09 Blog Writing Tips for Bloggers and Copywriters to Boost Their Writing Skills

Bloggers and copywriters always have to keep on improving their writing skills to make the quality of their work better. 

If they stop learning new stuff, their skills can stagnate…and this can lead to them failing to deliver high-quality content to their clients.

In this post, we’re going to be talking about 09 blog writing tips that bloggers and copywriters can try out to boost their writing skills.

Let’s get “write” into it.

09 Blog Writing Tips to Improve Blogging and Copywriting Skills

The blog writing tips that we are going to be talking about are actionable and easy to implement. Where possible, we’ll show a practical demonstration of the tips to help you understand them better.

1. Use a Good Software for Writing

This is not really something a lot of people will think of as a way of improving writing skills, but it is a good tip to follow. We’ll explain it in detail.

The software that you use for writing i.e., your word processing or text editing software, basically decides what type of formatting and styling options you have access to. 

For example, if you use MS Word for creating your drafts, you’ll be able to use different heading styles and fonts, and you will be able to set things like the size, color, orientation, line spacing, indentation etc.

On the other hand, if you choose to write your content on a simple text editing tool, you won’t be able to do a lot of styling and formatting.

Now, let’s come to how choosing the right software can boost your writing skill.

The answer’s simple.

When you have access to multiple styling and formatting features, you can organize your content properly and make it aesthetic for your readers. 

You can use different font types and colors if you ever have to give examples, stress a point, or write definitions. You can also insert charts, tables, images, graphs and clipart etc.

Since all of these options will help in making your write-ups and documents look engaging and more readable, they will ultimately contribute to enhancing your writing skills as well.

2. Check Every Write-Up for Grammar and Spelling Errors

To improve your writing skills, you have to stay on top of your grammar and spelling-related shortcomings. 

Frequent grammar and spelling mistakes can make your write-ups look amateurish, and they can have a very negative impact on the impression that your content has on the reader.

There are two different methods that you can adopt for finding and fixing grammar errors in your work. 

Along with helping you actively find the imperfections in your content, following these methods will also help you learn about the errors that you’re more prone to make than others.

So, the first thing that you can do to find and fix the grammar/spelling errors in your content is to read it manually a couple of times. 

Manually proofreading the content can help you find typographical errors that you can fix on the spot. During this process, you will be able to understand the typos that you’re more ‘vulnerable’ to as compared to others.

While manual reading and re-reading is a useful technique, it doesn’t actually help you learn anything new since you operate within the confines of your own knowledge.

For example, if you don’t know about a particular grammar error, to begin with, you won’t be able to detect it during the proofreading phase.

This is where the second method can be very useful i.e., using a grammar/spell checker to find your errors. 

When you use a dedicated tool for the job, you’re able to increase your knowledge and know-how while simultaneously improving the quality of your content.

3. Always Remember to Take Care of Plagiarism

Just as checking your content for grammar errors is important, the same goes for plagiarism. From a certain perspective, plagiarism is more dangerous and harmful to your write-ups as compared to grammar errors.

Here’s how.

If some content on a particular blog is found to be plagiarized, the search engine can hit it (the blog/website) with a penalty. Search engine penalties can range from a rank reduction to complete website delisting.

While there are many consequences of plagiarism, they’re not unavoidable. Finding plagiarism in a piece of content only requires a plagiarism detector. There are numerous such tools available on the internet, and a lot of them can be used for free as well.

However, when using a plagiarism detector, you have to make sure that you pick a good tool that is popularly known to provide accurate results.

The reason that we’re highlighting this point is that there are a number of such tools available online that can either skip whole chunks of plagiarized content altogether, or they can have such a sensitive algorithm that highlights every other word as ‘plagiarized’.

4. Avoid Using Passive Voice

Now, let’s move on to some tips that directly pertain to the writing process.

Bloggers and copywriters have to write stuff that directly engages the reader. That is why they have to make sure that their content is readable and easy to understand.

One effective way to make the content easily comprehensible is to drastically reduce the use of passive voice and to prioritize active voice wherever possible.

Passive voice can make your sentences look needlessly convoluted, which can consequently make your overall content difficult to read.

Active voice, on the other hand, is more direct and to the point. Here, check out this example:

Passive Voice: The door was opened by him, and the cat was turned out by him. (Horrible)

Active Voice: He opened the door and turned the cat out. (Much Better)

5. Learn to Break Your Content Up as Much as Possible

This tip can also be useful for improving the readability of your content.

When you want to write a blog post or a marketing copy, try and segment it as much as possible. 

In a blog post, you can usually do this by adding a heading for the intro, splitting up the main body into different sub-headings and then finishing with a conclusion.

The benefit of breaking your content up like this is that if your reader needs to read a certain portion or part of your blog post, they can quickly skip to it.

Plus, breaking your content into parts by adding heading styles is also beneficial from an SEO perspective. You’ll probably be acquainted with this if you are a blogger.

When your content is categorized properly in H2s and H3s, it is easily crawled by search engines. This helps in improving its ranking. 

The headings are also a good spot for adjusting the content keywords, which also adds to the SEO-friendliness.

6. Get in the Habit of Using Simple Words

Some writers – especially rookies – can often run off with the idea that if their content has a lot of advanced words in it, it will look nice.

But this presumption is fallacious since the onus is not on the readers to extricate the meanings of your sophisticated vocabulary from their lexicons.

Yes, that’s how it looks when someone tries to flaunt their vocabulary without considering the level of their readers.

So, whenever you’re writing a blog or a copy, you have to understand that it will actually be read by a human being…and not some sort of robot. Hence, your focus should be on keeping the words simple.

If you go overboard with the vocabulary, you can wreck your reputation as an author by coming off as pretentious and showy. You’ll also be likely to lose your readership.

7. Try and Add Interesting Facts and Figures to Your Content

Did you know that 63.5% people of the entire population of the world uses the internet?

That sounds interesting, doesn’t it? Look how it suddenly added a touch of ‘research-ness’ and ‘reliability’ to this post.

Adding these sorts of (relevant) facts and figures to your content, and then backing them up by linking them to a reliable source can highly improve the quality of your content. 

As a blogger and/or copywriter, making your writing look reliable to your readers can benefit you a lot.

Just as there are rules for every other tip that we’ve mentioned in this post, so too there are rules for adding such information to your content.

When adding linked facts/figures to your write-up, you have to make sure that you:

• Don’t overdo it by adding a lot of them in quick succession;
• Link to a reliable website and not some spammy one from the 10^th or 11^th page of the search engine;
• Add the link i.e., the blue underlined part on the figure itself or (if you’re mentioning a fact) on an impactful word.

8. Pay Special Attention to the Conclusion/Introduction of Your Content

A lot of people on the internet don’t go through an entire blog post or article published by an online source. Rather, they just go to the introduction or the conclusion to get the core crux of the whole discussion.

Some readers may read the introduction or conclusion to get an idea of whether the material they are looking for is discussed in the particular post or not.

That is why, when writing a blog post or an article for copywriting purposes, you have to give special attention to the conclusion and the introduction.

When writing both of these parts, you basically have to summarize your content. In the introduction, your tone should have a “commencing” air to it, and it should lead into the actual body of the post/article. On the other hand, when writing the conclusion, your tone should be conclusionary. Duh.

Given the above, we can appreciate that having good summarizing skills is necessary for writing a good conclusion and introduction. 

Now, for some people, especially rookies, it can be a little difficult to summarize the content on their own. During the process, they may leave out a crucial detail or they could drag it on for too long.

For these types of people, using an online summary generator can be a good solution. These online tools are designed to create an extractive summary of the provided input.

In other words, these tools extract the key sentences from the content and then join them together to form the summary.

The benefit of using a summary generator is that they allow you (in most cases) to set the length of the output. 

Thanks to this feature, rookies can create a summary without having to worry about making it too long. They will be able to simply pre-set the length before starting the process.

However, we should be honest about how well summarizing tools can work. While there are exceptions, these tools normally don’t provide a perfect summary of the content entered. 

Since they use the extractive technique, there can be some degree of abruptness and lack of flow in the output. This, you have to edit and fix yourself.

9. Learn to Create and Add Visuals

Although visuals don’t exactly come within the ambit of ‘writing skills’, they do play a major role in improving the quality of the written content. That is why we’re mentioning this tip here.

Now, looking at this heading, you might be wondering “adding visuals makes sense…but why learn to create them as well?”

Let’s explain.

Adding visuals to your content is recommended and necessary for obvious reasons. They help to give color to the otherwise bland text, and they can also be used to help elaborate or explain the content (as is the case with guides and tutorials).

But…

Where can you get visuals? Considering copyright issues, the only places where you can safely take copyright free stock images are websites such as Pexels, Unsplash, and Pixabay.

However, the hitch with using images from these types of sites is that they are used by other people as well…and they can give your content a generic look.

To counter and solve this issue, you can simply use graphic design software, such as Canva, and make your own visuals.

Final Thought on Blog Writing Tips

Improving writing skills is not a simple and straightforward process. There are a lot of different aspects and facets that you have to take care of.

In this post, we covered some important blog writing tips here that you can start with.

If we want to summarize the theme of this entire post and encapsulate it in a single tip, we can say that you should simply focus on making your content optimized for your readers as well as the search engines.