Writing is the MAIN aspect of blogging. Without the blog posts, a blog isn’t a blog after all!
Writing is also what holds a lot of people back from pursuing this amazing business.
It’s completely understandable. We’ve all had our fair share of days staring at a blank document just waiting for the right words to pop up.
But here’s a funny question… Do you have to be a good writer to succeed as a blogger?
The answer is yes and no.
While your blog posts should be well-written, you don’t have to have perfect writing skills to be a good blogger. As a blogger, your main goal is to provide value to your readers and communicate with them effectively.
Don’t get discouraged if you don’t think you’re a good writer. Yes, proper writing skills will help you. But there’s more to blogging than the writing itself.
You can be a good writer while being a bad blogger
You read that right. As odd as this may sound, it’s entirely possible.
Blogging isn’t about being poetic or writing in a way that would get you an A in a college English course.
It’s about good communication between you and the reader.
You can get every single punctuation mark right. You can have the greatest writing skills in the world…
But if you can’t connect with the people who visit your blog, they’re not going to want to stick around and read the rest of your content.
Let me reiterate this point. Good blogging is about COMMUNICATION and CONNECTION with your readers. It’s NOT about years of writing experience!
How exactly can you communicate well and connect with your readers?
The key is in these 4 tips:
- Do your research and be helpful
- Have a strong and engaging writer’s voice
- Have good grammar and punctuation
- Format and structure your blog posts so they’re easy to read
So, do you want to be a successful blogger no matter how much writing experience you have? Here’s what you need to know about each of these tips:
Do your research and be helpful
This is by far the most important part of being a good blogger.
It doesn’t matter what niche you’re in. A blogger’s job is to create content that will help their readers, whether that be in the form of a tutorial, product review or answering a question.
Always do your research. In every blog post, make sure you hit all the points you need to give your readers content that is of value to them.
Take a good look at your blog post before you publish it. What’s the goal of the post? Is it to answer a question? If so, does it do that in a clear and easy-to-understand manner?
Providing value to the people who visit your blog is what blogging is all about. It’s what keeps people coming back to your blog for more, so don’t skip out on this important step!
Cultivate your writer’s voice for better blog posts
Your writer’s voice is the tone you use while writing. It’s the way you and your personality shine through your words.
You can display your writer’s voice in several different ways. These include the vocabulary you use, how long or short your sentences are, how you utilize stylized fonts (bold, italics, underlines), how you use punctuation and more.
To-the-point sentences with plain vocabulary one after another often sound robotic. Adding in a bit of colorful vocabulary (while still being easy to understand), punctuation, varying the lengths of your sentences, etc. will help your writing sound more human and friendly.
This article by WritingCooperative is my favorite for learning about the writer’s voice. Feel free to read it if you’d like a deeper understanding of what the writer’s voice is and how to find yours.
Work on your grammar and punctuation
A decent understanding of grammar and punctuation can go a long way.
Using proper grammar and punctuation will, without a doubt, help your blog posts look more professional and trustworthy.
That being said, it doesn’t always have to be perfect. In fact, blog posts can sometimes benefit from improper writing. In some cases, improper writing can help make your words sound more “alive” in the reader’s head. But this is best done on purpose, not by accident.
A random comma where it shouldn’t go or forgotten periods and apostrophes will not do you any favors.
As bloggers, creating trustworthy content is one of our biggest goals, and good grammar and punctuation will help in achieving that.
I would highly recommend all bloggers to consider using Grammarly, even if you think your grammar and punctuation are fine. Grammarly does a fantastic job at not only checking your grammar and punctuation but also your spelling and even your style and tone. Plus, it’s completely FREE to use.
If you’ve never used Grammarly (or any other grammar checker), trust me, it’s SUPER helpful. And this is coming from someone who initially brushed it off to “save time” by not adding an extra step in my writing process.
It was only after I finally tried it that I realized I was wasting time by avoiding it! Grammarly makes the proofreading process SO much easier. If you want to try it out for yourself, you can sign up for free by clicking here.
Formatting and structure is just as important as the content
The way your blog post LOOKS matters just as much as how well it’s written!
When writing your blog posts, you should strive to make them “readable”. Readable blog posts are those that are easy to look at, easy to read through and engaging to the eyes.
This can be done by avoiding long blocks of text, using photos throughout your blog post, using stylized fonts, dividing your blog posts into appropriate sections by using headings and making sure that your text is big enough for your readers to comfortably read (14 point font is fine).
I have a blog post all about how to make your blog posts easier to read, so check it out if you want more details!
Don’t let your lack of writing experience get in the way
It’s true that writing a good blog post takes effort, but you’ll do just fine as long as you do you’re doing proper research, engaging your readers with a strong writer’s voice, using proper grammar and making your posts easy to read.
As a side note, I’ve seen some blogs with writing that could benefit from a little grammar and spell checking… Yet they’re still successful! (though I would recommend them to run their posts through Grammarly, haha.)
If you’d like to try out blogging but don’t have a blog yet, please check out my step-by-step tutorial where I lay out everything you need to know about starting your first blog.