Review: Better Blog Writing – How to Improve Your Writing to Keep Readers Coming Back for More

Back when I started blogging in 2005, blogs were still something new. Fresh. Different. Anytime I told anyone I had a blog, it was always met with a side-cocked head a la Scooby Doo. There was a small collection of food bloggers, small enough where we knew each other well, and a seemingly small group of non-food bloggers. And then, of course, Dooce.

Back then, blogs weren’t taken really seriously and they were merely ways to pass the time. The more popular blogs became, the more people wanted in. Especially as bloggers started to make money. Book deals. TV shows. Endorsement deals. Sponsored posts. Conferences. Many perks. New blogs pop up on the daily, many with hopes of making it big and dreams of quitting their full-time job in pursuit of blogging from home in their pajamas.

And then reality sets in.

Those of us that have been around since the beginning know the work that blogging involves. Besides the day-to-day routine of writing, editing, and photographing your own content, there is still the behind-the-scenes work of learning code, marketing your work, researching plug-ins, and much more.

It’s not all take-a-pretty-picture-and-write, repeat.

Especially if you want to make money at it. And this is even more true as you begin to work with clients on sponsored posts, advertising, and the like. More rules, deadlines, FCC compliance issues, competition, and responsibility.

Which means that like anything else, only the people that are most serious stick with it.

But one of the most common themes of having a successful blog?

We have to have a solid foundation of good writing skills.

While writing a blog is a very different animal than writing something that won’t live online forever, any written content starts with the basics: good writing. And “good” refers to engaging content as much as it refers to the technical aspects of it. Because, honestly, who wants to read a blog rife with grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, boring content, and crappy pictures.

Blogging is fun, but it’s work y’all.

Enter Sarah Caron’s book, Better Blog Writing: How to Improve Your Writing to Keep Readers Coming Back for More.

Whether you’re a seasoned blog writer or the new kid on the block, you’ll find something useful in Sarah’s first e-book. Starting at the very beginning, literally and figuratively, the book takes you step-by-step on the journey to building a solid blog, starting with your why. A reasonably quick read, the book focuses on the fact that you can’t be a good blogger if you’re not a good writer first.

With easy-to-follow guidelines throughout, the focus is on polishing your writing skills and honing your craft to insure that your online content receives optimal results once it is released. As the book concentrates on the basics of writing, it also shares blogging tips throughout each chapter. While many might seem like pure common sense suggestions, sometimes it’s those very suggestions that we need reminders of the most. There are writing exercises and good practical tips for new bloggers, as well as helpful grammatical and technical reminders on content for seasoned bloggers.

At the end of every chapter, you will find an actionable item that will help you quickly put into practice what you just read, as well as individual reader perspectives throughout, and these were the parts of the book that I found most useful.

Hungry for more book reviews?

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2. Touch and Go
3. A Million Miles in a Thousand Years
4. Here I Go Again
5. Most Talkative: Stories from the Front Lines of Pop Culture
6. Drinking & Tweeting and Other Brandi Blunders
7. Cleaving
8. 7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess
9. What I Learned When I Almost Died
10. Dwarf: A Memoir
11. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
12. The Honest Life: Living Naturally and True to Yourself