person using macbook proIt’s important to start your blogs with a generic image and a pleasing color palette.
“It can’t be that hard,” you think to yourself.

“I know a lot about the subject, and I’m ready to share my thoughts with the world!”

But when it comes time to put pen to paper (so to speak) there are all kinds of unspoken rules and norms for blogging.

Are you sure you know all the tricks of the trade?

Space = Style
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my brief foray into professional blogging, it’s that no one wants to read a paragraph.

Literally.

Just put every sentence on a new line, even if all of your thoughts are connected to the same idea or principle.

You’ll want to put as much space as possible between each brief statement. Otherwise, people might realize they’re reading.

Oh, look at that–two sentences together.

Don’t worry though, that’s the longest “paragraph” the norms of this writing style will allow.

These disjointed line breaks have come to dominate the medium. If you’re ideas can’t be expressed in one pithy sentence, don’t bother.

Your audience sure won’t.

Keywords, Keywords, Keywords
You know what’s better than a varied, specific vocabulary?

Keywords.

Instead of using the words that speak to you, make sure you drop as many SEO keywords into each sentence as possible:

For proper SEO marketing, make sure you are tagging all content and linking to your social media accounts to optimize your search ranking.

Rather than using your words to enhance or illuminate complex ideas, just keep cycling through the same adjectives until your writing becomes a bland, jumbled mess.

After all, it is standard SEO best practice.

For good measure, you should also reference:

customer conversion
brand voice
social media analytics
email marketing
tagging
trending
Yoast
Google Adwords
B2B
B2C
SaaS
B2C2BS (Just throw in random letters and numbers at this point–it’ll drive your readers wild.)
Oh, did I forget to mention that any list, of any number of items, ever, should be in bullet-point format?

The Sign-Off
Usually, conclusions for blog posts don’t have their own header.

But I’m choosing to be bold. To be different.

This is usually where the author just parrots back everything you just read.

There are often a lot of really important links that just lead you back to other pages on the site.

Sometimes, really advanced bloggers will link to “high-authority” outbound links to try to hack their SEO.

However you choose to blog, it’s important that you tell the world how you feel. And of course, encourage readers to connect with you on LinkedIn.