Between freelance work for clients, creative writing and academic papers, I have been writing for around 10 years. While creative and academic writing can be difficult, I have found that pretty much anyone can become a blogger. This may sound great on the surface but in reality, it merely provides a platform for terrible writers to have a much louder voice and reduce the overall quality of content that readers see online.
Is it any wonder that writing standards are declining with the advent of ‘text speak’ and increasing popularity of abbreviations and acronyms? The Wall Street Journal has discussed the decline of verbal scores and how economic woes swiftly followed a drop in standards from 1962-1980 and how these standards have remained low ever since.
Now we live in an age where approximately 2.4 billion people have access to the Internet and the result is hundreds of millions of blogs. While many of these are dead or moribund, there are enough poorly written blogs out there to continue the sad decline of our written language skills. If you are writing your own blog posts, here are a few tips to help ensure that you follow in the footsteps of many others and create a truly dreadful piece of content.
1 - Plain Headline & Lots of Keywords
You should absolutely add in the first headline that comes to your head; even if it reveals nothing of the blog post’s content. The last thing you want to do is attract attention, make visitors want to read more and know exactly what they can expect in the article. Once you’ve written your headline, place as many keywords as possible in the body of the text. Look for at least 5% keyword density and stuff them in wherever you can. After all, you’re writing for search engines rather than people. Besides, it’s not as if modern audiences want compelling content anyway.
2 - Go Wild with Font & Punctuation
The best bloggers know that in order to attract attention, they need to bold, italicise and underline absolutely everything while adding exclamation marks for emphasis!!! How else are people supposed to understand what you’re trying to say if you don’t scream out for their attention? Do you see just how annoying this is? You should only add italics, bold and underline words sporadically or else you will lose the impact. Excess punctuation such as added exclamation marks only turns your writing into a cheap sales page.
3 - Don’t be Specific
The last thing you want to do is have a blog post with a laser like focus on a single idea. Modern audiences don’t want an intriguing and well-written post on one topic with attention to detail, clear points, helpful information and an important conclusion. Instead, you should have anywhere from 3-5 different topics in every single post.
For best results, cram as many topics as you can into each paragraph. Most Internet users have the attention span of a goldfish and will only get bored if they are forced to read about the same idea the whole time. If you can go off on a tangent every fourth line that would be ideal.
4 - Be a Perfectionist
I’m sure that you’ve heard of crazy people who claim you can write a blog post in under an hour. I can assure you that this is nonsense as blog writing is a very precious process with each line placed under the microscope. It will be tough as you erase almost as often as you write and it could take several days to conjure up a 500 word opus but persevere and you will get over the line.
Don’t allow your blog post to see the light of day without ensuring there is a keyword on almost every line. You can of course save time by not proofreading or editing the post but under no circumstances must you ever believe that blog posts can be anything less than a masterpiece. A simple rule of thumb; if it isn’t the literary equivalent of the Sistine Chapel then bin it and start over and over again.
5 - Don’t Add Links
Why would you want to send readers to a different website, even if it does involve opening a new tab? You want them to stay on your website and every other site is poison. This means giving no links or attribution for any statistics you use. Actually, why bother looking up statistics at all? Simply pull some numbers out of your ass and state them as fact since you are an ‘authority’ on the subject.
Now you have everything you need to create a truly dreadful blog post! Remember, it is all about the search engines, be sure to attract attention, add a garbled mess of points, take hours to write a single post and never use sources or add links.