks more palatable for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) depends mainly on this step, so pick the most researched words by other users pertaining to the theme of the article and put them into your own article. This will most likely increase the traffic to your blog.
Improve readability
Make your article “skimmable“, meaning that, for example, you’ve got to make the most important, meaningful words bold. Lay out the content of the article by dividing it into sections and short paragraphs, because people get discouraged when they are faced with homogeneous, never-ending blocks of text. Choose sub-titles for each section, make short sentences. Use bullet points if appropriate.
Help users with step-by-step instructions
If you’re writing a guide-type article, we recommend explaining each step of the process through the use of bullet points and images/screenshots. This will certainly make things easier for the users.
Linguistic register and approach
When writing, don’t use overly difficult, pretentious language, it’s not an academic essay: a blog is more of an informal, relaxed environment (unless you are writing for a highly regarded blog with a certain authority or for some business blog). Don’t be inauthentic, uninspired or boring, try to sound natural and even crack a joke or two when it is appropriate. Thus, a friendly approach is preferred, even in a more professional environment, to make the user/customer feel at ease. But don’t be too much of a try-hard about this, or you’ll just result being cringy.
The images
Lastly, selecting the right images for your article is also a nice idea. An article becomes much more enjoyable, lively and easy on the eyes if there’s a good amount of images in it. The images have to be of enough good quality and pertinent to the article’s section, so their placement must be tactical and not random.