I ran across this wise blog post last week over on Problogger, by a guest author Leo Babauta from Zen Habits: 4 Pillars of Writing Exceptional Blogs.
While there are many things that go into great blogs, content is THE most important. Denise and I are preparing for our advanced business blogging class coming up, and we outline 4 areas that are key to business blogs:
Content, Outreach, Design and Action. There’s a reason Content is first. You can’t have a good blog without great content.
Here are Babuta’s 4 Pillars of Writing Exceptional Blogs:
Pillar 1: Be extremely useful
Pillar 2: Write great headlines
Pillar 3: Make the post scannable
Pillar 4: Write in a plain, concise, common-sense style
The key is to focus on your readers and give them what they want. Your blog becomes more powerful if you omit the noise and leave the signal. Do this, and your reader will not only read the post, but will likely stick around long enough to become a long-term reader.
Actually, when you think about it, these four pillars stand for other writing tasks: articles, ezines, white papers – even sales copy and advertorials. Do you agree?
