In our series on crafting blog content we’re at stage 7 (of 10) and having chosen our topic, crafted a title, written an engaging opening line, written a meaningful post, added a call to action and added depth – we’re finally ready to hit ‘publish’!
Or are we?
Image by geminicollisionworks
Today I want to talk about Quality Control – one of the last tasks that I recommend before hitting publish on your blog posts.
Having put so much time and effort into getting the content of your post into tiptop shape it can be tempting to put your post ‘out there’ for readers to engage with as soon as possible.
However, taking just few extra minutes to check for ‘errors’ can take a post to the next level.
This is an area that I admit I need to improve.
On a daily basis I find spelling and grammatical errors on my posts and embarrassingly, so do my readers.
I put it down to excitement and wanting to get posts out quickly – but if I’m honest with myself I’m sure it’s also partly laziness.
While some of your readers will gloss over these kinds of errors and won’t let it impact how they engage with the content – some will not be so forgiving and will be distracted by your mistakes.
Every spelling error that you correct and every awkward sentence structure that you improve removes a barrier to readers engaging with your content.
The solutions are simple (yet a struggle for so many of us):
- Take your time in writing posts
- Take time to look at spell check in your writing tool of choice.
- Reread your posts to see how they flow (sometimes reading them out loud will help).
- Have someone else look your posts over (I know of at least two bloggers who do this for one another – they have logins to each other’s blogs and edit the post that the other one writes on a daily basis).
- Test to see if links in your posts work.
Yes – this is an area that those of us who don’t like to pay attention to detail and those who blog in a language that isn’t their first language can struggle with, but it does pay off to work on.
As mentioned above – I’m not the guy to teach you how to improve on this aspect of blogging. As a result I’d like to point you to some others who are!
Resources for Bloggers
Posts to Read:
- Six Common Punctuation Errors that Bedevil Bloggers
- The Blogger Spelling Test
- 9 Grammar Rules all Bloggers Need to Know
- Can Poor Writing Skills Overshadow Good Content?
- Top 10 Grammar Errors that Haunt Web Pages
Blogs to Subscribe To:
- Grammar Blog – a blog about spelling, punctuation and grammar
- The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation
- Motivated Grammar
- Daily Writing Tips (spelling category, punctuation category and grammar category)
Books to Buy:
- Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
- Better Spelling in 30 Minutes a Day
- The Only Grammar Book You’ll Ever Need: A One-Stop Source for Every Writing Assignment
- Basics of Biblical Greek Grammar
- 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing
- English Grammar for Dummies
Feel free to add resources, blog posts and blogs that you’ve found helpful in comments below.
Read the Full Series
This post is part of a series on how to craft blog posts. It will be all the more powerful if taken in context of the full series which looks at 10 points in the posting process to pause and put extra effort. Start reading this series here.
