I find that the more I focus on writing unique content that logically explains my point, I have great success. I think it is better to post a great article once every other day than lots of junk posts!!! But that is my opinion.

BTW I used to teach, & trust me, a big wodge of text puts people to sleep!

Tanny
Internet Home Business Ideas

This is part of knowing your audience, yes? For example, Umberto Eco describes a scene from _The Three Musketeers_ in which our heroes ride a carriage up a hill in Paris. It’s a quiet scene, not moving the story forwward as much as moving us to where the story *can* move forward. And we read it and accept it. Now, Eco asks, what would happen if the characters left the carriage and saw that *the horse had no legs*?!

In some stories, that would work — but not _The Three Musketeers_. It’s not *that* kind of story, and Dumas’ readers, the readers he has created (inasmuch as our expectations are set by the author’s work) wouldn’t accept it. It would be weird, out of place, and ultimately unbelievable — even to readers who have accepted the various intrigues and coincidences that make up the plot of _Three Musketeers_.

If your readers accept that you’re hanging out with Keef and Tom, then it works. Mine wouldn’t, since I’ve given no reason to expect that this situation would be true. So unless I work overtime to explain how this situation came to be, few readers are going to accept it — and since I’m not a fiction writer, most will call BS instead of thinking “oh, Dustin’s experimenting here. Suddenly, instead of offering writing advice, he’s making up some kind of story about famous people.”

This all goes way beyond the original intention of the post, of course — that kind of believability is bound up in your entire professional reputation, the history you’ve created for yourself in your professional life, and the way you present yourself on your site (or elsewhere).

Daniel: on “titles + interesting content” — yeah, it’s a pretty good strategy, isn’t it? :-)

Dustin, this is an all-inclusive advice for bloggers out there. As a creative writing blogger myself, I also gave quite a number of advice to my blogging friends. Check out some of them here. The first part doesnt quite apply to me however. Though I quite like to see many comments and digg mentions, trackbacks etc for my blog, I believe that I don’t much care when I have done posting. If people like it, they will promtoe it otherwise no.

Ten tips to write great content This is quite an early time post in my creative writing blog. I hope it can be a good addition to this superior post.

Lenin

It is very interesting that you mentioned about a post being a masterpiece. Early this year, I made a post about How to Make your Post a Masterpiece and I hope Darren and his readers would not mind if I share the first part.

Know your gift.

This is very important when you are choosing a subject. You will look like a trying hard copy cat if you post about a popular topic that you are not capable of. Analyze your inner soul and write about something that you like most. If painting requires a steady hand, then article writing requires healthy fingers. There is a big difference between a musician and a composer. After all, it is still the talent that counts first.

Thanks.

Haha, I’d so read the rest of the rest. Even if the blogger him or herself believes it’s real or not, usually there’s quite some creativity which went into it.

Although I agree with some parts of your post there are also definitely those which I disagree on, for example a headline like earn $5000 an hour is something I’d never read as it simply smells like nothing more than a scam from miles away.

Or inserting affiliate links, I always check where links are heading before I click first, especially if it’s not stated that it’s an affiliate link I see it as rude trying to lure people into pyramid schemes like that and I just stop reading the post, if the blogger does it too much I stop reading the blog at all.

Your points were good though, many of the things which I’m still trying to teach myself step by step. It’s going in very little babysteps though.

There is a place within blogdom for the simply information: who, what, when, where, why, the whole journalism 101 thing. But that’s rare — the tech news site, the fast-breaking political filter site, etc. Most bloggers seem to model themselves after the feature writers whose articles don’t just inform (not that that’s any small thing) but *make sense* of our world. And those articles tend to follow pretty much the same rules. They open with a concrete image (”Barack Obama didn’t always want to kiss babies. But when Mathilda Livingstonertherhouse of Madge, OH held up her baby…”) and “sell” a particular way of viewing a set of events. The best ones walk you through, point to point, to the seemingly “natural” conclusion.

I think we should model our writing on journalism not advertisements. At least for those of us who want to give information and not just sell stuff.

Of course we will hear lots from those who believe in copywriting – they are advertisers after all. But I think people get rapidly tired of reading ads.

There is some good advice they have though – writing readably and so on. But journalism has all the advantages and none of the drawbacks of writing ads.