You are blogging, hence you are writing.
There’s a few skills that you might or might have not develop with time by writing.
The reason why I wrote this book and made the checklist is because from my own experience, I tend to forget a few important guidelines as to how good content is wrote.
Hence I will find myself having periods in which the quality of my content falls off and I’ll have to find a way to get back on track.
By checking at the checklist, each time you do an article, you’ll guarantee yourself that the article is:
-Properly written
-Properly formatted
-Easy to read
-Web optimized.
I don’t like the word SEO, I don’t really think SEO is that important. Then again, optimizing a little for SEO is important.
Anyhow, this is the checklist:
Structure: Title, intro, headline, paragraph, other headings.
-USE HEADINGS (A LOT)
Based on your writing style you should have an heading every 3 rows, or after up to 20.
Having less than that amount of heading will heavily pre-select your readers and will demotivate a lot of potentially interested people in reading.
-WRITE FOR PEOPLE WITH NO TIME
You are not writing for yourself, in a sense you are BUT, if you want your content to not be elitist you need to dumb it down.
This doesn’t mean that you need to remove info, it means that you need to make sure everyone can understand it.
Most importantly, the article should “seduce” the reader to read it.
That’s why clickbait works, they are seducing, the content is typically dumb and easy to read.
You should do the same with your complex content.
Bare with me here:
Think about learning math, most of us are INTIMIDATED by watching formulas.
Because we immediately understand that we need to learn every single symbol.
That is indeed demotivating.
It would be the same thing as showing a 5 years old children a paint that required 10 years of work to be done.
Would you ask the kid to make the same painting??????
So how do you “dumb it down”?
You need to split your reasoning into it’s core elements, like lego blocks, and then slowly build on it.
Each brick needs to be explained before you start creating a wall.
The wall is the sum of the bricks + what is perceived to be.
So you explain the bricks and then explain the wall, and so on until your point has been made across.
An interesting example of this would be Malcolm Gladwell, he basically takes the bricks and explains them to you, then he digress into another smaller “course-of-reasoning” and then comes back to where he left.
So he create a picture within a picture and uses the smaller one to explain, in more detail, the bigger one.
This is crucial.
So how do you break concepts into pieces?
You need to step away from what you think, and empathize with someone who doesn’t know.
Nothing is to be taken for granted except the fact that the reader can indeed read.
In order to achieve such “de-attached” state you will have to step back from what you wrote and read it with different eyes.
The way I write is I spit, I will write and write and write, most of the content on this blog is published this way.
Yet that’s writing for myself, to refine my own thoughts, writing for others require constant editing and modification.
You are not your readers.
As I said, dumb down the content, transition from a complete argument into another.
Writing a “logical” book is the same way as writing a “logical” blog.
You wouldn’t make long, drawn out sentences, because you have a title and you need to fill that container with the proper content.
When writing for the web you want to be as focused as possible:
-Here’s the topic, here’s the element, here’s the plot, here’s my conclusions.
Drastical changes in what you are talking about are not for “teachers” but for story tellers.
Surely you can be a story teller about marketing, yet the principles are the same.
We can add detail, to enhance our points and or emotional values, but in the end you need to be extremely logical.