People referred me from DP to here.

Thanks again. I just started blogging.

Again, you say readers enjoy writing that is “conversational”. That, I would imagine, depends on whose conversation. Most people in conversation are inarticulate, staccatic, disjointed and cliched. The beauty of writing is, you can think through your sentences beforehand, and edit them after. Writing should be anything but like conversation.

Beware of dogma. There are those who think the quality of writing today has become sloppy and dumb, precisely because of advice like yours. See for the kind of writing that used to be worthy of the erudite reader.

Copyblogger has a lot of good resources on getting to the point fast, and cutting out filler material.

Cheers

Dev from http://www.dailymoolah.com

But the advice to be “extremely useful”, “concise”, and “common-sense” can be limiting: Communicating a truly original idea often involves saying something not immediately useful, simple, or common-sensical, but rather something challenging, complex, and not obviously applicable to life in the next moment.

The question, then, is what is meant by an “exceptional blog”, and whether the value of wide readership should be supreme. I personally believe that many exceptional ideas can only be communicated to a limited audience, in a style that may be more complex than is encouraged by Leo’s advice (as well as his own writing).

I believe the best way of applying Leo’s suggestions is only in the final stage of writing – aiming to edit an almost ready-to-go article for simplicity, textual and visual clarity, and an attractive headline – rather than aiming to write blog articles following these guidelines as foundational principles.

I couldn’t agree with this post more if I tried. Very on target, too bad more people can’t “get it”.

I’ve gained traction after only 3 weeks with a small food blog I started, Blake Makes, and I think the reason I’ve been able to gain an audience is content.

I try to write short, pithy posts, but I spend a lot of time on getting a really great picture of the food I’m blogging about. Pictures are another form of great content in my opinion, goes to the scannable aspect mentioned above.

Bottom line, nothing good happens overnight. Nothing great comes easy. If it did, I doubt we would nurture it as much as we should something so special. bk

Even though my blog is only 3 months old my traffic has been very good and my ranking on Google’s search engine has been page 2 (a few times page 1) on the search engine results.

I concentrate more on my content than anything else.