Five Great Writing Tricks to Enhance Any Blog Post

You don’t need to invest years, months, or even days in becoming a great writer. These tricks are all ones you can use right now to enhance any post you write.

(Let me know any great ones I missed in the comments!)

#1: Cut Out Your First Paragraph

Look at your most recent post. Does it still make sense if you delete the whole of the first paragraph? (This will work more often than you might think.)

A lot of bloggers take a paragraph or two to “warm up” when they start a blog post. Often, the first paragraph can be cut off completely – leaving you with an introduction that gets straight to the point.

#2: Make Your Subheadings Match

The details count – and one way to make your post well-written (and trustworthy) is to match up your subheadings.

For instance in this post, all my subheadings start with a verb (“cut”, “make”, etc) and they’re all an instruction. I’ve also kept them around the same length: four or five words.

#3: Rewrite Long or Complicated Sentences

Imagine you’re reading a post and you have to pause to re-read the same sentence several times before you get what the author was trying to say. It’s frustrating, and it jolts you out of the flow of your reading.
When you edit, watch out for any long and/or complicated sentences. Rewrite them so that you have two or three sentences – or a list of bullet points.

#4: Use “You” More Than “I”

Unless you’re a celebrity or have an extremely loyal band of readers, they don’t really care about you and your experiences all that much.

Make sure your posts focus on the reader, offering something useful for them. An easy way to do this is to make sure you’re using the word “you” considerably more often than “I”. You might need to rewrite some paragraphs to make them “you”-centric.

#5: Include a Call to Action

A call to action is simply a request for the reader to do something, like leave a comment, share your post on social media, join your mailing list, etc.

It’s often placed at the end of your post, as that’s where readers naturally pause – but you can put calls to action elsewhere. (Did you spot the call to action earlier in this post?)

Which of these five tips do you like best … and what other tips could you add to our list? Let us know in the comments!