I am catching up with my reading and also revisiting some posts. Here is a selection of posts that I find very useful.
ProBlogger has a guest post that has been submitted by Leo Babauta from Zen Habits (one of my favourite blogs) titled The 4 Pillars of Writing Exceptional Blogs. The advice sounds simple enough:
Create valuable content and good writing, and the readers will come. Content is king, as they say, and that should be the focus of all your efforts.
Rory Sullivan adds another view in It’s Not Just About Writing Great Articles, YOU HAVE TO WORK THE SYSTEM! which in turn gets a followup at ProBlogger titled More Pillars of Exceptional Blogs.
CopyBlogger has a post titled Get Anyone to Read Every Word You Write With These 7 Steps. This post is great, concise advice and well written. Brian says this about which words are necessary:
The necessary words are those that ensure the reader’s complete comprehension and result in the action or result you want. The rest can be tossed out.
Another great post at CopyBlogger is Fight Copywriting Flab: How to Tone Your Writing Muscles. There is this solid advice (sometimes easier said than done):
To be a good writer you must write every day. Plus, if you want to be any better than so-so, you really need to stretch yourself and train for it. This means mixing up writing styles, alternating between longer and shorter pieces, trying short stories and then switching to tutorials, etc.
An interesting way of creating action is What Keeps You From Writing?. A short post asking a question and at present there are 105 comments. In other words, let your readers add value.
In How to Steal Great Content Ideas Brian writes that nothing is new under the sun. I like this part of the post:
Understand first that a unique perspective simply means you see a connection that others do not. So, you can still cite your sources and yet speak in a truly new voice, because the connection makes all the difference.
