How to Blog as a Business: 6 Steps For Structuring a Team

If you want to set your company apart from the competition, creating a corporate blog is definitely one way to do it.   Providing valuable, fresh content on a consistent basis is one of the best ways to build a loyal and engaged audience online and become a thought leader.   Blogging helps drive credibility … Read more

10 Bad Writing Habits All Bloggers Should Avoid

10 Bad Writing Habits All Bloggers Should Avoid

A successful blog requires one thing and one thing only: puppies. Readers love puppies. Give them puppies, and they will come. Puppy pictures, puppy videos, guilty puppies wearing hats—anything with puppies will do. Play to your readers' love of cuteness, and they will forgive you any bad writing habits, never straying from your blog. (Anything about stray puppies is sure to be a hit as well.)Incorporating puppies into your posts is never a bad blogging habit.

Okay, okay. So maybe bad writing habits can't be cured only with puppies, although I  do recommend incorporating them into your blog posts as much as humanly possible. The way to overcome a majority of bad writing habits is not to focus on baby dogs but to focus on balance.

The answer to the question “What is the secret to blogging?” should always be “balance.” Your blog writing should strike a balance between humor and information, between substance and fluff, and between perfection and humanity. When it comes to blogging, most bad writing habits have to do with a serious lack of balance.

Writing for a blog can be tricky, but a well-written blog post is certainly possible as long as you know what to avoid. Let's take a look at some bad writing habits and what you can do to avoid them.

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Becoming a Professional Blogger: What Everybody Ought to Know

 

I may not be Darren Rowse, but I'm still a professional blogger. That's because blogging is the main way I make my living as a writer. In the last 10 years I've written for sites covering everything from travel to business to social media marketing.  Some days I still can't believe that people pay me to do something I enjoy so much!

That said, it's been quite a ride. Apart from a brief flirtation with Blogger when it started up, in 2005 I'd never written a word for publication online and I had no idea that blogging would be a paying career. I had plenty of writing experience, gained from years as a reporter and editor. But blogging was an experiment.

At the time, not many companies had blogs and not many businesses took blogging seriously. But personal bloggers were everywhere, and I became one of them, honing my skills on a now-defunct site. That got me into the habit of writing daily, responding to comments and getting ideas for new posts from readers' comments and questions. And I learned about SEO, online writing and other useful skills.

Lesson one: hone your blogging skills

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