Not everyone naturally has a flair for blogging, and those that do can and do have very successful blogs, the ability to create a great post is essential to creating a popular blog, this is especially true when first starting as a lot of the traffic you will receive for your blog to begin will be from Social Networking and your success really relies on how well you can sell and promote your blog to fellow bloggers. If you have great topics and good information but your posts don’t flow and are filled with technical, spelling and grammatical mistakes, you won’t be very successful at gaining the respect of fellow bloggers, and your blog won’t do a well as it could.

The good news is if you are just starting out over time your writing stills will improve, and most importantly you will learn how to write better along with finding out what works and does not work. But if you don’t want to wait for these stills to develop, I have outlined the golden rules of effective blog writing so you can learn some of these stills now, giving you the chance to pickup the remaining skills (the skill that come with only with experience) a lot earlier.

The Golden rules of effective blog writing:

• Know your audience - Know their interest, demographic, country of origin, what sites they visit. One way I have employed this in my blog writing is with spelling, even though I am from Australia  (Yes another Ozzie) I know my readers are primarily from the US (29% in fact), and I always the US spelling of words. Writing for your audience is very important, if your readers are between 18 and 40 you don’t want to write as if you were writing to your father or grandfather.

• Plan Posts - This might sound silly and something a teacher might ask a fifth grader to do, but it does work, and helps by making you stay focused during the writing phase. Planning a post might be as simple as taking down bullet points about the main topics of the post, in the order of which you want to write about them in the post, after you have this list read over it and change the order of these points ensuring each point flows from one point to the next.

• Make your writing flow well - You can achieve this by reading over your writing three to five times before you post, this will allow you to craft and improve the writing, it might be tedious and boring, but I can vouch that it will improve your end post at least three fold. Also could also give it to a partner, child or friend to read over, they might have some great ideas and pickup on things that are not explained correctly.

• Spell and Grammatical Checks - this kind of fits in with the point above, but this is a separate point and deserves a lot of attention. I cannot count the number of times I have seen simple misspellings and grammatical mistakes in posts (either mine or someone else’s) most of the time is a typo or using a similar word that has a different meaning like where and were, or there and their and its something your spell checker wont pickup. Reading thru a post several times or letting someone else read before you publish will pick these mistakes out.

• Write your post in MS Word (or other Word Processor) - I always write my posts in Microsoft Word first, this allows for better spelling and gramma checks it also allows you to save your work locally before posting. When I started blogging years ago, I used to write directly into the post window of the blogging engine, after the second time I lost my entire post I decided to write in MS Word first and then copy/past directly into the post window of the blogging engine.

• Use of Images in posts – It is true a Pictures/Image is worth a thousand words Images and images in posts can make a great piece of writing even better, if you include a picture somewhere close to the top of your post it will attract more readers to your post and give these readers a good indication of what the writing is about at a quick glance. Just remember not to make images too big as this will draw away from your writing and will make your take page longer to download.

• Length of Post - Keep your post below 1 ½ pages. The length of a post is another important rule that should be followed; blogging is all about writing focused short to medium posts, not multi page short novels or multi page reports. A lot of time when I start reading a post that I might only be slightly interested in and it spans multiple pages I just turn off and leave the site all together. If your topic is very large you will be better off both from a reader and SEO perspective of breaking the topic down and posting it as a Part 1, Part 2.

• Word highlighting – Using word highlighting such as bolding, and using colours is important, as this will make your post more interesting not just a page of black words It also allows you to draw the readers eye towards the Important parts and phrases of the post.

• Encourage Users to Post Comments - This give readers a sense of community, and can help to enhance the quality of your post with readers giving additional information that could be of interest it also gives fellow bloggers a link back, which is a Win/Win for both.

 So what are your golden rules of blog writing? Do you have a great rule that you always follow and improves the quality of your posts? If so share them via the comments section below.