Consider this what happens when journalism major has reached the six-year mark in real estate blogging ... here are a handful of handy-dandy tips to improving your blogging:
- Make it worth the readers' while. While people don't want posts to read like Michener novels, they also expect more than what they can find in Twitter. If you're writing less than 200 words on a topic, you probably don't have a great deal to say about it in general. And for what it's worth, many news articles you read in the newspaper are 500 to 800 words in length (barring the longer features.)
- Watch your spelling. Maybe it's just the degree, but few things are as grating as poor spelling in an article; it's like being hit upside the head with a wrench mid-sentence. Your is a possessive, you're is the contraction for you are. They are interchangeable. Lose means to come in second, or fail to retain something. Loose means ill-fitting. These aren't interchangeable either. Don't blame your spell check. This is fourth-grade stuff. (And don't get me started on the use of apostrophes.)
- If you're unsure, have someone else read your article to see if it makes sense. There have been some posts here where, try as I might, I can't parse what the writer was trying to say. Stream of conciousness with little punctuation and random capitalization does not make for readibility.
Lastly, two quick notes specific to Active Rain:
- Forget the Members Only checkbox. The Internet is forever and not only real estate agents are here. If you're writing something that you wouldn't be comfortable seeing on a billboard, don't write it at all. And especially don't write it, check Members Only and think you're going stealth. Things don't work that way.
- This is just me ... but being a different religion than the majority, religious posts kinda rub me the wrong way. I have no issue with anyone's religion or spiritual choices. But you may want to be aware you could be turning off as many people as you're relating to with such choices. If you're cool with that, so am I.
Hope this helps someone out there. Happy blogging!
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