5 Ways to Write a Blog Post People Will Actually Read

Sup? It's Lara again.

Now, I understand that with a three-day-old blog, I don't appear to be the best person to give blogging advice. But, back in another lifetime, I spent two and half years of my life book blogging - and when it came to starting No, Mum, I was a little freaked. I knew that the biggest challenge for every blog was to keep the attention of those that clicked. To encourage comment engagement and avoid the dreaded skim-read. Frankly? I wasn't 100% sure my old techniques were still applicable.

Turns out at least five of them were.

#1 - KEEP IT BRIEF

GIF: American football player rotates his finger in a "go again" motion

It would be hypocritical for me to go on about this too much, but in short:

• Get to the point of the post. It's an unfortunate side effect of our modern short attention spans that lengthy introductions will likely be skimmed.
• It's okay if you have a wordy style with lots of long sentences (I mean, look at me), or want to write a super detailed post, you just need to make sure every single one of the sentences that ends up in the final draft a) needs to be there, and b) is communicating efficiently.
• This includes jokes. Jokes need to be told efficiently.

This might seem intimidating, but don't fret. Read your post through once quite quickly after you finish. Every time you feel your eye slowing down to understand something, change it.

Write long, edit short.

#2 - PRETTY AS A PICTURE

Hairspray GIF reads: "I'm a pretty girl, Mama!"

Why do you think books use double-spaced text and large margins? People find it difficult to read long, unbroken blocks of text, and they often won't push through that - not when other things are easier. There's another debate to be had about whether instant gratification is damaging to society, but as bloggers, we kind of have to pander to that with as many GIFs as humanly possible.

(It helps that they're kind of fun, I guess.)

When it comes to title graphics, which I absolutely, heartily recommend (and actually wrote a tutorial about on my old blog, if you need help) you need still images. If you're not a photographer, Creative Commons Zero (a form of licence that allows photos to be used online, by anyone, for free) is about to become your best friend.

While we're at this, by the way, it helps to make your blog easy on the eye, partly for the sake of people reading it without effort and partly for the sake of visually impaired folks. Use a light background with black or very dark grey text of a reasonable size, and save the decorative fonts for your header.

#3 - ASK YOURSELF - WHY ARE YOU WRITING THIS?

GIF: David Mitchell does finger-guns

The internet is a crowded place. This can be a great thing, since it means thousands and thousands of potential friends, but it also makes it difficult to get noticed sometimes. However hard you work to come up with original content, there will usually be other posts that are similar - other posts that your possible readers could choose. So you need to use the one thing that makes your blog unique ...

... you.

To borrow a phrase from journalism - what's your angle? What is it about your interests and life experience that makes your take on this topic different to what anyone else could come up with?

As Oscar Wilde once said: "Be yourself. Everyone else is taken."

#4 - READ OTHER PEOPLE'S BLOGS

GIF: Chandler from Friends turns the pages of a book aggressively

Completely apart from how relevant you become by knowing what's going on in your sphere of the blog community (be that books, fashion or activism), and the increased likelihood someone will find your blog link and click on it if you've commented on a post, I like to think of this sort of like karma. You're spending your life begging for other people - other bloggers, usually - to take time out of their valuable day to read something you wrote. Why would you deserve that if you aren't doing the same thing?

Also, I tend to find that when I read other people's blogs, I become inspired. Not to copy anything they've written (because that is a bad idea BAD IDEA ABORT ABORT ABORT) but to look at an issue from a different angle. To come up with a new way of writing introductions or tweets or ending paragraphs. Again, this style barely resembles what they've done once I've finished developing it (else I wouldn't use it) but it is something I wouldn't have come up with alone.

#5 - STAY TRUE TO WHAT YOU WANT TO CREATE

GIF reads: "Just be true to yourself and don't care what other people think, you're individual, you're unique, because, you're just you, and you're different."

The bottom line, as with so many of these blogging advice posts, is that I am only one person with one set of (limited) experiences. I know what works for me. But if anything I've said in this post isn't going to work for you, for whatever reason, cool. There's no point in changing anything you do well just for the sake of some weirdo's advice - even if that weirdo is me.


If you don't believe in what you are doing, it will be lackluster. And nobody wants to read lackluster. They want to read passion.

FANCY A FREEBIE?

Just in case you need help following my second piece of advice, I've linked above to a Google Doc which I have stuffed full of links to various websites which host images licensed under Creative Commons Zero. I hope it's helpful!

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In the comments: What's your favourite trick for encouraging people to read your blog posts? Have you found anything that doesn't work? Or do you think your techniques just are super-specific to what you do?