So, You’re Starting a Blog…

At some point within a modern writer's career, they will be forced to face that common internet-based question: To blog or not to blog? I have written about this multiple times now, and I will say it again, hopefully for the last time (though I know it won't be).

A writer should blog ONLY if they want to.

Seriously! If you don't want to blog, then DON'T. It doesn't matter what others say. A blogger who doesn't want to be doing it is so obvious and it could be harmful to your reputation as a writer.

If I was to ask you why you're blogging, there is only one answer I should get: "Because I want to." If you say anything else, then you need to go back and read my post about blogging misconceptions. If after reading that post you want to blog, then by all means, carry on. Otherwise, I'll see you in my next post.

Now that we have your reasons to be blogging out of the way, let's carry on.

I, like many other writers, spend a significant amount of time reading blogs, gleaning whatever information I can about the various aspects of the publishing industry. And there are a lot of things that I see with those blogs that are frustrating and quite frankly a bit of a turnoff.

And it's not just me. I have spoken to other writers, and we're all commenting on the same things. Yet, we see them over and over again, because some content marketer thought they would be a good idea.

It's time to tidy up the blogging world and highlight some of those ever-important Hidden Traps.

In this post, we're going to explore the content of blog posts—possible topics, the language and voice, and the paragraphing, as well as images, headings and those little things that are 100% in your control as the blogger.

So, let's get to it.

Who is the audience?

The biggest component of any blog is the content. Without words on the page or images plastered across the post, the blog post itself would be nothing but a blank page. But what does one fill a blog post with?

With everything that you do, think about who your target audience is. What type of reader are you trying to attract?

Understanding this particular question will help you to identify not only what content you should be sharing, but it will also add constraints on things like the length of your posts and the cross-connections that can be found in your posts. There might even be constraints imposed on the formatting. (We'll come back to formatting shortly.)

On both my personal blog and this one, my primary audiences are adults who are readers of longer works (or writers themselves, as is the case for this blog). This means that I can use longer posts and less images. It also means that I need to construct my thoughts in paragraph form with varied sentence constructions.

However, the writer of a middle grade to younger YA stories who decides to blog will want to keep their blog posts short (say less than 800 words) and possibly be graphics intensive. Whereas a nonfiction writer of medieval cultures will want to shift into those longer essay forms with photos of historically relevant relics.

Understanding your audience will also help to define your blogging voice.

Someone who writes for the millennial generation might have pieces that are more heavily slanted to social topics currently hot on the social media feeds with a strong perspectives and opinions on these topics. However, the nonfiction writer from above (the one who writes about medieval cultures) will want a more formalized, academic voice—hopefully one that doesn't put everyone to sleep. The children's writer might use more simple language, whereas I tend to be filled with elements of sass and stating things as they are, no sugar coating.

Each writer is different. Each has their different appeal.

A blogger's voice is important.

If you are going to start down this blogging journey, your blogger voice will form a huge part of it. In some respects, your blogger voice will likely be something that is closer to the way you are in real life—at least, that is the case for me—but it's actually the author you that you want the public to see.

Voice, when spoken about in the industry, is a confusing thing, and really is something that develops over time. However, all writers will eventually develop multiple voices that they are able to pull on at the drop of a hat.

Crafting fiction, particularly if you use deep POV like I do, will require you to delve into your characters and to write the way they would talk. While our characters are facets of ourselves, they are NOT us. (At least, I would hope that they are not us, because I would be in serious trouble if I was a homicidal maniac.) Even if you employ perspectives like omniscient views, the voice used will not be way you speak to others in real life.

Blogging tends to be conversational. It's like having a one-sided dinner conversation, where the person you're talking to doesn't get the chance to respond until after the conversation is over. And depending on your audience, your topics will be close to your heart, sharing your opinions on the subject.

Do you see how this can be an interesting, but confusing, conversation?

Blog posts are short, but can be long. (Confusing?)

The length of a blog post will depend on the nature of the post itself. I have seen some that are as short as 500 words or less. Others that have caught my attention could easily clock in at 3000 words. The bulk of my blog posts come in somewhere between 1000 to 2000 words.

Just like everything else that we write, there is no right or wrong when it comes to length, but there will be a point where a post is too short or too long. It feels like it's incomplete or that it's dragging.

My advice on this one is to keep in mind that your average internet-based reader has a short attention span. Don't waffle on about the one topic for page after page. Edit your blog posts with the same care that you would edit your other writing.

A quick word about editing blog posts.

You're a writer and writers command the language they use to convey their ideas to others. Part of that does include punctuation and grammar.

If you are blogging, do endeavor to use correct punctuation and grammar, but don't stress yourself about it. The nice thing about blogging is that you can still editing things even after they're published.

If you spot an error (or someone brings an error to your attention), go ahead and fix it. Typos happen and with the production schedule of blogging, even more errors will occur in your blogs than anything else you write. Accept it and move on.

Content consists of more than just words.

Blog posts are not just words on the page, but are a function of their formatting. Some care should be given to the reader experience—particularly with the internet-savvy reader.

White space is important.

The biggest gripe that readers I spoke with have about blogs would be the sea of text on the page, formed by the lack of white space.

It doesn't mean that you should add lots of gaps between your paragraphs or turn the background of your website to white. In truth, I hate websites that employ a pure white background, as it is harsh on the eyes, and many blogging engines will ignore added lines between paragraphs. No, what you need to do is use shorter paragraphs, employ headings, and throw in the odd graphic.

Break up the text.

Take a look at the evolution of the posts on this blog. If you look back at some of my early posts, such as Finding value in a critique…, it can be overwhelming. While the information presented in that post is still valid, key pieces of information can be missed among the sea of text. There is a single image on the page, but it's not enough to add sufficient white space.

However, if you look at more recent posts (including this one), you will see that I now employ headers and significantly more graphics. This is all about breaking up the information into smaller chucks, adding more white space.

Perhaps one day I'll back to those older posts and rework them to incorporate the white-space-building elements, but it's not on the priority list of things to do.

Graphics and videos impact significantly on load time.

While graphics (and videos) can be employed to help break up the text, they also add to the load time of a web page. Image-intensive pages can be slow to load, so much so that some readers just give up on trying to load them altogether.

It frustrates me to no end when someone sends me a link for an article that I might want to read and the page lags as my web browser tries to compensate for the graphics that are still loading in the background—and I have a top-of-the-line machine with high speed internet.

Graphics aren't limited to just those which are incorporated in the post itself. They can be found in the sidebars, headers, footers and page backgrounds too. These all add to a page's load time.

Optimize your posts to load on the slowest of your devices on the slowest of networks that you have ready access to. (I'll revisit this concept in a future post, because a site's theme also plays a huge role on a page's load time.)

Graphics also impact on the speed in which a person reads your post.

While graphics can play a big role on a post's load time, it also influences the time it takes for someone to read through your post.

For the moment, I want you to think about a time when someone came back from holiday and insisted on sharing all their holiday pics with you. You start all eager and more than willing to be the captive audience, but after the third packet of photos comes out, your attention span drops away completely—that's assuming that you didn't find an excuse to run for the hills after getting through only half of the first packet. And for those looking at the digital library, how many times have you tried to grab the phone out of the person's hand so you can whiz through the remainder of the reel?

Images on web pages (and a blog post IS a web page) have the same effect. If you're anything like me, after about the fourth image, you just skimming through to find the text, hunting for that one bit of information that might actually be useful.

I see it all the time. Writers have heard that images help to keep the attention of the internet reader, but they go over the top and the blog posts seem to be nothing but animated GIFs and other random images with some words scattered here and there. (Many of the #PitchWars wish list posts from mentors seem to be like this every year. I would link to them, but the posts are not always static URLs that stand the test of time.)

What I'm trying to convey here is that one should never go over the top with images in their blog posts or on their websites in general. The odd image here and there is important to help break up the sea of text, but people just don't bother looking at all the pretty pictures.

A quick words about copyright on images.

There are many bloggers and other internet users who don't seem to think about images as being copyrighted, but they are. Photos, regardless of who took them, come with intellectual property rights. As such, you can't just do a random Google search for any old image to use on your website. To do so could land you in some very hot water with copyrighted images.

As such, you will want to use sites that contain commercially free images.

Commercially free images are images where the person who took/created the image gives you the right to use those images for commercial purposes without paying royalties. There are some images that come with licenses that allow you to use the photos on websites only (perfect for blogging) (I have a Star Wars Lego one with a web-only license), whereas others will possess licenses that allow you to use them in printed materials too (great for covers or any other printed material you might want). Some require attributions to be given, others do not.

Be sure that you understand what permissions the different licenses give you to do with the images.

If you encounter an image that has a CC0 license attached to it, it means that you can do whatever you want to that image—no attribution required.

There are many sites where you can get a FREE subscription to an image database filled with CC0 images. A few of my favorites include Pixabay, Unsplash, and Pexels. Download as many images as you want from these sites without paying a cent.

Headers are a thing.

This is something that I've worked out in more recent times.

To help break up the sea of text, inserting a little white space, make use of headers. Throughout this post, you will see a whole range of them. These headers have two roles.

1) For the reader who just skims through posts, glazing over the sea of text, the headers make important messages stand out.

Play around with the settings for H1, H2 and H3 headers. These will all look different based on the theme employed on a website, but you will find the one that works for you, attracting your eyes to the details that you would like readers to take away from your blog posts. (I tend to use H2 and H3 headers the most.)

2) Headers actually play a role in SEO searches, improving your site's searchability.

It's a little secret of SEO algorithms that not many writers/bloggers actually know about. If you put your keywords into your headers and the title of your blog posts, you will increase the chances of your posts being found in a random search.

That can't be a bad thing, right? We writers all want to be found. So, if something that we can control within compiling our blog posts can improve those chances, why wouldn't we use it?

Titles need to entice, but they also need to relate.

How many times have you ran a Google search (or related) for something, and clicked on a title for a page that might be of interest, only to discover that it was an ad for some diet pill? Or what about those pages that turn out to be paragraph upon paragraph about the writer's dog when it should have been a post about the way eBooks have impacted on the publishing market?

Those titles that have the entice factor but have little relevance to the post's content are known as click-bait. It's all about getting people to the page, because then they have your attention to sell you whatever they want.

Grr!

You want to include the keywords for your post into your title if possible, but you also want to ensure that the title of your post is relevant to what is actually in the post.

Edit your blog posts. Seriously! Edit them! If you notice that you're going off topic, remove those elements. If you're starting to waffle, edit it to a concise format. Ensure that you have relevant headings and titles.

No need to irritate prospective readers unnecessarily.

 

Everything listed above is all related to the content of a blog post. It's all things that are 100% in your control as the writer.

In a future post, we'll turn our attention of the elements of a blog that are heavily influenced by the theme used on a site. These elements might not be entirely in your control, depending on the blogging engine employed. But by understanding what impact the various components have, you might start to see what systems might work better for you.

Catch you next time.