Just Get On With It!

Oh, if there's one thing I learned about as a writer it's to cut the throat clearing.

What's throat clearing?

Excessive backstory before getting to the meat of the story.

The same should go for your blog posts.

Every. Single. One. Of. Them.

I just had a SiteComment disapproved in the SiteComments section.

First one in over a month.

The reasoning?

The author of the post accused me of failing to read the content and stated I delivered a weak response clearly off topic.

Okay, what?

This is a WA review, right?

I probably read about 3/4 of the article, so I'll admit guilt that I didn't read the whole thing, but at this point, the post was clearly in everyone's sane eyes a WA review.

Turns out it was a review of the Affiliate Programs tab.

Only the author just touches up on it before saving the penultimate section to actually get to the meat of the post.

As a writer, I cringed.

Well, this experience should teach a few things;

1) If anyone writes this way, you'll lose readers if you don't get ot the point within seconds, such as before your first sub-topic.

2) Don't rehash redundant subtopics, such as the training, Jaaxy, etc, especially if the post isn't about this.

3) Don't deviate from the main topic.

If I'm writing an article about, say, helmet rankings, I'm not going to throat clear as to how pretty an NFL team's overall uniform is and get to the meat of the post halfway through.

Heck, I probably just lost readers expecting helmet rankings and instead I'm talking about uniforms.

We all want our blogs to succeed, but to do so means grabbing your reader by the throat (figuratively) and never letting go from the first sentence. Talk about your topic from the first word, and trim the fat off that meat; in other words stay on topic from beginning to end.

Especially in SiteComments, where a reader is going to just click out and comment on what they'd read to that point, and with product reviews we've seen A THOUSAND times, it's likely going to be an identical comment.

Be clear, from sentence one, what your article is going to talk about.

Find a long-tail keyword phrase and give me 1,000 words on ONLY that keyword phrase.

If not, you're going to lose A LOT of readers and you'll be left making false accusations toward others' integrity of actually reading the article.

Again, I should've read the whole thing; but I've read about twenty product reviews this entire weekend, with about five of them being WA reviews.

If you make it clear that it's a review of something within the site, maybe you'll hold your reader throughout the post.