Why Blogging is Important in 2019 (a blogging checklist)

Blogging keeps you on the edge of things!

It seems like everyone should be blogging from business owners to writers to anyone who wants to get their writing to readers, customers and clients.

If writing seems painful, or there isn’t enough time, should you start or continue a blog? Is it authentic to blog just because it’s popular? Are blogs essential to promoting your writing, your project or your business? Or do they keep you away from what you really want to do?

Google favors blogs and other written content for Search Engine Optimization to give businesses, nonprofits and individuals higher online rankings, especially for recent content.

Blogging as Branding

But blogging goes beyond simple SEO. It’s part of branding. It’s an aspect of creating a platform. And it’s a form of marketing.

Consistent, quality blogging creates an image. It demonstrates expertise and authority in a niche. And it gets readers to turn to you, because, over time, they begin to value your knowledge and how you relay that knowledge, your values and what you see as important. Blogs also create relationships and convert readers to customers, resulting in engagement and a following.

Research shows that blogs should be posted once a week on the same day of the week, and not randomly, especially with big gaps of time and a mishmash of topics. Medium-sized blogs generally are 500 to 700 words, while article-type blogs are 1,000 words are more.

Blogs should educate and entertain and not be space fillers vying for that SEO. Content-mill produced blogs are written only to get clicks—what’s created is SEO-stuffed with little meaning and value. They only are about quantity. Think about your target market. Who are you writing to? What voice do you want to use to reach them? What is it you want to say?

Blogs are a way to talk about your business, your newest product or service, your latest book or your artwork. It’s a way to show your process of creation. It’s a way to show what attracts customers specifically to your business. And it shows why you are the best to offer what you offer.

Blogging Advantages

Here are some other advantages of blogging. Blogs can:

• Put you in front of your customers, serving a similar purpose as an ad or marketing materials.
• Bring traffic to your website.
• Nurture and build a relationship with your audience through regular connection.
• Separate you from your competition.

Blogs also can be used to tell your story and to make your business look personal and inviting. They’re not just about what’s for sale.

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Loving Writing on Valentine’s Day

Zoey the Dachshund makes for a cute valentine!

Does writing fit with a romantic holiday like Valentine’s Day? The day is all about declaring your love for someone, but why not for a hobby or a passion?

As you check the aisles in the grocery store filled with pink and red from Valentine’s cards and heart-shaped candy to teddy bears holding stuffed hearts, do you think of a red notebook? Do you want to set aside maybe even just a half-hour for writing—or do you need to, ensuring the blog, article or short story meets deadline?

Do you see writing as a gift? This gift giving and exchange of cards developed out of Saint Valentines. A number of Saints called Valentine are honored on Feb. 14, a day that became associated with romantic love in the Middle Ages in England. Traditionally, lovers exchanged handwritten notes and later commercial cards when they became available in the mid-19^th century.

On the surface, greeting cards and the notes in valentines all involve the quick correspondence about friendship and romance. Communicating through writing has a universal appeal (think notes passed around at school before texting, texting, Facebook messages, emails, letters and cards). What’s written can be reread, saved and kept as a memento (even texts, if you copy them into a notebook or journal) and serves as physical proof that someone is thinking about you.

Writers do the same thing, compiling poems, short stories, manuscripts, ideas for writing and processes for doing the writing. They become collectors of the written word, saving their work toward the day they will be published. Or they simply write out of a passion and because it’s their hobby.

They do it because of love. For me, my love is writing, and a close second is editing.

Here are a few things to love about writing:

• Writing is a way to figure out what you really think or feel about something.
• It’s a way to be creative.
• It’s a way to play around with words and language.
• It’s a way to improve your understanding of words and how to be concise with language and how to effectively get message across.
• It’s a way to express yourself, using your intelligent and creative minds at the same time.
• It’s a way to make connections with text, memory or experiences that you might not otherwise make by thinking or talking.
• It’s a way to tell stories and disappear into another world, where you don’t see the page and can’t tell you’re writing.
• It’s a way to be whoever you want to be and do whatever you want to do, going places and doing things you might not do otherwise.
• And it’s interesting to find out what it is you created after spending a few minutes or hours on a story or essay. It’s a process of discovery.

Writing is the perfect match:

Lastly, writing gives you a sense of accomplishment after completing a story, meeting a word or time goal and finishing a novel or other large project.

In essence, it’s reciprocal, just like love, because you give your words and you get back a product, starting in rough draft form. But as you get to know each other even more, you develop a relationship, turning something rough into your perfect match.

 

The Best Editing Checklist

Editing is best done in layers to achieve clean and great copy.

Editing isn’t a quick fix of reading over an article, story or novel, making a couple of changes and hitting Publish.

It takes at least a couple of rounds of evaluating the overall content, checking for transitions and gaps in flow, and fixing paragraphs and sentences. It takes looking at the whole and the individual lines to make sure the result is a clean, easy read.

With my own work, I used to edit randomly, reading the text from start to finish over and over, but I found editing involves multiple layers of analysis. My original approach was time consuming and I missed things both at the line level (I’d reread the same things) and in the structure of the beginning, middle and end.

Simplifying the Editing Process

To make the process easier, I compiled an editing checklist to make sure I address the levels of editing, while also breaking the task into smaller parts so it doesn’t seem overwhelming and tiresome. After going through the list, the task is completed, and it’s time to do some more writing.

Editing can be done in any order, but it is best to include a read-through for errors in spelling, grammar, punctuation and mechanics; words that are missing or misused; and sentence structure that is awkward or clumsy.

As you edit, ask if there are missing details or areas to be cut that give too much detail or repeat. Also review the entire document for structure, consistency in approach (using the same types of bullets for example) and intended messaging. Make sure everything makes sense and is in a logical order with any explanations and examples fitting with the message.

While editing through the various layers, there are more specific things to check, and here is where the editing checklist is great to have on hand.

7 Things to Look for While Editing

• Determine if there are boring parts or parts that are over-explained.
• Look for needless repetitions, awkward transitions and poor word choice.

• Cut unnecessary words and sentences that do not move the message along or confuse what you’re trying to say.
• Use the active voice whenever you can.
• Get rid of inconsistencies in how things are stated and look for any elements that don’t carry through, such as a dropped idea or an incomplete example of the main topic.
• Vary the sentence structures, so that not every sentence reads subject-verb-object.
• Avoid clichés, unless used for a specific purpose, because they serve as space fillers.

Writing without editing is a rough draft and work that is incomplete. Editing helps get the writing to the core and essential components of what you want to say.