7 Blog Writing Best Practices (Get +Leads & Offend Less)

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Blogging is a great way to share your experience and connect with others in your industry. More importantly, blogging as content marketing is one of the best ways to generate leads and revenue for your business.

But blogging can also be tricky. Unlike writing sales pages or FAQ pages, blogging is more casual and personal. Because of this, it presents many opportunities to alienate readers and offend prospects. Following blog writing best practices will help you stay focused on your objective.

And while it’s exhausting to try to please everyone, causing needless offense will affect your content marketing goal: revenue.

Blog Writing Best Practices

While it’s best to avoid writing like an encyclopedia, caution is needed when writing in a more casual way.

There are many topics that can cause unintentional offense. Be aware of how you handle medical, cultural, diet, religion, politics, language, and moral topics.

Blogging is a Juggling Act

Blog posts aim to share information that is helpful to prospects and clients. The goal is to understand the product and service offering – what to expect, use cases, and success stories.

In travel, for example, the intent is to help prospective travelers understand the country and its culture. But without being offensive to the local people.

If that all sounds kind of tricky, that’s because it is.

When you realize that one or two references can throw off the feel of an entire post – causing offense or confusion, you begin to feel the weight of what you are trying to do: Create a helpful blog that best represents your company and helps generate leads and revenue.

Here are some common content marketing mistakes that will affect your conversion rate.

7 Best Practices to Write a Better Blog

Here are seven blog writing best practices to increase leads and avoid causing offense.

1. Comparisons: It can be very difficult to pass on unbiased information when using comparisons. This is especially true when comparing cultures, education levels, or any other sweeping generalizations. Use with caution.
2. Your Mood: It’s never a good idea to write when you are in a bad mood. You will write in a totally different way than when you are feeling more positive. This could cause offense through unbalanced posts.
3. The Passing of Time: As time passes you’ll get a better understanding of the topic, culture, or situation. You also mature within it. This causes your perspective to change.
4. Your Mindset: When writing, it’s best not to picture your closest friend. For improved tone, it may be better to picture a mixed group made up of people from your target audience and people outside of that audience. This can make a big difference when you are sitting at a keyboard and staring at a blank computer screen.
5. Revisions: Don’t be too proud to edit or trash your past posts. It’s more important to make sure your writing gives a clear picture of who you are and how you feel than it is to keep a popular post alive. It is a good idea to go back and reread your posts from time to time. As you improve as a writer and mature in your niche, your perspective will likely change. Weeding out past posts will give you a better feeling about what you’ve done and are trying to do. This will create a better experience for your readers and you will have a blog you are proud of.
6. Criticism: Writers need to have somewhat of a thick skin, but not too thick. While there are always a few trolls, there are many more sincere readers. And you’ll need to be able to tell the difference. Concerns from sincere readers need to be taken seriously. When a sincere reader takes the time to tell you how something you have written makes them feel, you need to pay attention. You may need to apologize and fix your post accordingly. We all make mistakes, and people respect people who admit them. So pay attention because your sincere readers are the legs your blog stands on.
7. Remember the Objective: Education and conversion should be your content marketing objective. This can help keep your articles from becoming a place to air pet peeves and share unhelpful content.

Being a better blogger is not an impossible undertaking. It just means having the right mindset, caring about your readers, and staying true to yourself.

Here’s how to edit a blog post that you didn’t write. And here’s how to quickly format a blog post.

Should You Even Care?

It’s easy to say that you don’t care, especially if you have no readers. But once your blog becomes influential – with tens of thousands of monthly readers – being careless can be damaging.

Ignoring best blog best practices can result in the following:

1. lost readers and trust
2. harming or offending others
3. misrepresenting who you really are

These consequences all reflect poorly on your company. And will reduce the effectiveness of your content marketing campaign.

Changing Perspectives

We recently did some “house cleaning” on our travel site. We unpublished many posts and changed some others.

Why? Some friends told us about a post that could be misinterpreted, and they were right. After we reread it from a different perspective we could see what they were saying.

This caused us to examine our posts with a different mindset. We were worried that some posts could be offensive, and we found a number of posts that needed to be revised.

Writing is different than having a face-to-face conversation. In conversation, personality and feelings are conveyed by body language, tone of voice, and immediate response to questions. As a writer, these luxuries don’t exist.

Who Are You Really “Talking” To?

Writers often picture the person they are “talking” to. This helps their writing flow better and can make it more interesting. They often picture the person they feel most comfortable talking to, their closest friend.

As a result, they may write things that they would never say to someone they know casually because their friend gets them, they know their history and true feelings.

A close friend weighs everything you say against who they know you are. Jokes, exaggerated expressions, and comparisons can all be said without the need for lengthy explanations. Even then, when your conversation is over, it’s over. They don’t dwell on everything said.

With writing it’s different. What’s down in black and white is done. There is no body language or context to help. It’s there forever to be read and reread, deliberated over, and taken in as many ways as possible. And open to numerous interpretations.

Regular readers may grasp your intended meaning – because they’ve been with you from the beginning. So they understand when you make a joke and aren’t offended. But most of your readers only read some of your posts, and others find you via search and know nothing about you. These readers could be offended.

Caution with Comparisons

We have learned to be more careful about how we express ourselves, especially in writing. And comparisons are tricky.

As writers, we want to pass on balanced information without needlessly offending anyone. It can be very difficult to convey true feelings through comparisons.

There are a couple of factors to consider when making comparisons:

1. the possibility of causing offense, and
2. the possibility of making yourself look different than you actually are

So there is always a need to fully explain both sides. Passing on the information and how you felt about the situation, not just the differences.

I prefer to write granular posts – covering just a single topic at a time.

Blogging is a Learning Process

Blogging is a learning process and your readers will make sure of that. This is a good thing!

Following these blogging best practices will help focus on your goal of revenue and conversion. And avoid unintentionally offending prospects.

Have you ever unintentionally offended your readers? How did you address it?