Blog Success

When writing articles for your niche blog its easy to lose focus. Especially for those who keep up daily posting schedules, keeping on track, on topic and keeping it interesting and relevant can become difficult.

One way to combat this problem is to ask yourself these five questions about every article you write. If you have good answers to these questions, then go ahead and write the article. If you don’t, you might want to think about writing something else.

Who? Who am I writing for? Is it for me or for my audience? Always make sure you consider the perspective of your audience as you write. If you’re writing for yourself, put it in a journal.

What? What is the topic? Am I staying on topic throughout the article? Blog posts that try to cover too many topics at once get confusing. Stick to one topic per article.

When? When is this information from? Is this article timely? Am I writing about some topic that’s no longer relevant? Especially when responding to or working off of information you’ve found online make sure you check the dates and make sure that you article is something people will find interesting today.

Why? Why am I writing this article? Does it offer something; a unique point of view, helpful advice, a useful review? Sometimes it is easy to create content just for contents sake, but if it isn’t offering anything to your readers, they won’t read it so you might as well not write it.

How? How is this article related to my niche? It doesn’t always have to be specifically about the core topic of your niche blog, but at least make sure its related enough so that the same audience will find it interesting.

Give the questions a try and see if they don’t help you to know when you are writing good niche blog content and when you are just writing.

There are lots of blogs out there and some of them, if not many of them, probably have content that is similar to yours. So how do you make yours stand out? How do you write great content that will separate itself from the pack? Its all about style, baby. Or more specifically, knowing your own style and taking ownership of it.

Not everyone is Dave Barry. Nor is everyone Abigail Von Buren, or Carl Sagan, or Noam Chomsky. And none of these people are anything like one another. Well, except, of course, for the fact that they are, or were, all hugely successful writers.

And, even though you are none of these people, and might not be overly funny, or able to solve a persons life altering social problems in a few short sentences, or able to break incredibly complex astrophysics concepts down into language everyone can understand, or able to get people to read you even though no one can actually understand what you are trying to express, you can be successful in writing great content for your blog. All you really need to be… is you.

When people ask me what single step they can take that would most improve their writing, I tell them to forget everything they’ve ever read. Of course I don’t mean this literally. Hopefully there will be something in the writing that you have learned through reading and want to pass along to others. What I mean by it is to forget all about your favorite writers and how much you like and want to emulate their styles, and to simply say what you want to say the way you would say it.

One of the biggest mistakes you can make in writing, whether you are a novelist or a blogger, is to try and be something, or someone, you are not. You may love to read Ann Coulter or Tony Bourdain, but that doesn’t mean you should try to write like them. They write the way they do because of who they are, the life experiences they have had and the way they feel comfortable expressing themselves, and that is how you should write as well.

There is no best or even correct writing style. A writers style is who they are, so be who you are. Take ownership of your you-ness and write your blog the way only you can. If nothing else it will guarantee that those who read your blog won’t confuse you with anyone else. And, in the blogosphere, that is a huge victory in itself.

We would love to hear your thoughts about this writing series, comment below!