Professional blogging in practice: part 2

Following on from last week’s post about finding sources, today I’m looking at the rest of the professional blogger’s daily pipeline.

Once you’ve found something to write about, it’s time to sit back, relax and let your blogger instincts do the rest. Right? Perhaps. Once you get into the habit of posting multiple times a day on the same site, a lot of the following stages in a post’s lifecycle do become second nature, but when you’re starting out it’s useful to run through the checklist in your head.

Writing the post

The first step in writing most posts is to devise a headline. Headline writing is definitely an art form, and the easiest way to get it right is to check out other headlines on the site. (If you’re devising your own professional blog from scratch this might prove tricky!). Things to look for: Capitalisation, Consistency and Keywords. How does your blog capitalise long headlines? How do you deal with regular features and multipart posts? Where do you generally find the keywords in a headline — are they SEO-optimised or does the site favour pithy, snarky one-liners to draw readers in?

If you’re unsure where to begin with a catchy headline, Google for some tips and don’t forget your editor or blog lead as a very useful source of help.

The basic tips I can offer with writing the post body are: get used to writing fast, get used to communicating fairly tersely (although not so terse as to contain zero information), and — unless you have supreme confidence in your writing ability — spellcheck, or at least use an editor that will flag up obvious mistakes. Even if you’re the most accurate typist in the world, one will slip through sooner or later, and the last thing you need is to look sloppy.

The rest of the writing part is down to you. Obviously check out your house style and follow any relevant naming and stylistic conventions; italicise, capitalise, embolden, emdash, etc. Soon this will become second nature. Don’t waffle — you’re not (usually) getting paid by the word, and readers will tune out.

Add appropriate images

Many blogs require, as part of their house style, an eye-catching image to start off the post (or sit alongside it). Despite the generally lax approach to image reuse on the Internet, you have to be careful once things start getting commercial; beware of images that explicitly forbid copying, attribute where attributions are due, and if in doubt, check for Creative Commons-licenced content. You may well have access to a bank of images that have already been used on the site, which can be especially useful.

If you’re feeling particularly lazy, search the blog for previous posts on the same topic and reuse an image from an old post — this can work well if you are on the move without access to a decent image editor, too. However, original is best; if you can come up with an original shot, especially if you’re covering a live event, use it. It adds value to your post and might even get distributed elsewhere if it’s good.

Metadata ahoy

Professional blogs love visitors, and especially love visitors who stay and look around the site, as well as those who regularly drop by. Plus, there’s always the beloved SEO — optimising your blog for search doesn’t work if none of the posts ever come up on Google.

The metadata you add to a post has multiple uses. By adding tags, attributions, source links, categories and keywords, you enable better discovery through search and pingbacks, as well as making it easier to find your post in future if another is written on the same topic. Again, house style and consistency are important here — do you use spaces in tags, no spaces, or dashes? Do you use British or American spelling? What tag do you use for a specific event or company?

Blogs and the web are intricately hyperlinked; adding both internal and external links throughout your post is extremely valuable, letting readers discover other parts of the blog related to your content, as well as other posts on the Internet. Third parties are always happy to be linked by major professional blogs, but be careful not to shill a specific site, especially if it’s your own. Don’t link every single keyword to the appropriate category on your site; you want people to treat the blog like Wikipedia, diving in for pleasure, rather than a hyperlinked advertisement.

Of course, you can add your own element of style here. On particularly pithy posts, I remember linking to a cartoon or amusing cat picture more than once. As long as it’s safe for work, it doesn’t always have to be about self-promotion.

Schedule

Setting a post to go live at a certain time is probably the least tricky of all the stages in its lifecycle. There are still things to consider, though! Firstly, check the day’s planned coverage and attempt to fill in any gaps. If you’re posting a feature with a regular timeslot, you obviously want to stick to it, but otherwise you can post whenever you like. House rules might require you to schedule only on-the-hour or similar, but that’s easy enough to figure out; obviously, if it’s breaking news, this goes right out of the window.

Once you’ve scheduled your post, step away from it for a few minutes. Walk the dog, make a coffee, dash to the supermarket. Then check the site to see what it will look like when published. By scheduling it, you’ve effectively signed it off as-is; a fresh read will easily pick up any glaring typos, awkward sentences and missing tags. You also get a chance to see it in the page layout rather than the page editor, so you can check things like image dimensions versus length of the first paragraph, whether your post is too long and should have a ‘read more’ link, etc.

Promote

It’s always in your best interests to get more people reading your stuff. On an advertising-funded blog, more pageviews means more revenue means, eventually, more pay for you (probably). On other blogs, more visitors means more potential customers. Some sites leave post promotion entirely up to the writer, others have editors actively looking to cross-pollinate anything they can, so it helps to figure out which yours is.

Self-promotion on the Internet is a complicated game, but my main concern — based on past experience — is to say please, please, make sure what you have is worth promoting before you spam it everywhere. Submitting every single story you write to Digg won’t increase the chances of the one awesome story you write making the front page. Although there are many automated news ranking systems, plenty of promotion submissions do go past human eyes and becoming known as a spammer who tries to game the system won’t make you friends.

Of course, I may be too conservative on this front. The best posts I ever made got promoted by other people (usually my site lead) and filtered around the Internet thanks to coverage on Digg and other sites, so it definitely works. I just believe there’s enough noise to signal out there already that the ratio doesn’t need to be increased.

Babysitting

Once you’re done with the post, you’re done, right? No more work. On to the next!

Nope.

In the majority of cases you don’t need to do much after you’ve scheduled and let your baby go. Housekeeping on every post usually consists of keeping comments in check — deleting spam and applying house rules (whether you moderate flamewars or let them reign unchecked). Here’s where the reality of being a blogger in the spotlight really hits: comments will, sooner or later, be hurtful and personal. Unless you’re writing about the tamest of subject matter (and probably not even then), people will dislike what you say and use the power of the Internet to tell you this with as much vitriol as they can muster.

How you deal with this is down to you, but always remember you’re the one being paid to write about stuff, and they’re not. That’s not to say you should totally ignore criticism — factual errors should be corrected as soon as noticed, and well-worded disagreement can even spark off new posts.

If the subject of your post changes after it’s gone live, you also need to keep the post up to date to maintain accuracy and credibility. Editing a post because something changes isn’t bad, but editing a post because you were too sloppy to notice a typo is, especially if your house rules require you to flag all updates.

You’re likely working as part of a team, and their eyes and feedback might pick up on errors you missed; similarly you might spot their typos and inaccuracies. It’s usually polite to let the original author maintain their own post, or failing that, defer to the editor; obviously this varies from site to site. However, you wouldn’t like a co-writer randomly editing one of your posts, so don’t do the same to them!

Babysitting a post might seem like hard work for zero reward, since you already wrote the thing and got paid for it. However, a little effort keeping your writing up to date and accurate will pay off in the long run.

Conclusion

Many of the stages of blogging are done almost reflexively by most writers, but making the leap from musings on Blogspot to standing in the spotlight and being paid for it can be a tough transition. By thinking like a professional, using all the resources at hand and working with your blogging team, it’ll all soon be second nature.

Part three of this series (next week) will look beyond the blog, at healthy working habits for the solo writer.