Tag Archives: Blogging

Organizing a Blog Post

So many people have a hard time hashing out blog posts in a consistent and efficient manner, and so I wanted to take a minute to talk a bit more about my own system which I have found can decrease the time between starting a post and publishing it.

The Idea

The first part of posting is to come up with ideas. I sometimes find it necessary to just start writing down words related to my industry and working outwards from there. After coming up with a few different ideas, I bring certain main points together as a single post and I have a fully conceptualized idea.

It can also help to see what other people are writing about. Do you have an opinion? Look back and see what was interesting to people a year ago, two years ago. Have things changed or are they still the same? Some of my favourite posts by authors are the ones where they compare/contrast two different products or two different time periods.

The Questions

Everyone knows about who, what, where, when, why and how, and these questions are infinitely more important when getting ready to post on a blog. They are especially useful when you don’t know everything, and can come up with things you’ll want to research to include in the post.

For example, if you are doing an article about a car company you could easily add information about who designed their main cars? When did they perform the best? How well has the public received their cars? Why are they producing cars with bigger engines than another company? What do you see them dealing with over the next few years?

The Research

Don’t take too much time researching, or you can get bogged down in what others have said. For longer articles, you shouldn’t be spending more than an hour researching for a post. This can be one of the longest time sinks in creating an article. Don’t spend time writing the post as you research, or you can get sidetracked, and unable to create proper flow in your article.

For any niche you should be able to, over a period of time, pick out a few resources that are consistently useful for research, and that will save you massive amounts of time. Try not to stray from these main resources too often, unless you aren’t finding the answers you need. Too much variety, and you can land into information overload world, where nothing productive ever happens.

The Post

The amount of time you need to write an article always depends on its length, but now that you’ve come up with an idea, answered some questions, and completed your research, the words should flow from you. Don’t worry about what you are writing, as you can come back after you are done and edit. The hardest thing I ever learned was not to self edit as I was writing.

As paragraphs are written, your mind will come up with other things to say, and usually, if you are properly prepared, the article will flow together nicely.

You should easily be able to tell how long your article is going to be by this point, and don’t try to push it too far beyond that point, or you’ll find yourself adding useless filler. Brevity can be just as important as details, but with the attention span of most people dwindling, shorter is most likely better.

The Call to Action

After you have written, and edited the post, I always suggest going back and adding in a call to action. It might be a question at the end of the post, links to further reading, or just a simple request to have people comment. You are much more likely to have people act upon what they read, if you ask them to.

I enjoy asking people to comment. I want them to know that I’d love to see them participate if they have any thoughts on what I’ve written. Some bloggers put in affiliate links, strange questions, or a list of other articles they have written along the same lines. These can all be important to increasing the longevity of an article online.

The Pretty Additions

Now you are ready to add in links, images, proper text formatting of headings and whatnot. This doesn’t have to be perfect, but it will add some pizazz to your article. Don’t give it too much time. You can edit articles after they have been published, but no one can see the content until it is published. Far too many people play with formatting for so long that the information that they wanted to share becomes stale.

I take the time to set proper headings, bold certain lines of text, italicize what I think would work best, work on the coding for my lists, and insert block quotes at this point.

The Publishing and Promotion

Once everything else is complete, publish. Your articles don’t do you any good unpublished. Get them out into the world. Feel free to edit them after the fact, or to write whole new articles giving more details, or adding onto your original points.

Don’t forget to let the world know about what you’ve written. Don’t be shy. People are hungry for new content, new ideas, and new perspectives, so find a way to get your work to them. The best thing a writer can receive is constructive criticism on how to improve, so open yourself up to that.

Conclusion

If you are trying to merge all of these steps into one, you might find your articles taking forever to craft and it is fairly easy to see why. There are so many areas between crafting the idea and publishing that breaking it down is really the only way to remain consistent and efficient.

Post inspired by Tom Leroux, check out his blog Leroux.ca.

Originally posted on May 11, 2011 @ 7:30 pm

Markers and Useful Tools

No, we will not be talking about the physical marker here that has been used to highlight a page or docment one is reading or has read. We are talking about markers punctuations, words, phrases and other useful things to make your post/article reader friendly. Please note this is not part of a style manual just some random notes and points picked up through the years.

Words/Phrases

The Bible begins with In the Beginning. Some Fairy Tale begin with Once Upon a Time and ends with And They Lived Happily Ever After. There are words and phrases in any language that can be used to: (i) Point out things; (ii) To compare; (iii) Begin and end; (iv) and a a number of other things

Punctuation

A period or a full stop tells the reader when a sentence stop. A punctuation can also tell the reader when a set of words pauses and then continues. It can also tell the reader when things get exciting or quiet.

Bullets/lists

When you enumerate or list things.Bullets if all items on the list are of equal importance. And numbered if there is a sort of ranking. Then again its a matter of style and what is important is that a list focuses the readers attention to a set of fact, information or knowledge.

It can also be used to signal that should be taken when one wants to achieve something. In this instance a numbered list is more effective because it means that it is a step-by-step process.

Quotes

Sometimes things are best said from the source. A quote is a powerful tool. It adds credibility to the story. A quote can build up your story: A quote from President Barak Obama carries more weight than a Chef at a five star restaurant, unless of course the topic is about restaurants.

Bold/Italics/Underline

The format of the word or phrases in an essay, article and even post can if one wants to bring out the word or phrase within the essay. Standing out has its advantages. A term that needs to be defined can be formated to stand out. It could be the name of an author, title of the book, name of a place, and many other things you would want to get notice.

Figures/Images/Vidoes/Audio

Content is king but presentation is Queen. An article or post has to have some value added feature that will help further explain or make interestomg. And sound, image and moving images can do that.

Originally posted on January 24, 2011 @ 10:31 am

I Really Like RSS

One of the best advise I got from a friend when I was starting mind your RSS feeds. The what ? Really Simple Syndication. It is one of the more overlooked and least appreciated part of a blog or a website. When you mention RSS – you often get the perplexed look on the face of the person you are talking to. But you can find it nearly everywhere on the Internet.

Why is it important?

Because it is a way for you to deliver your content or writing to your reader.The reader just has activate it and voila! the post gets delivered to the reader. Through an RSS reader, which maybe on-line or not.

The publisher, whether blogger or webmaster, may also enable a feature in the RSS feed via Feedburner or any similar service that will deliver content to the reader via the email.

Feedburner is one of the services that allows you to enhance the value of your RSS Feed through services like receive posts via email, chiclets to promote your feed; a way to get statistics from your blog or website; and a number of other things. The service is now owned by Google.

I realy like RSS. It is quite a useful thing, although a bit too hard to explain at times. Although, I think Commoncraft does a good job at explaining what it is:

Originally posted on March 14, 2011 @ 3:18 am

Five Blogging Lessons from Julie Powell

I just finished watching the movie Julie and Julia as recommended by Juned in a previous post here in XFEP. Indeed it was a very inspiring movie – for writers and bloggers. Julie Powell may not be the best blogger in the world, but she definitely excels in one important thing that all of us bloggers should learn to do (if you’re not yet doing it) – talk to our audience when we write blog posts.

Taking the other important things that we can all learn from Julie Powell, here are five blogging lessons that we can learn from Julie Powell from the movie Julie and Julia.

Be Passionate About What You Are Writing

Julie adores and loves Julia Child. She was her hero, icon, semi-god. And like Julia, Julie loves cooking. At some point in the movie, when Julie was talking about blogging she asked her husband what she should write about. Somewhere in their discussion – the niche came out – Julie will cook all the recipes in Julia Powell’s cookbook and blog about it. So she did. Continue reading

Originally posted on November 9, 2010 @ 7:00 am

Question: Reviving a Dead Blog

So, I am not sure how to go about this, but I need to know what everyone thinks. I have a few blogs that I have let fade away, but I really want to revive them, and over the next two weeks especially, I feel like I have the time, energy and hopefully continual focus to make them part of my daily routine.

Do I just start writing on them again and act like they never faded? Do I give up on them, and start again fresh without any of the baggage and the apparent break in posting? What do you think? What is the best way to revive a dead blog?

Let me know in the comments below.

Originally posted on May 18, 2011 @ 6:16 pm