I haven’t written anything about blogging recently, focusing mainly on web design and web site clients but I’m ready to come back to it this week as I had recently read an article that had frustrated me so much.
Perfectly Polished Only
The article I had read was basically saying the only way to write blog posts is to polish them to the point that everything was spot on. The language needed to be professional (and it seemed emotionless), the articles to be about work-related things only (seemingly making the business devoid of humanity) and that it needed to strictly be 1000 words (not caring how you ended up there).
And I call bull on this.
Blogs can be imperfect
In fact, I prefer reading imperfect blogs. Why? Because they have character, they have emotion and passion. They tell a story about the person who wrote it.
By imperfect, I don’t mean full of spelling and grammatical errors; nothing would turn me off quicker than coming across that (expect offensive topics) but having a couple of errors? Not an issue.
Give me a way to connect with you.
Give me humanity within your writing.
Show your passion for your topics.
I don’t want to read the blog equivalent of a monotonous speech. I want to read something that flows, yes, but also can come across as having cadence. And when it comes to a conclusion, it should feel natural and not forced.
While 1000 words is a good length to aim for, not every post needs to hit that marker. Especially not when you end up doing the blog equivalent of buffing up an assignment by going back and changing words like can’t into can not; changing and into in addition to; or spelling out acronyms.
I aim for 300 words as my minimum. Anything above that is brilliant as 300 words is the minimum requirement for Google to start to pay attention to page content. Depending on the topic, I increase that aim to 400-500 words, especially for my clients’ articles. But I always conclude when I feel like there is nothing relevant left to add.
What things have you been told you should do when writing blogs that you completely disagree with?
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