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What’s the Right Style?
Speaking of creating blog posts, it’s essential that you and your contributors get the style right. Effective blog writing is conversational yet direct. It has to reflect the personality of the contributor, while still getting across the company message. To that end, the author’s voice is important; the writing needs to be personal, nor corporate.
Getting that personal feel is important. A blog post shouldn’t sound like a regurgitated press release, nor like a piece of catalog copy. It should sound like a letter from a trusted friend—a little chatty, perhaps, but full of useful and interesting information.
Blog posts also need to be relatively short. Not as short as a tweet or Facebook status update, of course, but not near as long as a magazine article, either. We’re talking posts that are measured in paragraphs, not pages. Write too much and no one will read the complete post; write too little and the post won’t be informative. You have to strike a middle ground fit for the short attention spans of today’s web users—somewhere between 250 and 1000 words.
As to how fancy the writing should be, the key descriptor is “conversational.” You also need to know your customer base, and gear the writing to that level. There’s nothing wrong with aiming at a fifth-grade reading level, which seems to be the American average these days (and woe is that), but you can notch it up a tad if you have a more educated or technical audience.
By the way, remember that a blog post doesn’t have to be text only. You can include pictures and videos in your post, both of which can help to humanize the experience. There’s nothing like a picture of someone making or using a product to grab the reader’s attention and pull him into the process.