How to make interesting blog articles? - For those of you who already have a personal blog, you may know that there are various types of blogs that are created, from those just for sharing daily life, travel blogs that specifically explore bloggers' journeys to a place, or just being a place to vent about their worries. your relationship with your friends, girlfriend, family or your surprise, until there is also a blog that contains interesting learnings that they see from the phenomena that are around them.
The purpose of the target reader in a blog can also be various, some are intended to be read by general readers, some wish to be read only by close friends, some do not want to be read by other people, just for self-reflection. alone.
From what I've noticed, most of the young bloggers (15-21 years) always take the topics of their daily lives to include in blog articles. Very few people take tips blog themes that contain interesting things that can be learned around them.
Actually, there's nothing wrong with it if you really enjoy writing about your daily life, just a suggestion from me, try to write 2-3 serious articles every now and then about the things you learn from the environment around you.
I'm sure your learning process will be much more ridiculous if you can "catch the meaning" of every incident that you observe on a daily basis and put it back in written form.
Because actually, almost everything that happens around you has its own meaning, starting from your experience interacting with the surrounding environment, from the movies you watch, from the books you read, or even from the process of changing the paradigm of your way of thinking.
For those of you who read my previous article about Soe Hok Gie's brief biography, there I discussed how Gie has consistently written his diary for 11 years. If you ever read Gie's diary, there is one thing that makes Soe Hok Gie's figure so alluring and interesting to explore in depth.
That's because in his diary, he doesn't just discuss things that happen in his daily life. But Gie can also see the "meaning" of every incident that happens in his life.
Well, it is precisely from his writings that we understand the learning process he went through in his life, his intellectual development, and the reasons behind every struggle, thought, inspiration, and all the considerations that underlie his decisions in life.
The same thing can be seen in those who write diaries or autobiographies of their lives such as Anne Frank, Hellen Keller, Kartini, and other world figures.
So, in filling this holiday, Zenius challenges all of you to start actively writing articles on your respective blogs.
Especially for writing articles that are based on the learning that you get from what you experience, or you read, watch, listen to, in your daily life.
For those of you who already have a personal blog, this is an opportunity to improve the quality of your writing. For those of you who don't have a blog yet, this is an opportunity to start capturing your life's work, experiences, ideas and thoughts in written form.
What is the definition of an interesting blog article?
Okay, this "interesting" context may be a bit abstract, but let's try to make the indicators so that they are easy to evaluate, okay? Practically, we just agree that the interesting articles are articles that are widely read by netizens (internet users). Logically, if our article is interesting, then people who read it will also tend to share it with their other friends, either through social media, messenger, and so on. Well, this benchmark is actually a bit oversimplifying, but let's just assume that this is a fairly accurate indicator. okay?
But by the way, what about the articles on the Zenius Blog itself? To what extent is the Zenius article considered interesting based on the indicators we agreed on earlier? Okay, as an illustration, below I share some Zenius Blog traffic data from a period of almost 2 years, from January 2013 to today December 2014.
Okay, from the Zenius Blog traffic development above, you can see that the Zenius article page has been read 4.2 million times in a period of less than 2 years. So, here I just give an overview of measurable indicators of whether the writings that Zenius Blog publishes are considered interesting or not by the audience of readers. By looking at trends and seeing any traffic fluctuations, I can better evaluate which articles are more accepted (considered interesting) by the audience, and which are considered less attractive.
Well, based on experience and the results of continuous evaluation for approximately 2 years as an editor and also an active writer on the Zenius Blog, through this article I try to concoct some special recipes which (most likely) are the key factors in how to make articles a blog can be considered interesting by readers. Here is the recipe for the cave concoction:
Disclaimer: The guide to writing blog articles that I have prepared here is intended for blog articles that contain knowledge sharing that aims to be read by the general public. So maybe less relevant for blogs that aim to just vent that is read by private circles.
1. Why is my blog worth reading?
Maybe for you this question is a bit cliché, but I'm sure many bloggers forget to question this to themselves before writing a blog that is intended to be read by the general public. The first recipe to answer this question in my opinion is actually simple, you just have to reflect on yourself:
"What kind of reading can make me give up my time to want to read to the end?"
For me personally, the answer to that question is: "I want to give up my time to read an article that challenges (challenges) my previous views".
2. Publish your article at the right moment!
This is one of the most important elements if you want your blog articles to be considered "interesting" to read. With you "riding" on topics that are still hype among netizens, of course it will be more inviting to read. Wouldn't it be funny if, for example, during Christmas and New Year's holidays, all of a sudden we're even talking about Valentine's Day on the blog, who wants to read about Valentine's in December? haha..
So for this point the strategy is actually simple, to become a quality blogger we must be prepared with a good understanding of many topics and problems. So that when the moment is hot, we can immediately respond to the “market reaction” by discussing relevant and quality topics.
3. Create a structured writing framework.
Well, here it is, a common mistake that is often made by beginner bloggers. They usually write articles with the principle of "just pour everything that's in your head right away". Usually the result is that the writing becomes unstructured, sometimes it digresses here and there, the context to be discussed spreads everywhere, things that are not relevant to the main topic are also discussed.
Writing techniques that are not neat like that, often make people bored and don't finish reading the article completely. So, how do you do that so that you can write structured writing? Okay, there are many techniques for making structured writing, but I'll try to briefly summarize my version of the move. The following is a technique that I developed myself, who knows, it can also be applied to your blog.
4. Provide clear descriptions of sources, data, graphics, as well as pictures and references.
Finally, so that every statement in your writing can be trusted, you MUST include information on sources, data, websites, graphics, and images in the form of footnotes or hyperlinks. Well, why do you have to cite the source? There are three reasons:
- Listing every clear source in every statement we get from other sources is an indicator of quality writing.
- Listing the original source is a code of ethics as well as a form of our respect for the intellectual works of others.
- By including clear sources, we are indirectly giving a signal that every statement we make is worthy of trust, so we provide flexibility for readers to double-check from the sources we refer to.
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