3 Ways To Write A Great Blog

‘Blogging’ is a difficult topic to illustrate, so I have selected this grumpy dog. Deal with it.

Image © Maggie Smith

I recently wrote a post on how ‘write what you know’ is the worst writing advice ever. Well, I’m here today to confess that I was wrong.

No, the worst writing advice ever is, inexplicably, located over at Jody Hedlund’s blog - hidden within the subtext of her first point, here. Jody is normally a font of writerly wisdom*, so it’s particularly disappointing to find her willing aspiring writers to be boring.

The advice she gives is this:

Pick blog post titles carefully.

The subtext, as I see it, is this:

Make sure your blog post titles are as simple, transparent, generic and obvious as possible, because humans are witless, easily-confused chumps, who will refuse to investigate anything that fails to promise clear and immediate rewards.

Jody goes on to say that ‘this is not the day and age for cutesy, creative titles’. I have decided to regard this as a personal attack on my good self – the fact that Jody has never met me (and has no idea who I am) is frankly irrelevant, such is my rage.

Furthermore, here we have a professional writer advocating that other writers be less creative.

Of course, it isn’t fair to point the finger at Jody. It’s not her fault that we live in an age of search-engine optimisation and attention spans shorter than a mayfly’s todger.

That said, there’s something fundamentally distasteful about whoring ourselves out to potential readers by deliberately dumbing-down, particularly if you’re the kind of person who enjoys writing whimsical or cryptic titles.

I’ve even read advice insisting that every paragraph should start with a phrase chosen to bump the post to the top of search results! And let’s not be coy – a lot of this is done in an effort to boost advertising revenues or book sales, not simply because the blogger has something to say.

Why stop there? Why not optimise every sentence? In fact, why not start every word with a dollar sign, $just $to $be $safe?

I don’t know about you, but I can immediately tell the difference between an interesting/entertaining/thoughtful blog, and one that has been mechanically crafted to generate traffic. Sometimes the latter type can still be worth the read, but it’s sacrificed its soul nonetheless.

I suppose now would be a good time to fulfil the promise of my own generic, carefully-crafted blog title, so here we go:

3 Ways To Write A Great Blog

1. Follow good writing advice, not good blogging advice.

People who blog for its own sake are soulless traffic-whores, know as bloggers. People who blog to express themselves in an interesting/entertaining/thoughtful way are called writers. One is indifferent to the concept of creativity, the other thrives on it – which are you?

2. Write blog posts that you would want to read, not blog posts that you think the internetz will like.

If you write some generic crap that doesn’t particularly interest you, just to appeal to others, then not only will your writerly muscles become flaccid, but you’re probably duplicating the work of 100,000 other soulless morons.

Write about something that appeals to you, enjoy yourself, and hope against hope that your uniqueness will generate that following you’re hoping for (I’m still waiting for this to happen).

3. Go for a walk.

This is good advice for any writer. It clears the mind, and invites fresh ideas. Probably. Also, I couldn’t really think of a suitable third point, so I went with this.

There you go – 3 ways to write a great blog. Not ‘how to be a successful blogger’ or ‘how to generate blog traffic’ – how to write a great blog.

You’re a writer. Be creative. Don’t let anyone persuade you otherwise.

 

* I linked to some great posts of Jody Hedlund’s just a few days ago. They’re well worth a read.