Advice for Blog Content Writers: Hard on the Grammar, Easy on the Links

Social media and blog marketing maven Douglas Karr has some on-the-mark remarks about “The Anatomy of a Perfect Landing Page”. 

With this week’s Say It For You blog posts devoted to using other bloggers’ pearls of wisdom as a jumping-off point for me to offer business blogging help to owners and freelance blog content writers, I found two of Karr’s recommendations to be particularly valuable for writing blogs.

Everyone who knows me at all well is familiar with my near-maniacal preoccupation with proper language usage. Informal and conversational as business blog writing might be, I constantly stress to anyone blogging for business – or anyone providing business blogging services – how important it is to check for “spinach-in-the-teeth” bloopers in their SEO marketing blog content.

“Impeccable grammar” in the world-according- to-Karr, ensures “the trust of the customer will not be risked.” One very common error Doug and I discussed is the misuse of “it’s” and “its”. The apostrophe, I stress to blog content writers in Indianapolis (for some reason, this particular error seems to occur more commonly with Hoosier writers), is there to replace the letter “i” as in “it is”, whereas “its” means “belonging to it”. 

#7 on the Karr web page Anatomy Cautions is “Go easy on the links”.  In business blog writing, I teach, links can be useful in a number of ways:

• Linking to news sources lends credibility to your company’s point of view
• Linking to someone else’s writing on your subject as part of business blog writing shows you’re in touch with what’s going on in your industry
• Linking can be a form of networking through exchanging ideas.  Anyone providing business blogging help should advise clients to use their blogs as networking tools.

I think, though, that Karr would agree that hyperlinking to other sources belongs in the “slow” category in the system of “Go”, “Slow”, and “Whoa” elements in corporate blog writing, a tool that can easily be overused and become distracting rather than helpful to the reader.

In summary, blog content writers – go hard on the grammar, easy on the links!