5 Questions You Must Always Ask Yourself Before Publishing a Blog Post

July 26, 2011 by Daniel Sharkov|

Writing is really not all that hard. First thing you need a bit of creativity to come up with the initial idea. Second… well you need to start writing. That is the phase, where you already have the basic outlines in your head. You start editing and refining so that you produce an article that attracts attention, receives comments and gets shared. That is namely the part, a lot of newbie bloggers are struggling with.

A few months back I was one of those bloggers. One morning though, I decided it is time for a change. The idea I came up with was a simple checklist with questions.

In today’s article I’m going to share namely those questions in the hopes that they’ll help you keep quality and get more done at the same time:

Is That What Readers Actually Want to Read

Blogs are centered around a specific niche and the covered topics are very closely related. The moment you start a blog, is the moment when you begin establishing a certain focus and theme with your writing. Regular readers will have a certain level of expectations that you need to fulfill.

If you really want to keep building an audience of returning visitors, more than just writing relevant articles is required. What you need is consistency. You need to be consistent with all aspects of your articles, starting with posting schedules, through depth of information, established style and article length. Even allowing guest bloggers can scare away people.

But in the end people change, what if I want to change my writing style you’d say? As long as the change isn’t radical, go for it! But do it gradually, so that readers can have the time to “adjust”.

Is It Easy to Understand What the Post is About?

So now that you are certain you are fulfilling readers’ expectations, you need to make sure you are presenting the information in an easy to understand manner. That is crucial since it can easily make the difference between an article that goes viral and one that doesn’t get a single retweet (digg, vote or whatever).

Whether an article gets read or doesn’t hugely depends on its title. Take a look at my article about titles that get retweetsfor more information!

The second component you need to take care of is the introduction i.e. the first paragraph. That is where you present the article to the reader. Make sure you are as descriptive as possible with the least amount of words. That is just an introduction so try to make the topic easy to understand, but at the same time don’t disclose too much information. After all you want people to read the whole article.

Back then when I started that blog, I believed that content is what matters. And although it is indeed the most important, as they say a picture is worth a thousand words. Choosing a good image to go along with your article can do miracles. Read more on adding imagesto your blog posts!

Am I Using Too Many Technical Terms?

A common advice given to bloggers is to keep things as simple as possible. With each technical term you use, you get further from “keeping it simple”. Technical terms might be a good way to “show off” your knowledge on certain topics. Using them however is rarely a wise decision. The easier it is to understand what you are rambling about, the more people will benefit from your article. When others benefit from your work, you benefit as well – you get more comments, more shares and more traffic. Isn’t that what you want?

Is Content Well Organized?

Organizing and structuring your content is yet another important component for a good blog post. Readers rarely read from beginning to end and they rather scan through the post to find the most important only. I am doing it, probably most of you are doing it as well. That is why after finishing the post, you need to take the time to highlight the important information.

Image Credit

Before you do that, there’s one more thing to take care of. Giving individual paragraphs a subheading is crucial. It makes finding specific information a piece of cake – perfect for the scroll through fans!

What I am doing to make articles as easy to scan through as possible, is to bold the most important sentence or sentences in each paragraph. That needs to be done in such a way, so that if only the bolds are read, they actually sound like a simplified version of the whole article. I rarely find that technique implemented, but when I do it certainly makes reading and digesting the information a whole lot easier.

Read more on making your post easier to scan through!

Have I Included Enough Detail?

There are pretty much two types of blog posts. The first include just a few different points, which however are very comprehensively covered. The second type of posts rather rely on numbers, presenting ten, twenty or even more points. Problem with them is that they rarely cover enough detail, so that the user actually benefits from reading in the end.

So when writing, don’t hold information back. The more you give the more of a reaction you will likely get with your work. Some say that giving away too much information doesn’t allow room for interaction, but that is rather a myth. If you write in an engaging way, then you are sure to spark discussions, no matter how much you’ve revealed.

Conclusion

These are in my opinion the most important components bloggers should consider before hitting the “Publish” button. All in all a good article is one that is able to catch the reader’s attention and not only catch it, but keep it as well. However a good article is also one that is well organized and can easily be scanned through.

Have something to add up the list? Don’t hesitate sharing your two cents in the comment section! All feedback, both positive and negative is much appreciated.

Post Written by Daniel Sharkov

I’m Daniel, an 18 year old student and the author of this blog. My articles cover a variety of topics, including blogging and writing tips, social media, traffic generation and more. Connect with me on Twitter, Facebookand Google+.

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