The post below was originally written and posted by the staff members who evaluate and feature World Race blog posts.
It's a 10-step guide to writing clear, concise stories using your World Race blog.
These tips were compiled out of years of research and experience from some experts, so if I were you, I'd probably take their advice!!
1. Be literal and informative with your titles. Don't try to be too creative or eloquent, and don't use titles that rely on reading the blog post to understand them. If it's about someone being healed, use the word "healed" in the title. If there's video, put [Video] or pictures, put [Pictures] or [Photo blog] or something to let people know it's there. The purpose of the title is nothing more than to get people to open your blog post.
2. Use correct grammar, capitalization, and punctuation. It's not cute to write in all lower case.
3. If you have qualifying information, housekeeping issues, etc., either write a separate post for those or put them in italics at the top or bottom, separated by a horizontal line. Let your story stand for itself so it doesn't get lost in all the other information you're trying to convey to your supporters and friends.
4. Use color VERY sparingly, if at all. If there is one line in a post that you really want to emphasize, make it red or bold or a larger font, but do not write rainbow blog posts where every few lines are a different color. They're hard to read, and they don't do what you think they do. When you emphasize everything, you emphasize nothing. Make the default color black.
5. On a similar note, don't use crazy fonts. Writing in all italics, cursive, calligraphy, etc. is hard to read on a screen. It's easiest for us to feature if you just leave it in the generic font that all the posts are in if you type them in the blog's internal text editor.
6. Break up your stories into small paragraphs (usually 3-4 sentences). Don't make a blog post that is one big block of text, because no one will read it.
7. Do your best to use pictures in every post. They help tell the story, and they help your readers keep their eyes moving down the page. Blog posts with pictures are much more likely to get featured because they require less work on our part to find pictures to supplement them with.
8. Have some moment of reflection at the end of your story. Don't preach at people, but let them know what you learned from this experience and what they can learn.
9. If you're going to include video, actually embed the video in your blog post instead of just pasting a link to it. Similarly, if you're including a link to something, make it a hyperlink instead of just pasting the URL in the post.
10. Treat the stories you tell with a high level of care and love. You cared about these people and their stories enough to want to share them, so share them well. Put time into the formatting and editing of your blog posts, and we'll be more likely to notice your amazing story and feature it on a larger platform. It's fine to write informative blogs that only your friends and family will care about, but for the stories you really want shared, effort is noticed and appreciated.
We've got one more blog coming next week with some more tips, how-to's, and best practices compiled for you by the Adventures Storytellers!
Until next week, happy blogging!
