I recently wrote an article about editorial calendars and how they can help bloggers build a backlog of topics. It's so wonderful not to run out of ideas that I called them a blogger's best friend. I'd like to introduce you to your second best friend: checklists. This hoary organization tool can keep you from looking foolish – or worse.
If you want to read that earlier article, here's a link. This article, however, will be more concerned with what happens after you've written your masterpiece of a post. The work doesn't stop after you finish typing. In a sense, you got the hard part out of the way by writing what was once called the first draft, but now it needs a little polish.
Don't worry; I'm not going to pretend I'm your high school English teacher and force you to write three or four drafts of the same post to get it right. That would be counterproductive. Many, if not most, blog entries weigh in at under 600 words, maintain a conversational tone, and try to find a tie-in to current events of one form or another. Even in such a casual and “ephemeral” medium (can anything on the Internet truly be ephemeral?), you must have standards.
The good news is that Theodore Sturgeon's law applies to blogging – that is, ninety percent of everything is crap. Yes, that's GOOD news, because simply by checking over your work and making sure it meets certain standards, you'll already be rising above the worst examples in the field. This will help you get noticed and properly indexed by the search engines. You'll also stand out to those using the search engines to find relevant information, which could increase your traffic.
I'd like to tip my hat to search engine marketing consultant Jennifer Slegg, whose article helped me understand the importance of a checklist to blogging. While I don't use the one that Slegg gives, I do check my articles for many of the items she mentions. After all, good writing is good writing, whether you're doing a blog entry or a PhD dissertation (though I should hope you'd use different “voices” with each one!). So certain rules will carry over regardless of what you're writing.
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