Effective blog posts

An opportunity to demonstrate expertise

Effective blog posts are very important in delivering up to date and regular information online. It keeps your site looking relevant, and an opportunity to demonstrate expertise.  It’s one thing actually thinking through the content, but another altogether when considering how to format.  Fortunately, help is at hand, in this very interesting article written by Sumo, a first-rate American online marketing agency with an amazing online presence:  How to format blog posts

Old vintage typewriter, close-up.

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Whenever I meet with business people, they tend to be passionate and full of enthusiasm. Happy to explain their product or service, talking openly about how they help others. Normally they are a font of knowledge with a huge amount of expertise and experience. And yet, even though they know they should, too few will write effective blog posts!

Write about what you know

My advice is just to start writing about what you know. Don’t aim for War and Peace, as you are setting yourself up to fail.  However we can all write 300 – 500 words a day on a subject that interests us.  It takes very little time.  Don’t worry too much about whether your draft is perfect, it doesn’t matter at this stage.  Just write by setting a daily word count target, at a set time and start!

Target word count

Very importantly, you must stop when you reach your target word count.  This is essential, as you will still be fresh and on top form.  If you keep going, when do you stop?  When your effectiveness starts to wane?  That doesn’t make any sense does it? Plus you will play games with yourself – write too much one day, and you will kidd yourself that you are ahead, so it doesn’t really matter if I write tomorrow. And come tomorrow, you will put off writing. The art of effective blog posts is to write daily.

It is also true that in many ways you don’t know what you know until you start to write. The sheer act of writing means other thoughts and ideas will pop into your head as if by magic – simply jot them down and keep focused.

The other great attractions of stopping when you should, is it means you can fit into your day plus when you start to write the following day, the words will flow easily. Your sub conscious will have been working away in the background.

So the most effective blog posts are any that you write and just get into the habit as soon as you can. After all, you no doubt have something to say, and your target audience wants to hear it!