Blogging is a huge opportunity… and a lot of people are missing out.
They\’re missing out for one reason.
They don\’t believe they can write.
They might have slept through their English classes at school. They don\’t know what a semi-colon is for. And since entering the workforce, they might never have had to write anything longer than a grocery list.
And now I\’m telling them that they can make their living — and more! — writing on the Web.
They can. You can too. If you can talk, you can write a blog.
A blog isn\’t a screenplay or a work of literature. It\’s a diary. Or a magazine. Or whatever you want it to be. It\’s just a place to put your thoughts, your ideas and your advice.
If you tend to share any of those things — and if people are interested when you do — you can create a blog that gets views and makes money.
The difference is how you share them.
A conversation with a friend is spontaneous. You only know what you\’re going to say when you\’re saying it. That approach doesn\’t work too well in writing. It\’s much better to spend a couple of minutes thinking about what you\’re going to write and planning it out in advance.
Once you\’ve decided what you want the post to be about, you should have a length in mind. That\’s not strictly necessary but knowing when to stop and having a goal to aim for can make the writing process much easier.
You should also know how the post ends. Whether a post makes an argument or tells a story, you should be able to sum it up in one sentence. For this post, for example, that might be \”bloggers should plan their posts.\” If you were describing your daughter\’s goal during her weekend soccer match, it might be \”Natalie scored a great goal this weekend and the training helped.\”
It\’s as simple as that.
And finally, you\’ll want a short list of points the post should mention on the way to the conclusion. In a 350-word post, there might be no more than two or three. So for the post about Natalie\’s goal, you might want to write down that you want to mention how she recovered from a tackle and went past the goalkeeper, and how each of those skills were things that had come up in training.
That sounds like a lot, but in practice, the list might be no more than: \”tackle, goalkeeper, training.\” They\’re just reminders so that you always know what\’s coming next.
Plan what you\’re going to write before you type the first word and you\’ll find it all flows a lot faster and comes out a lot better too.