How high do you set your own bar? That’s a question you’re going to have to ask yourself whenever it comes to writing for a blog — your blog.
Ideally, you should be setting your standards somewhere between what you want to achieve and what is comfortable and practical for yourself. I’m all for quality, but you can’t justify spending hours and hours of your time researching and writing for a post that’ll only garner a dozen views across the next handful of months. Equally, you can’t write a big tangent in a single five-minute-long sitting and press publish without even reading it over.
Your blog represents you and your name (unless you do it anonymously), so you’ll want a certain level of quality to be established, lest you risk people thinking you’re a lazy or terrible writer. They may also suspect that shoddy writing means you are using A.I. to cheese your way through it. This is doubly important to consider if you plan to note your blog on your CV or under your projects on LinkedIn, or mention it anywhere within the professional world.
The level you need to write at depends on what your blog is about, too. A lifestyle blogger — someone who writes about their daily life, or what they get up to and the holidays they are planning — won’t require as much refinement, or many in-depth ideas, since they are writing daily pieces that are designed for quick reading.
Let’s say you’re running a blog that reviews media, whether that’s books, films, music, or anything else. You may be committing a lot of time to each review, and that means they’ll be of good quality, but there’s no way you can sustain a website on that (trust me, I tried with The Steady Read). From that, you can create distinctions of content: your top-tier reviews and your more casual, filler-like content.
Filler gets a bad name, but this post right here, this is technically what I’d call filler. This isn’t a review, nor is it about books, so it defies the main appeal of my website — yet you’re reading it, because it still holds itself to a level of quality, and it still has value for select readers.
You can’t please everyone, and you can’t be perfect. Don’t enter into blogging with the mind set that you ever can, or that you ever will, attain such an impossible feat. Someone will think you could have done a better job, or expanded on a point, or added some sources or proof of research into your claims and explanations.
Some general rules for your quality standards are:
- Be typo-free
- Make sure sentences form meaning and don’t cut off
- Keep your content mostly relevant to your blog
- Even if you’re confident, remember to proofread at least once
- Make sure to tag and categorise posts accordingly
By upholding these five main points, you’re at least going to establish a competent baseline for each piece of writing you output. Remember that it’s perfectly fine to experiment, and we all let typos and tiny errors slip past here and there. We’re only human, and one of our biggest traits is that we continually improve through practice and slowly avoiding mistakes.
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