Blogging guide – how to write a great blog

Weblogs, or Blogs for short, have taken the online world by storm, and just about everyone seems to have their personal internet journal on which to communicate (“to blog”) their knowledge and opinions these days.

The nature and content of blogs varies greatly, from informal & personal to focused & professional.

Writing blogs for fun and money

For ‘personal bloggers’ it as an opportunity to document their lives and to keep a close group of contacts abreast of latest activities. Blog writing is also a popular way for people to showcase their travels and adventures, posting the latest information about their trip whilst they are still away so everyone’s kept informed.

For those with more serious objectives, blogging presents an opportunity for them to share their thoughts and expertise on a wide range of topics from fashion trends & dog breeding to financial investment & government policy review. Blogs can help to establish an expertise in a subject that supports career development and even generate a new income stream for the writer.

These days’ blogs come in every shape and size but the principals of what makes a great blog are common throughout. Effective writing is the key; the ability to entertain and engage your audience is what will keep people coming back to your blog week after week and will help you more than anything else to build a substantial following.

Blog writing is very like journalism: you’re writing for a specific audience and you must grab their attention and keep them interested in reading further rather than drift off to another site.

7 top tips for how to write a blog

This is an acquired skill that anyone can learn, but here are 6 simple tips to get you started –

• Online users have short attention spans – express your opinions succinctly and don’t waste words. Ideally keep each post to 250 words or less.
• Post regularly but only when you have something valuable to say – there’s nothing worse that updating a blog because you feel you have to, rather than because you have something interesting to say. Try and update your blog at least once a week but only if have something new to say.
• Snappy headlines grab attention – give each blog post a short and punchy headline; this allows users to get an immediate understanding of what the blog is a about and should draw them in to read more. This practice is common in newspapers to grab the reader’s attention and summarise the article content.
• Use short paragraphs & bullet points – make life easy for your readers by breaking up your article up into short paragraphs so users can scan quickly through the content. Use bullet points to summarise the key bits of information.
• Find a writing style & stick to it – even the most dry & functional topics can be brought to life through good writing style. Find a style that reflects your personality and be consistent in how you use it.
• Keywords & search – keywords are individual words & phrases which summarise your blog. Keywords for this article would be – blog writing, how to write a blog, create a blog online. Keywords are important because search engines use them to determine the topics being blogged about and can secure you a higher ranking with the search engines like google.
• Always check spelling & grammar – nothing will put off your readers as much a poor spelling and bad grammar. Always review and spell check your blog before you publish it.

Free tools to help you write a blog

Creating a blog is simple and there are a number of services that you can use to get started. At Videojug we have created a new service for bloggers called Videojug Pages. Videojug Pages is a new style of blogging site. It’s free, easy to use and requires no knowledge of HTML – you will be up and running in under 5 minutes. You can create great looking pages about the things you know best by using our simple text, photo and video editing tools.

The emphasis of Videojug Pages is on useful and informative blogs. It enables users to write about their interests and passions and be read by a knowledge-hungry audience. The website groups blogs with similar content together helping browsers to easily find related content – that means more visits to your pages.

The site doesn’t cost anything to use and you will actually make some money using Videojug Pages. We have a professional advertising team who sell adverts around your content and then we share the money we make 50:50 with you.

Click here to get started today and create your first article within minutes...

Videojug Pages is officially 6 months old and to celebrate our 6 month birthday we're running a big content competition throughout November.

It's been an amazing 6 months for VJP. Our writers community has really grown and we now have over 5,000 skilled & committed writers publishing hundreds of pages each day. The quality of these pages is getting better & better and has really impressed all of us here in the VJP editing den.

To say 'thanks' and to add some extra fun and competitiveness into the site, we've twisted the arm our finance 'man' and pulled together a huge prize fund of US$3,000 for the Page Maker Competition.

 Find out how you could win big in November - 10 cash prizes up for grabs