The Tortoise Website

The Tortoise Website
Click on image to go to Author website. "THE RACE IS NOT TO THE SWIFT." Eccl. 9:11

Friday 15 February 2013

What You Can Do To Get Rid of Writing Mistakes on A Blog

By Gigi Monsen


Anytime mistakes are noticed, like writing mistakes, then people become more attuned to noticing more of them. Some readers will even be on the lookout for more of them, and if they see several in proximity with each other, then they'll have one foot in the door. What you want to avoid is making them more critical about your content, and then they go over it with a fine-tooth comb. Visitors will not know you, and they're looking for trust indicators. This is how it goes, and you probably react in a similar fashion to mistakes on websites.

It's a fact that if your blog contains significant writing mistakes in quality and number, then your blog is doomed. You need to be able to write decent enough and that includes putting ideas together well. At this stage of things, poor writing with various mistakes just won't cut it, anymore. Giving your readers the kind of high quality they're looking for is the other important piece of the puzzle.

Really try to avoid writing long headlines on your blog for your content, and this has everything to do with social media marketing. You can make your headlines too long to the point where it interferes with social sharing. There are many reasons for this, but the bottom line is that you need to optimize them for sharing. We all do this, and it's just the way we have evolved with reading on the web - we skim and scan. Copywriting is perfect for writing content for web readers because the principles have been used for decades.

While it's nice to promote yourself if you have strong credentials, using this valuable real estate for self-promotion is a waste. What you really should do is talk directly to your readers, and this is doing a little relationship marketing. If you don't have much commenting on your blog, then make the most of this time and space to get more comments. So the mistake here is to do something that is designed to sell rather than develop a strong rapport with them. Since you're in a hurry to publish your post, slow down and do proper proofreading. Just about everybody uses spell and grammar check software, well the funny thing is that it misses some things for interesting reasons. You've seen words that are out of context with the surrounding copy, and this is what we're trying to explain to you about relying too much on spelling checkers. If you use a word processor, then you have seen these little annoying things here and there. So you have to know what you're doing and also properly proofreading your content.

What do you have right now on your About or Bio page? If it's sanitized corporate-speak, then get rid of it. Avoid going too far over the top unless that's fine with your blog readers, but if not then don't do it. You'll need to make the call and base it on your readers and where they're coming from. Lastly, did you know that the way you write should be your own voice? If not, then learn more about that because you want to put it on display.

Remember that your readers are there but still in a hurry to read and get on with life, and they won't appreciate tricked-out text or any such things. Or, using too many underscores and exclamation points or bold font, etc.

You can find differing opinions about links opening in a new tab, or window, or on top of your page. To me it's far more of a hassle to have to navigate back to the main site I was just on. What you'll find is people do things in different ways and they like their way of doing it. There are other areas in usability that can be related to writing mistakes and this is one of those times. Tabs are faster to deal with than windows because the information is already loaded. You'll not want to include much more than about two outbound links, anyway. It's hard to spot your own mistakes, so it's always good to get another opinion. Others may point out errors that you had no idea you were making. As a blogger, you want to improve your blog in every possible way. Your goal should be to make your blog as reader friendly as possible, which is why it's so important to reduce writing mistakes.




About the Author:



No comments:

Post a Comment