Blogging Tips

Spelling and grammar

Before submitting your article, proof read it once or twice to make sure there are no spelling or grammatical errors. Spell checkers can be useful but they don’t pick up on every mistake. For example, you could type ‘form’ instead of ‘from’ and a spell checker would see it as a valid word and ignore it.

Correct spelling won’t improve your article massively, but having simple mistakes in your articles can damage the reputation of you as an author and the website as a whole.

Images

You may have noticed that quite a few of our articles feature an image relating to the topic. Images can be useful for brightening up a boring page or breaking up a long article. They can also be used to summarize a point by adding a caption below them.

If you want to use an image for your article, please supply it together with the article and if it’s a reasonable size we’ll upload it to the blog for you. If you would like the image to have a caption below it, please provide that too.

Title

The title of your article is perhaps the most important part of it. Articles posted on our blog are picked up by a newsfeed at newsnow.co.uk. I’m sure most of you have used it in the past. It’s a valuable source of traffic for any blogger, so it’s important that you get the headline right to ensure the maximum number of clicks.

Make sure the title relates to the content of the article.

Keep it short. Longer headlines aren’t as popular as the short and snappy ones. If you must make it long, make sure the important keywords are at the beginning.

Structure

• Headings – For long articles it can be useful to make headings and sub-headings at intervals down the page. Readers may not want to read a very long article, so headings can help them find the information they’re looking for more easily.
• Links – Linking to previous articles on the blog can provide depth to the one you’re writing. It gives the reader the opportunity to look ‘back in time’ so to speak, to see what you might have said on the subject in the past. Clicking on links to older articles also keeps the readers on the website longer.
• Paragraphs – Try to keep them relatively short. Break your article up into bite size chunks and people will be more likely to read it and comment than if you’ve written one big wall of text.
• Formatting – Use CAPITALS, bold, underlining and italics to highlight key parts of your article. They can help prevent your reader becoming distracted and are helpful to emphasize important points. Don’t over do it though.