Writing a blog: How to get started

What is a blog?

'Blog'. It sounds like a modern term, and it is, but where did it come from? 'Blog' is an abbreviation of 'weblog', which means the word has been around no longer than the world wide web itself. Blogs generally take one of two forms: that of a journal - a diary-entry style piece of text - or that of an informational webpage. Blogs are therefore predisposed to assume many different forms, according to the motivations of the blogger. Often businesses may develop blogs in order to increase customer engagement, improve SEO, or to draw traffic to their website - with the aim of turning readers into customers.

Now that you are familiar with the notion of blogging, we are going to look at how to go about writing a blog. First, you must find a topic of focus for the blog. It is better to choose a subject of which you are familiar or knowledgeable, so that you can produce a discussion which is appealing and interesting to the reader. But you might also want to think about who you are writing for: who your likely demographic or target audience would be. To help you narrow down, ask yourself why you want to write a blog in the first place. What do you get out of it? What do you want your words to make people think? These sorts of questions can help give your blogs direction and purpose, features which will improve the quality and success of the blog.

How do I begin to write one?

Having discussed the idea of blogging and the many reasons to do it, we will now talk more specifically about the (rather essential) writing element. Hopefully, if you're writing a blog, you already have some basic writing skills. I'm talking spelling, punctuation, and grammar. It does not have to follow Chomsky's latest generative theory, but it should be clear, accurate, and readable. Similarly significant are style and tone, which should be in line with the blog's topical focus. These may take a little time to refine, but they can really be the difference between readers making it to the end of the article or flicking across to another resource.

The content itself in your articles is equally important. Assuming you already have a broader focus for your blog, narrowing in on specific topics for individual posts can be challenging. But what can be even more challenging, is sourcing the information needed to pull an article together. Often, this requires some astute research skills and an ability to reshape information into a compact, interesting, accessible piece of prose. This can be difficult, but genei is on hand to help! genei can help you find the information you need up to 70% faster, streamlining your blog-writing process. It can also produce automated notes from lengthy documents, and find keywords across multiple documents to help you connect the dots in your research. Take it for a free 14-day trial here.

What about SEO?

Depending on where you want to take your blog, you might want to think about how you can improve its SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). In short, the better a website's SEO, the more likely it is to appear high up on search engine results pages. Whilst I'm not going to write a comprehensive guide to SEO, I'll give you a couple of basic tips to get you started. First, including backlinks (in-text hyperlinks to other relevant webpages) in your blogs can bump it up the results pages and get you more hits, like this. Second, work on your meta descriptions (the bit of text below a webpage link describing its contents). They play a significant role in determining the quality of your website's SEO. Third, endeavour to publish evergreen articles (articles containing information that is intransient and will therefore not age or diminish in relevance over time). This helps to ensure that your blog, rather than following flash trends and events which might have a big but abrupt spike in drawing website traffic, is producing content that new readers will want to visit for years to come.

I hope this has been a useful article. Blog writing is educative, rewarding, and fun! And with genei's help available, it couldn't be more straightforward. Try us now!

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