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The myth of the perfect blog post

I want you to imagine the perfect blog post.

It’s got an informative, yet clever headline that drags in readers, and a click-compelling image that’s legal for you to use.
The first line hooks your reader right away.
The second paragraph hits your audience smack in the pain point, and moves on from there into a body filled with action items and takeaways so clear, they end up in a Google featured snippet.
It’s about 1,500 words.
There are keywords, but not TOO many keywords.
It’s broken up into shorter chunks with clear subheads that keep the reader moving through the content.
It ends with a call to action that will compel your readers to do something: comment, enter your sales funnel, download something… and they do.

My god. It’s beautiful.

What I’ve just described isn’t the reality of most blog posts. It’s a myth writers are chasing, a target we’re trying to hit. And although this shimmering mirage of a perfect blog post provides writers with a goal, it has its drawbacks as well. For one thing, it’s a moving target.

The components of a “perfect post” are constantly in flux — a few years ago, the optimal length for a business blog post was between 500-700 words. Now, depending on who you ask, it’s 1,600 words, or close to 3,000.

Also, Google is constantly changing as well, so different types of content do better or worse depending on those algorithms, and that’s something we have no control over.

But here’s my big beef with the idea of a “perfect blog post” — it intimidates business owners and entrepreneurs who write their own blogs. I am a professional content writer. I write other people’s blog posts for a living, so it’s my job to try to hit the perfect blog post target. But there are plenty of business owners and entrepreneurs out there who enjoy writing their own business blogs, and this idea of having to write a perfect blog post that’s going to bring in the right leads instantly shouldn’t be stifling them.

Those folks — the people who love writing about their businesses so much that they do it regularly —  are their own brand of unicorn.

The blogging business owner

The business owner that likes to blog is not nearly as common an animal as you’d think. But they are the perfect blogger, no matter what their writing skills are like. Here’s why:

  • They love what they do, and they are eager to write about it.
  • They know their products and services better than anyone else
  • They know the problems their customers need to solve and write about them easily
  • They can answer questions and comments without having to look anything up
  • They like writing about their business so much they do it regularly; blogging is not a chore for them

That last one is important. Consistency is the most important ingredient of any blog. If you’re stressing out about making sure your blog posts are perfect, your consistency will end up suffering when blogging becomes a task you have to do.

Of course you should be striving for good, solid blog posts every time you sit down to write, but not killing yourself to create a unicorn twice a week.

The important thing is not that you create a perfect blog post, it’s that you create a sustainable blogging habit. Optimal blog post lengths and Google’s algorithms change, but you’ve got to keep blogging regularly, and it shouldn’t suck for you to do that. You should be able to enjoy it.

That said, a post filled with typos will damage your credibility

Entrepreneurs who blog may possess the secret sauce: passion and a love of writing, but a successful business blog also needs a little something else.

Depending on who’s writing, that need could be structural or grammatical. The thoughts might not fit together well, there might be typos, or a post may ramble a little too much, not doing service to the business. All of those are pretty common mistakes, and totally fine on a personal blog. But they’re not what readers expect to see on a business blog.

Professional blogs are just that: professional. You don’t want typos turning away any grammatically-minded prospective customers. But that definitely doesn’t mean worrying over your posts or outsourcing your blog to a writer. All it means is that you need a little help before you hit Publish.

Get yourself a reader

The biggest favor you can do for yourself, if you are a business owner who blogs, is this: get yourself a reader.

This could be someone you know and trust, like an employee or friend, who looks over your posts before they go live. Or you could do what I do, read your post aloud to someone before you publish. This helps me slow down and actually see the words I’ve written.

You can also hire an editor.

A word about editors

There’s a lot of concern among new writers about editors. Writers often fear working with an editor who will criticize them and make them feel bad about their work, or rewrite everything, or hijack a blog post and make it theirs.

As someone who has worked in journalism for 17 years, and worked with a lot of editors, let me tell you: a good editor sees what you’re trying to do and helps you do it. They don’t change the point you’re trying to make; they help you sharpen it. They clean up your grammar so your voice can shine.

Working with a good editor is like working with one of the Dancing With The Stars house dancers: it doesn’t matter if you don’t know all the steps, the professional’s job is to make you look good.

Editing is so important that editors who write work with other editors. One of my favorite clients employs an editor who is a delight to work with. Sometimes, I’m too close to a project. She is able to step back and see the post as a whole. Then she makes a few changes and the whole piece sings. And I can relax, knowing my piece is in good hands.

Hiring an editor is an investment in your business, but if working with an editor isn’t your style, you can still learn how to build a better blog post.

I am teaching a live, free Build A Better Blog post course this week (May 16, 17 and 18) in The Content Clubhouse Facebook Group, offering live videos and answering questions from you about how you can improve your blog posts. And if you come across this post after the 18th, no worries. The videos will still be there.If you are ready to hire an editor, though, I am accepting editing clients this month. I edit blog posts, and this month only, I am running a sale.

So forget that unicorn. Just be the best blogger you can be.

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Writing after the MFA: The Book

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Now What MFA Guide

Yeah. Now what?

After I graduated from my MFA program in 2011, I wrote about how it can be a struggle to keep writing after getting a Masters of Fine Arts degree in fiction: you leave a ready-made community of writers and a system of built-in deadlines and head back out into the world, where life is waiting in the shadows, twirling its proverbial mustache and rubbing its hands together with wicked glee, just waiting to get in the way of your good writing habits.

So what do you do? I’ve tried to answer that question for myself on this blog a few times, but now I can share a project I’ve been working on with several other writers, which answers the question in much greater depth.

Allow me to introduce Now What? The Creative Writer’s Guide to Success after the MFA. It’s a non-fiction book containing essays by 46 contributors who all attempt to answer that very question: Now what?

The book’s electronic edition is being launched this very evening at the AWP conference, so if you’re out in Seattle right now, you should definitely head to the swanky launch party at the Seattle Art Museum tonight at 6:30 p.m. I won’t be there — I’m too close to my due date for travel —  but all sorts of fun people who are still allowed to drink will in attendance.

I worked as a chapter editor on this book for a little more than a year, so I can say with authority (because I’ve read my two chapters over and over and discussed other chapters with other editors) that although the book is aimed at MFA grads, you don’t need to be one to benefit from the book.

There are essays about finding agents, about the publishing industry, about working with writing groups and there’s one chapter, which I think will be very popular because it addresses the question of how to make ends meet while working on your masterpiece.

Definitely check it out if you’re at AWP this week. (I mean, there’s a party and you’re right there – why wouldn’t you go?) If you’re not there, check it out on Amazon, and if you’re more interested in a physical book, no worries; the paperback edition will be released in July. (Did I mention that the book also includes an article about e-books vs. physical books? Guess who contributed that one.)

 

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Writing while pregnant

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pregnancy, writing

That’s no moon.

At eight months pregnant, I’m a little nervous about my writing career. Mostly because writing while pregnant has not been easy for me. In fact, it’s been really difficult.

I’ve held off on writing this post because of the inevitable comments of those who will say things like “You think <insert activity> is hard now. What until you have <an infant, a toddler, a child, a teenager, etc.>” but then I realized that those one-uppers will always rear their heads, no matter how old my child is or what stage of life I’m in.

So screw it. I’m writing this now, because I wish I’d known it earlier and maybe someone else needs to read it: writing while pregnant has been a struggle for me. I truly hope that other writers don’t have as rough a time with it as I have, but just in case another pregnant writer is out there, reading this and beating herself up for her lack of productivity, let me say this to you: You’re not alone, lady.

I’ve always assumed I could write no matter what. In fact, I figured that if I ever did get pregnant, I’d go into literary nesting mode, write daily and finish churning out my novel and probably other projects as well. I thought I’d be super-creative.

That didn’t exactly happen. Every pregnancy is different, but a host of physical symptoms kept me from my desk: fatigue, nausea, pain, and now, in the last weeks of my pregnancy, an inability to get myself or my laptop comfortably positioned long enough to write a meaningful sentence. Seriously. I need a floaty Minority Report keyboard and maybe some anti-gravity for an hour or so a day.

The strangest side-effect for me as a writer was probably this: my brain hasn’t worked in quite the same way for the past 30-something weeks.

Let me try to explain what I mean by this: I can do my paid job without a problem. I can edit and revise, and I can outline and organize my projects, and I can even write articles. The problem is creativity:  sitting down to make art became all of a sudden, extremely difficult. (They don’t list that under symptoms in What to Expect When You’re Expecting.)

This is new to me, because I’ve never had trouble being creative. I was the kid who spent second grade staring outside the window daydreaming, and I’ve been the writer who can’t always knuckle down because she’s always distracted by new ideas. My new lack of creativity was a big, unpleasant surprise. Creativity became work, and I started to beat myself up about it: What’s wrong with me that I can’t produce 500 words a day? Why is everything I write awful?

Now that I’ve been living with this change for a while, I do wish I hadn’t been so hard on myself about it — I imagine that any person who undergoes any major physical shift, like injury or illness or chronic pain or a huge lifestyle shift — must go through similar issues. Our brain chemistry is delicate; any change can cause a shift in how we experience life.

It took me months to figure out how to work around the issue effectively, but eventually, (and later in my pregnancy than I like) I started to repeat something I’d heard from Nalini Jones, an MFA teacher I once had a workshop with: “If you can’t create, you can work.”

So now I’m editing a backlog of old work, both for my novel and for my new serial fiction project. I’m also forcing myself to write a little bit of a flash-fiction every week, because I’ve discovered that I can still be creative — it’s just hard now, the way that math was hard for me in grade school. I need to build that muscle just in case things don’t immediately improve when the baby is born.

And I take naps when my schedule allows. I still feel guilty about it, but I do it anyhow.

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