In the first 8 seconds, you as a reader decide to stay or leave. Hopefully, you stay ;) If you apply the following blogging tips I received today from the pro-blogger Anne from mediasteak your reader will be thankful.

Who Is Your Audience?

Think about the people who should read your post. Creepy. I’m thinking about you right now;) I think you like catching up on my points quickly. I think you blogged a couple of times and you are looking for ways to improve your writing and your reach.

Tell A Story, But Not Your Life!

Be personal and make your topic personal. Use you and I or you and we. But keep it short. Focus on less than 300 words. 300 words is not much. Guess how many words this post has. 437!

Make It Beautiful

Make it a feast for the eyes. That means avoid typos as well, right! Don’t use too many fonts. The font size should be big enough. The contrast should be high enough. We use the fantastic publishing platform Ghost so that we get all that and can focus on the content and its structure: Headline, Abstract, Sublines. Include images, audio or video, which underline what you’re saying. Images should be less than 1280px, greater than 300px and with a size lower than 400KB. Audio? Videos? I have none. It doesn’t matter! You can reference related podcasts or YouTube videos.

Headings matters!

Less than 20% of your visitors will read the whole story. Can somebody get most of your story by just reading the headings? Focus on that. Make them stick, catchy, interesting. Make them not too long. Less than 65 characters is great.

Your Story Teaser - What’s In It

Right after your headline, write about what to expect. Why should somebody read your post? Give a summary, which is often called TL;DR.

Be Findable With A Little Help Of…

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

To optimize your content for SEO take a look at your Meta-Title and Meta-Description. The Meta-Title must not be too short, best is 70. The Meta-Description should be readable on its own. It should include your keywords and has to be more than 120 characters, the best is 156.

Networking

If you find similar content, you can comment there and point to your content. But please be gentle and do that only if it matters!

What Do’s and Don’ts do you have?