Writing is one of the most important elements when it comes to content marketing. Besides helping to boost your SEO, well-written content can help to establish you as an authority in your niche.
Also, creating high-quality, compelling content will help you to stand out from the crowd, considering there are thousands of new blog posts published every day. For these reasons, you need to be improving your writing skills consistently.
Fortunately, there are certain strategies that you can implement and become a better blog writer. And we’ve shared them here. In this article, we will walk you through 10 strategies and tips on how to improve your blog writing skills and become a better writer.
1. Read Educational Resources
Reading is one of the most effective ways of improving your blog writing skills. It will help to boost your grammar, vocabulary range, as well as sentence structure, among other aspects of writing.
But it’s worth mentioning that, reading fashion magazines, love novels or social media posts will enhance your vocabulary in any way. Instead, you should focus on reading educational articles about writing skills, books and other resources, which will help to enhance your vocabulary in your niche.
Reading such resources will teach you how to play around with words, construct sentences, and the language to use, depending on your target audience. Also, reading educational resources will boost your expertise and knowledge of your niche. And the more you know about the topic at hand, the better the quality of your content will be.
2. Read Other Blogs
Reading other blogs within your niche can also help to improve your blog writing skills. When reading other blogs, you will get to see how the words they select, how they use these words as well as how they craft their sentences. And all these will go a long way in helping to improve your blog writing skills.
So, do some research and identify a couple of blogs within your niche. You should then select some pieces that align with your topics or writing style. From there, you then need to put aside some time every day or week, when you will be reading these content pieces.
By doing this regularly, you will be able to determine the writing style, tone, sentence structure and various other writing elements, which will align best with your target audience. Applying these lessons to your own writing will eventually help to enhance your blog writing skills.
3. Make Writing a Habit
You may have probably heard a thousand times that practice makes perfect. Well, this is also the case with writing. If you want to perfect your writing skills, then you need to keep practicing.
As you may expect, writing one article a whole week will not do anything much to improve your writing skills. Instead, you should try to put out four to five articles every week or one article per day.
After you’ve written every piece, you should then request someone else, preferably a more experienced writer to go through your work and make recommendations. By doing this frequently, you will eventually become a polished writer.
Eventually, you'll run into an accute case of writer's block. This happens to everybody. Don't blame yourself for it. Don't let it stop you. Keep up the habit, and eventually you will conquer it.
4. Keep a Thesaurus Close
Regardless of the type of article or blog post that you are creating, you should always have a thesaurus or dictionary close. Referring to a dictionary when you are writing will help you to identify the most appropriate words for your articles.
Even if you may be writing in your native language, it’s almost impossible for your mind to recall all the precise words right when you need them. As a result, you may find yourself repeating the same words over again, which will in turn lower the quality of your content piece.
So, whenever you are writing, go through every sentence and paragraph to see whether you have used a particular word too many times. If that’s the case, you will then use your thesaurus to find an alternative word.
Incorporating this habit into your blog writing will help to enrich your vocabulary significantly. Also, it will help you to recall the right words at the right time. And without a doubt, it will be a considerable game-changer and a massive boost to your blog writing skills.
5. Eliminate Distractions
Studies show that it takes approximately 23 minutes for the human mind to refocus on a task following a distraction. So, if you are constantly getting distracted, then the quality of your writing will be poor. Simply put, if you want to keep producing the best quality content, you will keep distractions to a minimum.
So, how can you minimize distractions when you are writing? Well, you have several approaches to consider. First, you should put your phone on silent mode if possible. Putting your phone on silent mode will ensure you won’t be distracted by calls, emails, messages or other notifications.
Second, you should be writing in a dedicated, quiet place, away from external distractions like noise coming from traffic, children playing, or music coming from your neighbors.
By eliminating distractions whenever you are writing, you will be able to focus on the task at hand. As a result, you will manage to produce high-quality content pieces.
Furthermore, eliminating distractions will also help to boost your productivity. For instance, if you usually spend four hours writing an article due to distractions, you may manage to write two articles within the same time frame. And as mentioned earlier, writing more articles will eventually help to improve the quality of your writing.
6. Always Have an Outline
Regardless of whether you are creating a short article or a long-form piece of content, you should always begin with an outline. While it may appear like an unnecessary step, starting with an outline will not only help you to produce better articles but will also save a considerable amount of time.
With an outline, you will have a clear idea of the ideas or information that you will include in your article. Also, it will give your entire article or blog post a clear direction, consistency as well as logical flow.
Also, an outline will enable you to give balance to your article. With an outline, you will give each section equal attention, thus avoiding over-focusing on a particular section while neglecting the others.
Your readers want a complete and coherent article. And, having an outline will ensure you will include all the information that your readers want. And, using this strategy consistently will help to boost your blogging skills.
7. Research Thoroughly
While it may appear like a time-consuming process, taking the time to conduct deep research when writing your blog posts will be worth it. And this applies to all blog posts, whether you are familiar with the topic or not.
Conducting thorough research when creating your blog posts will enhance your blog writing in various ways. First, research will help you to unearth interesting facts about the topic, which can help to boost engagement.
Second, proper research will help you to identify information from reliable sources or authoritative sources. And by supporting your arguments with these sources, your articles will appear more credible, thus helping to set them apart from all the generic articles out there.
Third, researching your topics thoroughly when crafting your blog posts may help you to identify some great keywords. You can then incorporate these keywords into your blog posts. And, they will significantly boost your on-page SEO efforts.
8. Work With an Editor
Regardless of how great a writer you may consider yourself to be, you should consider working with an editor. A competent and honest editor will go through your articles and identify areas that need work. They will then make the right recommendations, depending on the identified areas.
For instance, an editor may request you to re-write an introduction, remove certain paragraphs or even re-do the entire piece. While this work may appear frustrating or time-consuming, doing it consistently will help to fine-tune your writing skills.
9. Keep Your Articles Clean, Tight and Simple
Some writers have the habit of using complex words, in an attempt to appear sophisticated or smarter. However, using such complex words will make your articles unreadable to your audience.
So, if you can’t use a certain word when having a conversation, then it shouldn’t appear in your article. There’s no point in writing a blog post that looks like a college academic paper. Instead, you should make your writing simple.
Also, try as much as possible to keep filler words to a minimum. Filler words don’t add much value to your articles, besides inflating the word count.
By removing unnecessary words from your pieces consistently and replacing them with more effective words, you will gradually become a more competent writer. Consequently, your readers will always be looking forward to your next article.
10. Take a Writing Course
The digital landscape is constantly changing and the blog writing industry has not been left behind. So, if you want your blog to remain relevant, you need to be enhancing your writing skills constantly.
And you can achieve this by taking writing courses. A writing course will equip you with the latest skills in the industry, thus making sure you are constantly ahead of the competition.
Apart from taking an online course, you also need to be constantly attending industry workshops and events. During such events, you will gather valuable insights, which can considerably help to improve your blogger skills.
11. Wrapping It Up
Becoming a better blog writer will require a considerable amount of effort, time and patience. So, you shouldn’t expect it to happen overnight. But as long as you are consistently working to improve your blog writing skills, you will eventually get there.