Blogs are different, quite unlike any of the other copy on most websites.

Strike that sentence.  It needs a rewrite.  Here’s how it should go:  Good blogs are different, unlike any of the other copy on their websites.

As with everything else, there are good blogs, fair blogs and awful blogs.  The good ones are written by people who understand the very real difference between blogging and copywriting product copy, articles, news items and other typical website elements.

To appreciate the difference, it helps to remember that blogs evolved not from the web’s commercial realm, but from its personal one.  Specifically, blogs are the direct descendant of the web journals in which people chronicled their lives, loves, hates, obsessions, compulsions, successes, failures, relationships and anything/everything else they wanted the world to know about them.

Blogging, in its infancy, was simply a more technologically efficient way to keep a journal and allow other people to find it and comment on the entries.

As it turned out, blogs were so efficient — so bloody easy for search-engine bots to access, among other things — that they quickly became a favorite way, in many cases a virtually essential way, for commercial website operators like us to communicate with customers and potential customers.

Because blogs — be they personal or commercial — are inherently individual communications which should be written as one-on-one conversations.  A blog may be read by five, 5,000, or five million people, but each entry should sound like it’s written to each one of them personally.

How do you do that? Good question.  If we knew the answer, we’d all be fully tenured creative writing professors instead of lowly creative writers.  Frankly, the only way we can explain it is to quote a great editor who once said, “always write as if you’re sitting around talking to a bunch of friends.”  If you remember that, and a few other things, you’ll be greatly increasing the odds of your blog becoming a raging success.

The few other things:

– Don’t write a pitch: A blog is not where you should put glowing descriptions of the old hulks on your used car lot or extol the virtues of “set it and forget it” cooking over “watch it and worry about it” cooking.  You have the rest of your website available for a hard sell, use your blog to win friends by giving them information in a non-aggressive, conversational way.

– Do sell your credibility: At the end of the day, your blog is all about you. If it’s done right, those reading it will be left with the impression that you shoot straight and know what you’re talking about.

This blog, for example, is our way of engaging you in a dialogue about different facets of web copywriting.  If the blog works as we intend, you might learn a few things you didn’t know, remember something about the subject you’d forgotten, or leave this site with a few things to think about before adding new content to your site.

At the least, we’d like you to come away from the blog with the feeling that those of us here at GetWebContent have a clue and are qualified to provide any copy you might need written now or in the future.

– Don’t let your blog languish: One of the biggest debates in the blogging world involves posting frequency.  Some experts advocate a rigid regular schedule, i.e. putting up a new post every Monday at 8:47 p.m.  Others say the exact timing doesn’t matter as long as the blog is updated regularly.  Everyone agrees on this:  Letting a blog get stale is a recipe for doom.

A blog is like a diary, some days — even some weeks — there’s simply nothing to say.  But a blog without a new entry at least every two or three weeks is like a diary with 80 percent of the pages blank, not very many people are going to be interested in it.

– Do respond to comments:  You’re “talking” to your friends, remember?  If you say “it’s hot enough to go to the beach” and a friend comments “you must be nuts, we’d freeze our butts off in bathing suits,” you’re going to come back with something, right?  A blog is a conversation, to make it “sticky” you need to hold up your end.  Be cool — as in polite — but do respond to both praise and criticism unless the comment is so basic (”I agree with what you said” or something similar) that no response is called for.

– Use your keywords, but don’t beat them to death:  Everyone knows the question about the tree falling in the forest … would it make any noise if there was no one there to hear it? A blog — any kind of writing, really — is sort of like that.  Would it be worth the effort if there was no one there to read it?

In order for people to read our blogs, they have to be able to find them.  People who visit our sites can find them via a link, others will most likely have to enter through a search-engine click.  So it’s important to lightly sprinkle your blog with SEO sweetener.  But only lightly.  Up to now, the major search engine algorithms seem to be working blogs quite a bit differently than they do other content like home page copy.

The important things seem to be freshness, relevance, perhaps even the amount of comments a blog attracts. So a small sampling of keywords, enough to establish the topic and the focus of the blog, is usually quite enough.

Always remember the bit about sitting around talking to your friends.  Let’s say you sell running shoes online.  And you’re sitting around talking to your friends about the Olympics.

Too many sentences like “the running shoes the American team uses are different from the running shoes the Algerian team has and the running shoes on the Nigerian team, which are high-top running shoes, while the Americans use low-cut running shoes and the Algerians wear lace-less running shoes” and even your very best friend will quit listening.

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