Tip for bloggers: get more links with well good English

Let me start off by saying that if you’re not reading ProBlogger, you should be. Consistently good content? You will find it there.

Today (well, tomorrow if you go by the post date) there is a guest post there by Sudeep D’Souza with his 9 tips for successful blogging.

I think the most important one is tip number 9:

9. Writing a good post takes time and patience

There may be few gifted bloggers out there that can churn out interesting posts easily. Some have this skill from practice, and for some, it is a gift, but for the majority of us it is hard work right from coming up with the title to the way the post is structured to the content of the post. Be prepared to go through many iterations of it before you come up with the post that you would feel proud to publish.

I like to think of myself as one of those few, talented, sometimes annoying writers who can spit out well-oiled posts with nary a re-write and few ticks of the clock.

But the fact is that I need to check my grammar, look up words like “nary” to make sure I’m using them right, and re-write my headline a few times to make sure I’m including the right keywords. In fact, I think the “gifted, write-once” blogger is largely a myth.

I bet that if you look at the top bloggers, almost all of them re-read their big posts before they take them live.

The good think about blogging is that you don’t have to be literary to be successful. But that doesn’t mean that good posts come easy. You still need to think about structure and phrasing.

Concise and convincing writing will be quoted, credited, and linked to far more often than mangled sentences, no matter how good your ideas are. It’s worth a second pass to get there.