By Leo Babauta

We’d like to welcome our newest contributer, Leo Babauta. Leo Babauta has been a reporter, editor, speech writer and freelance writer for the last 17 years, and writes about simple productivity on his highly successful blog, Zen Habits.

Image from iStockPhoto

If you’re a freelance writer who’s written for newspapers and magazines, or an English or communications major who’s an old pro at writing papers, or even just someone who’s always written well, you might think your talent will translate directly into awesome blog writing.

As a freelance journalist (for the past 15+ years), I’ve discovered that writing for blogs is a bit different (sometimes quite a bit different) than writing for other mediums, and understanding those differences can help you write amazing blog posts and get a ton of readers. Be a blog writer, not just a writer, and you’ll find success in this new medium.

First, let’s note a few ways in which writing for blogs and writing for a print publication are the same:

• The basic rules of writing don’t change. You see some blogs where all rules of spelling or capitalization or grammar are thrown out. And there’s definitely not the same formality about blogs as there is in print. But you still want people to read this stuff, and if you throw out the basic rules, it makes reading more difficult.
• Still go for concise. Sure, with blogs, space isn’t as limited as it is with print media, but the readers’ time is still limited — probably even more so, if they do a lot of online reading. So save them time by getting to the point quickly, and allowing them to move on. Otherwise they might not read your article at all.
• You still have to be interesting, useful, newsworthy or humorous – or a combination thereof. These rules apply to print and blogs equally. Many blogs don’t understand these rules (and for that matter, neither do some print writers), and therefore suffer the consequences.

OK, now you’re thinking, “So what’s different?” Well, nothing is so much completely different as having a different emphasis. Good writing is good writing. But if you want people to read your writing on a blog, you can’t rely on the authority, resources and wide distribution of a print publication — you have to get readers to find you and want to keep coming back.
Here are seven of the best ways to write well for blogs:

• Be useful. Sure, it’s also good to be newsworthy, interesting and/or humorous. But useful is most important, in my experience. People love reading funny stuff, but unless you’re Dave Barry, they aren’t likely to subscribe to your blog and keep coming back just for the humor. You’ve got to have more. Same goes for good story-telling — that’s a definite plus, but it’s not usually a reason to subscribe. People will read your blog and keep coming back if you’ve got stuff that will be extremely useful to them in every day life.
• Scannability. Readers subscribe to dozens of blogs. They don’t have time to read them all, every day. So you’ve got to allow them to read your post quickly — to scan the post — to get an idea of the main points, and either read more or move on. If all you’ve got are long paragraphs of plain text, you’ll never be read. The best way to write scannable content is to write lists. Sure, there are a million lists out there, but the reason is because it works. People can see, at a glance, what your main points are without any effort. Another good way to be scannable is to highlight your main points.

• Good headlines. If you’ve written headlines for print, you’ve got a head start. You have an idea of how to communicate the main idea of an article in a very concise way, and of how to write the headline so it’ll grab attention. Without a good headline, your post might as well be crap — because no one will read it. Again, people read dozens of posts a day in their feed readers — often they just scan the headlines, and then read the posts with headlines that interest them. Grab their attention right away, but be sure that the article delivers.
• Put yourself in your writing. This may be the main difference between print writing and blog writing. In many print publications, you’re supposed to be neutral. Not so in blogs. You can be yourself, with all of your quadrillion biases. The more biases, the better. With millions of blog posts out there, yours is not likely to be very unique — unless you put in your post the one thing that you know is unique — yourself. There is no other like you out there.
• Links, always links. Print articles are supposed to be self-contained, for the most part. But blogs are part of a larger web, and you should take advantage of that. Allow other posts to give your reader some context and background. Allow them to read more about a topic with links to further reading. Give them some good resources with a great list of resources.
• Be your own editor. Writers are notorious for writing something up and submitting it without reading it. Which is fine if you’ve got a careful editor who will do more than run a spell check. But if you run your own blog, you are your own editor. Be careful, read every sentence, revise, edit, rewrite. You’ve got no one to blame but yourself. Put your best stuff out there. Just because you can shovel any ol’ drivel onto a blog doesn’t mean you should.
• Read other good blogs. Get to know the other blogs not only in your niche, but the ones with the best writing. The good blog writers tend to stand out over time. See what they’re doing right. Look at what others are doing wrong. Learn from them, emulate the best, and soon you’ll be the one setting the example.