Writers ‘Block and Blogging

I am blogging since last over 11 years. Blogging is a great way to communicate with the audience your point of view, opinion, ideas. It also provides the writer with an opportunity to get connected with his audience in a dialogue and discussion. It’s a two way magazine. The versatility of blog is due to its medium, the internet.  In my opinion, and I am sure most would agree, that Internet is one of the greatest invention after wheel which has changed the society in a revolutionary manner.  

For the students, blog is an excellent tool, which can not only help them in refining their writing skills, but also being able to develop a thought into an article, it will help them consolidate the concept in a proper and presentable manner. Starting a blog is the easiest thing, the tough part is writing it on a regular basis, with unique topics, which would be of interest to the audience. Getting new ideas is a challenge. One can get help from many sites and pages suggesting ideas for blogs. But most of the time when you go through them, you find that you also had some of the ideas, but still were unable to write anything beyond few lines, it is the dreaded writer’s block. All your ideas all your thoughts seem to end at blind alley.  I am also currently going through the same stage hence; my posts are intermittent, and sparse. While going through the pages I just mentioned, I came across a blogger Neil Patel’s page neilpatel.com. He gave some great ideas, which are not about suggesting topic and areas to write on, but about finding the topics and ideas of relevance, from the point of view of the readers. One of his suggestions was to go to quora.com and look for the questions that people are asking. You might have better answers to the questions, you might also find some good keywords, on which you may elaborate or write detailed posts.

In my many years of blogging I have come across many blogs, some I find interesting enough to follow, I would like to mention a particular blog named “rollingstone-revelations” by Mr. T.K. Koshy. I find it worth mentioning because of the clarity and conciseness of posts. Mr. Koshy has also categorized his posts in different labels, which are helpful for a reader to identify the topic of his interest. 

What should be ideal length of a blog post? Well it depends on for what purpose you are writing your blog, if it is a fun blog, which you are writing just to share your random ideas and thoughts, then there is no such stipulation on length of the post, but if you are a professional blogger who wishes to have his blog reach to larger audience, he should pump in more words, lot more than people generally trust, most bloggers trust that the ideal length of post should be between 200-500 words, but from SEO angle, the average length of blog posts should be around 1900 words.

Having said that, one should not really bother how long his post is, there are many variables that define, or help one decide on the best length of the article or blog posts. The most significant being – the consumer of your post, that is the target audience, depending on the target audience, one should decide the tone, tenor and length of the blog post.  Another factor is the nature of the post, and the length would depend on how many words, sentences and paragraphs can explain the concept, thought or idea can explain it to the reader.

We all know that attention span is much shorter on screen that it is there on printed text in hard form, but this should not make one shorten the text. Attention span is definitely short when one is browsing on non-serious things, or just surfing casually, but when one is reading something of his interest or need, irrespective of the medium of communication one pays interest.  “Quality over Quantity” is always a better proposition.  Though no one can deny the importance of substance or length of content, but just to maintain the length using redundant words or sentences doesn’t help at all, rather it adversely affects the readability quotient of the content.

One should be very clear about the topic, the keywords and the audience. Like any piece of text which intends to communicate, the blog post also needs to have an introduction of the topic, concept, thought or story; then a body which describes the crux of it, and concluding paragraph or sentence.

Being on the internet gives a unique advantage to a blog post writer while communicating his thought to the people; he can use multimedia information to substantiate, support, and explain his concept. The cross reference is also handier in case of internet where just a hyperlink would do the job.

The facilities at internet also come with challenge for the writers. You just can’t write anything and get away with. Your content can easily be verified on the internet for its originality or correctness. Of course one does get inspiration from some place, but inspiration should remain only inspiration, it should not entice you into plagiarism.  Sometimes it becomes important to cite reference or quote content from different sites, but in that case it is pertinent to share the source of the references and acknowledge the original writer of that content.  

Internet is a collaborative medium, no one owns it but everybody can use it, it is like a city where cybercitizens live, work and play. Like every other city, on cyber-city too, it is the responsibility of the citizens to abide by the social norms and values, as it makes it comfortable for everyone.

I hope my writers block has removed blocks from many of you who were thinking of starting a blog, and may be some of you who were not thinking would start consider writing blogs. It’s a great way to improve your skills.  Before closing let me reemphasize that your goal should never be to write 500 words, 1000 words, or 2000 words post. No length can be considered as “perfect length” so stop worrying about the length, let your fingers dance on your keyboards and let the magic happen.

Size doesn’t matter, at least not on blog posts.