How to improve blog writing skills – the only 5 tips you will ever need (plus, a SECRET BONUS step!)

The only difference between a successful blogger and a person that just wastes their time typing words in WordPress is the blog writing skill.

As with any skill, the good news is that anyone can practice it, become better at it, and ultimately, master it. Meaning, nobody has an excuse for why they are not as good at blogging as they can possibly be.

I could easily produce a list of 15, 20, 50 tips to improve your blogging, and probably all of them would work. But the problem with such lists is that they often become blurry, the points start to mix with one another, and worst of all, they are not actionable at all. I mean, how do you put into action a list of 20 tips?

That’s why I’ve narrowed it down to the 5 most actionable, most useful things you can do that will have a meaningful impact on your blogging skills, and your bottom line.

Write a lot

Writing is by far the best way to improve your writing.

Duh, right?

Well, you’d be surprised by how few people actually put this one into practice. I’ve had bloggers reach out to me and ask how to write better, and when I’ve opened their blogs, I’ve found a total of… 8 articles!

Come on.

You need to write your fingers off.

In fact, if you just start writing a ton every day (I’m talking 5.000+ words), you can probably skip the rest of the tips and you will still improve very fast. True, you need to reflect at certain points, and actually measure the results of your efforts and identify where you should improve, but unless you output a ton of written content, you will not have nearly enough data to extract those vital insights.

So, start improving by doing. You will also be producing valuable content in the meanwhile, which is just pure gold in the long run, and if you’ve made some terrible mistakes, well, there’s always that “Update” button.

Speaking of updating…

Edit a lot

In some ways, the line between writing and editing can be blurred. You will rarely write a sentence and get it 100% right the first time, and maybe you’ll even go back at it as soon as you type that full stop.

But I’m talking about a conscious effort of trying to improve the entire post after you’ve written it all.

This sucks.

At least for me, this is the most terrible aspect of blogging, and my new approach to content creation called “dirty blogging” postpones this process as much as possible.

It sucks because it requires a lot of attention. You have to basically forget everything you’ve written (which often takes a full day of time) and carefully comb over your content with a fresh set of eyes. It’s difficult. Changing a sentence and trying to improve it is actually much harder than just writing it.

When writing, you can often just let your stream of thought flow through your fingers, through the keyboard, through the text editor, and for me, that’s a beautiful thing, almost like an art form…

But when editing… man, that’s much more science than art. And I mean this with the utmost respect for the craft. Editing requires so much more precision and deliberation, that you can spend an infinite amount of time doing it, knowing fully well that you will never get nowhere near that perfect sentence, let alone the perfect blog post.

And that’s why it’s so important to do it, and that’s why it improves your writing so significantly.

By actually doing the editing, you improve your writing as well. It’s almost like the editing process itself starts becoming a part of your writing a bit, and a lot of your text comes out already edited to a certain degree.

One intriguing tradeoff if you postpone editing is that you can actually get quite far with little editing. By just minding the grammar (which is easily done with Grammarly or Word) and cranking out a lot of content quickly (as long as you know what you’re talking about), you can actually run a quite successful blog. I recommend adopting this approach to a degree for new bloggers – you’re not writing for The New York Times yet, and quantity with a reasonable amount of quality will get you going a lot faster than nitpicking every single article for a week.

So yeah, editing sucks, and it’s very cool at the same time. Do as much of it as you can spare the time for.

Read a lot (especially other successful bloggers)

Reading is the most important supplementary skill to improve your writing. Reading and writing go together like go together like peas and carrots. They are each other’s best friends, life partners, and godfathers to each other’s children. They are the moon to each other’s stars, the Bonnie to each other’s Clyde, the Kanye to each other’s Kanye.

You can’t be a top writer unless you read a lot.

However, there is an important distinction to be made here.

While I strongly recommend devouring any piece of literature you get your hands on, for bloggers, especially new ones, it’s by far the best to focus on reading other good bloggers.

Reading Hemingway will make you a better writer, which in turn makes you a better blogger because it provides you with additional and more powerful language tools, but only a limited number of them will be immediately useful to your blogging success.

Blogging is a unique form of writing, and good blogging is maybe even another form. The more you get exposed to it, the more you will unconsciously start to emulate it in your own writing.

Now, the problem becomes how to identify successful bloggers?

I will avoid the temptation to offer my own blogs as an example, because obviously, I will be heavily biased. I’ve seen some decent level of success though, but I still don’t think I’m nearly as good as the pros.

I recommend starting out with the various blogs that Income School produces. I think they are pretty solid examples of good blogging, or blogging that results in you earning some good money from it. Some of their best blogs include Dirt Bike Planet and Camper Report, I believe new bloggers can learn a lot about affiliate marketing by starting there.

Learn some copywriting

This is probably the most advanced tip to improve your blog writing skills. I believe it will only be useful to a small percentage of bloggers, but also it’s probably necessary if you’re looking get to an elite level and make your blog content bring you much more results with just a few applications of smart copywriting.

The art of copywriting can have a huge impact on your success overall because it can drastically improve the 3 most important pieces of every single blog post:

  • the title
  • the hook
  • the call to action

Simply put, copywriting is writing with a bit more intent behind the words, and you’re looking to influence the behaviour of the reader by compelling them to take a certain action.

Just by learning some copywriting and applying what you’ve learned in crafting better titles, you will start seeing much more traffic. A lot of your blog posts can even not rank above a more authoritative article, but still steal a lot of clicks because of just the title, that one sentence that searchers will get to see even if they never read anything else from you. It’s a shot to make a very solid argument for why they should choose your article instead of all the other 9 on the first page of Google, and a little copywriting can go a long way in achieving that.

Using some copywriting magic in the first few paragraphs will set the tone for the rest of the article, build some trust with your reader, and most importantly, intrigue them to learn more and continue reading. And since the time the reader spends on your page is something that Google measures and is a fairly important SEO factor, you want those first few paragraphs to be iron-clad.

And finally, the call to action is probably nothing but copywriting. Most of the blog posts you write will have one of two calls to action:

  • compells your readers to click a link and go check out a certain product or a service
  • compells your readers to click a link and go check out another article of yours (where you probably compell them to check out a product)

Adding good calls to action to all of your blog posts results in users either visiting the online stores for which you’re an affiliate more often (and earning you more money), or seeing another page on your blog (which is another SEO ranking signal that Google measures).

Now, copywriting is a whole other animal, and it takes years to become a master of it. However, by applying some 80/20, you can learn the fundamental, most important, most useful principles in a relatively short time. I always recommend Kyle Miligan as the best educator when it comes to copywriting.

So, when you start getting a bit more advanced, learn some copywriting, as that’s the next level, and just applying some simple writing and language principles to those 3 small but important places in your blog posts, you will start seeing huge improvements.

Give yourself time and trust the process

You will forget this one.

I can almost guarantee you. At some point, you will get frustrated, and say things like “blogging sucks” and “I’m wasting my time”.

It will happen. I believe it happens to every new blogger.

In those moments, I would urge you to remember that this is a long process. I know that it will be difficult, as you will see and hear nothing but despair and frustration from your own brain, and those can be pretty loud.

But blogging works. Millions of people worldwide wouldn’t be doing it if it didn’t work.

So.

Read.

Write.

Edit.

Repeat.

And if things get hard, try to remember – there’s no other way. If you stick with this, you will start seeing some initial success, and if you keep working at it, you will improve and increase your success.

But it takes a lot of time. So give yourself some time.

Join the Digital Marketing Empire team

And, of course, getting some help is probably the best thing you can do for yourself here.

You might already be doing that, simply by reading this article, or learning from other digital marketers out there.

However, getting a dedicated mentor will be far superior to any independent training you get, including very expensive courses. You will simply avoid so many of the mistakes you would make if learning on your own.

Which brings us to the Digital Marketing Empire team membership.

In case you’re not familiar with our program, you will get free education on blogging and affiliate marketing by me or another member of our team, and you will start working with us as soon as you complete the training. You may start building passive income streams and generate revenue that can last you a lifetime in a matter of months.

See the application to join the Digital Marketing Empire team if you’re curious.


Want to get cool tips and learn how to build a passive income online? Join Digital Marketing Empire.




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Matt
I’m Matt, the man behind the Learn Digital Marketing brand. Find me on Instagram and TikTok if you want more.

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