Why do most bloggers never gain any sort of momentum while others grow at an exponential rate? Much of the reason has to do with a few mistakes that even those who have been blogging for a while make.
As a matter of fact, you probably weren’t even aware of these mistakes
Keep these points in mind and you’re sure to see much better results.
Continue reading “Five Mistakes Even Veteran Bloggers Are Guilty Of”
Let’s be honest, shall we?
You don’t just want people to subscribe to your blog. You want them to keep coming back to read, share, and comment on your articles. You want to build an online community, you want your readers to forget themselves reading your content.
You want your blog to be so immersive that they come back the next day. And the day after that.
Simply put, you don’t want to be just another blogger.
But… how do you do it? Continue reading “How to Be More Than Just a Blogger”
I did a bit of counting today: this year I wrote 318 blog posts on this blog, 234 blog posts on my main blog, plus 373 posts on irevuo, for a total of 925 posts.
Granted, let’s say half of those are reposts, advertising, or not that long to be considered actual writing, like Quote of the Day on irevuo.
Still, I wrote over three hundred and fifty blog posts across eleven months. On average, that’s more than one blog posts per day. I also wrote and released a book on blogging, wrote a few chapters from some of my fiction projects, and a couple of short stories.
Oh, and the emails and comments. Never underestimate the amount of keys one has to punch in other to reply to thousands of e-mails and comments every week.
The stats say I’m prolific, but this doesn’t mean I spend most of my time writing posts.
Actually, I think you’d be surprised by how much time I actually spend writing. It’s just not as much as you’d think.
This is why I am writing this post. Because there are a few strategies that I employ to write as fast as possible.
Because the truth is that writing blog posts is something you can do with ease, as long as you approach the process in a certain way. Continue reading “Do You Want to Be a Prolific Blogger? Here’s How”
Let’s face it: most people can’t write their way out of a paper bag. Further, most bloggers are boring, most journalists are so heavily edited that any personality they’ve added to a story has long since been weaned out by the editorial process.
I want to let you in on a secret, though: it’s not really that people are boring, but that too many have been taught that you shouldn’t write the same way you talk. I blame our educational system, actually, with those 5th grade teachers who drilled us on adverbs, pronouns and the minutia of grammar, coupled with too many boring, tedious academic books that we all suffered through while in college.
Instead, I suggest to you that the best way to write clear, coherent, engaging and enjoyable content is to write the way you speak, to recognize your spoken voice and pour it out onto the virtual page of your computer screen and weblog. Continue reading “Write Like Yourself”
In a ideal world, you’d never have to edit your own work, but well, you know the drill… life’s not fair…
So, how do you go about editing your posts?
Here are five simple (and kind of easy) steps to editing your blog posts. Continue reading “Five Simple Steps to Editing Your Blog Posts”
Some bloggers suffer from what I like to call verbal narcissism. Only it’s in writing. Anyway…
To avoid this awful fate, you probably try to keep your posts short, sometimes writing series of blog posts. After all, you don’t want to scare away readers by dumping too much information on them all at once, right?
Makes sense, but what’s weird is it doesn’t work that way.
Many popular posts here are around 1,000 words. But other times, short posts pack the most punch. It’s almost as if the length of a post matters not when it comes to how successful a post becomes.
But how could that be?
There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of writing guides out there. But in my opinion, none surpass the simple, direct advice of The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B.White.
This classic serves up much good advice, especially in the last 20 pages in a section titled “An Approach to Style.” Nowhere have I seen more helpful advice in so few words and with such precision.
If (for shame) you don’t already have this reference in your library, I will leave it to you to explore it in depth. But I would like to provide you with eight important writing tips as they apply to blogging. Continue reading “The (Very Short) Ultimate Guide to Blogging”
Considering the fact that I am not a native English speaker, I thought I should write about one of those topics almost no one writes about: does it matter if English is not your first language, and you still decide to blog in this language?
How do poor language skills affect your ability to share remarkable content with your readers?
Grammatical errors, misspelled words, and poorly structured sentences can make your content difficult to read.
If you also think of the fact that we have thousands of blogs on every topic imaginable, you begin to understand that the quality of your blog posts can mean the difference between a popular blog and one that does not get even a single comment.
Don’t get me wrong; I am not telling you that you should display superb writing skills in order to be a successful blogger. No.
But you must work on three basic aspects that make a big, big difference in the way your readers, especially native speakers, react to your content. Continue reading “How to Blog in English Even If It’s Not Your First Language”
Ever since blogging became mainstream people have been debating about a blog post’s perfect length. A lot of bloggers may read one or two articles about this, and try to follow the rules – never revisiting the issue for as long as they blog. This can be a mistake.
For a definitive answer, the following are three things to consider when you’re trying to decide how long your blog posts should be. Continue reading “How Long Should Your Blog Posts Be?”
The blank page tends to scare people into a state of inactivity. The possibilities are endless, the desire to create perfection so intense that it is easier to do anything else.
Perfectionism and procrastination have an awful lot in common, and the truth is that most bloggers waste an insane amount of time thinking about writing. Weeks go by like this, and then they start wishing they have written when they had the chance, but now… they’ll just write a short post apologizing to their readers for not posting anything.
And then the cycle resumes.
The essential part of writing is to punch those damn keys. Don’t think, just write. You’ll be able to rewrite, one, twice, as many times as it’s necessary.
Today you focus on writing like a lunatic.
Today, you’re going to punch those damn keys…
And the best way to do that is to follow a few simple rules. Ten, in fact … Continue reading “10 Rules to Help You Punch Those Damn Keys”
