image source: www.bitlanders.com and edited by me
Hello, guys!
Here I am again, writing my next blog in this wonderful network – bitLanders. In this post, I want to go through a very important topic – uploading quality content, and I will mainly discuss blogs. I am a relatively new user, but since I already have rated blogs, I'd like to provide my thoughts on writing posts here. So, how difficult is it to write a quality post?
Well, in my experience in life so far, things are as hard as you think they are. If you believe something is achievable, then you will probably accomplish it. But before I go too deep into the motivational stuff, I will start concretely describing the parts of a quality blog, as per bitLanders rules.
For Blog posts:
- Only English submissions will be accepted
- Submitted posts must be written in proper, well formed and well formatted English
- Submitted posts must be original
- Submitted posts must be exclusive and can not be present anywhere else on the web
- Submitted posts must be tagged accurately
Why blogs?
image source: www.pixabay.com
In fact, not only blogs can be submitted for review, but also galleries and videos. What is different about blogs is that they include everything – your article, some videos, and pictures. Of course, people who prefer submitting videos or galleries will be rewarded as well, but I prefer blogging because I am not so confident of the quality of my videos and pictures. Maybe I will try submitting them later in time.
English skills
image source: www.pixabay.com
I believe this is one of the hardest parts for all people like me, who are not native English speakers. So, how can you write a good article in a language, that you do not know perfectly? What I do, is I try to think of the article in English, I never make it in my language first and then translate, because it will sound silly and will not have the same meaning as before. And I also want to mention the importance of proper grammar and style. There are numerous tools for checking your writing, and I will list some of them:
● Grammarly – which is a paid product, but it also has a free version with fewer options. See the video below:
video source: www.youtube.com
● WhiteSmoke – a browser-based tool for checking style, spelling, and grammar.
● ProWritingAid – has amazing features, checking sentence length, vague words, preposition usage, etc.
It is important to know how readable your text is. If you read your own writing, you will definitely know what you mean, because you wrote it. But, the question is, if somebody else reads it, will he or she understand exactly what you meant to say? Here comes the readability index – there are many of them, in fact. By checking any of the search engines for readability tests or readability score you will find out more about them. Most of the indexes have a scale; after checking your text will be rated a certain amount of points, and you will get additional information about it. Like, for example, what your audience would be – text is readable by people aged 11-12, or by people aged 14-16 years old. That will help you for any additional tweaking of your text, in order to increase the age range of your readers.
image source: www.pixabay.com
Proper tag usage
You have seen those tags, which are used on almost every website on the web. What are they used for and why are they of so great importance? Tags are the keywords for your blog; the words people will use when they search for content on the Internet. And in case you chose the perfect tags which represent your content, the relevance of their search will be higher. So, when you decide what tags to place on your blog, think about the leading idea, the main topic/topics which you cover in your work. You can try to put yourself in the place of the user who is searching for information. What keyword would you use to find that blog?
image source: www.bitlanders.com and edited by me
Exclusive and original blog posts
As mentioned under the FAQs section of bitLanders, your blogs should be written by you and not just a copy/paste work from the web. And I cannot agree more with that rule. It is not fair to take another author's work, not to mention it is illegal. The main purpose of blogging, the way I understand it, is to help readers gain knowledge regarding the topic. It is not useful for anybody to write and post content only for the sake of gaining rewards, without offering helpful information. So, making a quality post is not just writing whatever comes to your mind, but it also includes filtering the things that come to your mind and are helpful from the ones that are just irrelevant. And editing plays a huge role in improving your writing. Spending a few more hours to correct any thoughts in your writing so that they are more understandable will give you a great advantage when it comes to scoring your work.
image source: www.pixabay.com
Plagiarism is also a big issue on the web, and sometimes it is possible to plagiarize somebody without even realizing it. People are not so different after all. Using a tool to check for plagiarism is helpful for you as a writer, and to protect other authors' work.
Formatting and presentation
I will immediately admit, this is my weakest side. I am not good at formatting at all, and I am currently in the process of improving this. However, I do know a blog should be visually appealing in order to attract more visitors, to provide a better user experience and eventually be rated with more stars. The blog editor offers great functionality like centering your text, pictures and videos, moving photos to the left or to the right of your paragraphs, changing sizes, headings, adding links to relevant external and internal articles, ordered and unordered lists, etc. They exist to help bloggers improve the presentation of their blogs, so use them.
image source: www.bitlanders.com and edited by me
Which topic to choose?
image source: generated with www.wordclouds.com
Everybody is good at something. You probably noticed from my previous blogs that I like to travel. Traveling gives me the boost I need to continue my life and work efficiently. And it is easy for me to write longer posts on this topic because it is something I have experience with, I know that information from the source, so to say. Considering topics you are good at, you might find out that there are many of them. If you like cricket – write about cricket, if you like technology – write about technology. I believe there is no good and bad topic – but there is good and bad writing. The words you say will sound more authentic, in case you have the experience in this subject. And you will be able to write longer for something that is interesting for you. As far as I know, there are no strict rules about the length of the posts, but I think 1000 words are a decent number to start with. It is difficult to give a good amount of knowledge on a given topic with fewer words.
video source: www.youtube.com
Learn from others
If you look at the leaderboard, you will notice that everyone who is there has rated content (mostly blogs). There is a reason why a certain blog got three stars and another five stars. Before I wrote my first post here, I read many of the other users blogs, like jean-beltran, LookUp, shaiera. Read their blogs, check the tags they use, look at their writing style. You do not need to do something completely by yourself if it has been already done successfully by others. And it is publicly available for you to learn from.
image source: www.bitlanders.com and edited by me
Once you submit a blog, listen to what feedback Hillary gives you. It will help you understand what you need to work on. And I know that might sound boring, but reading the FAQs, About and Terms of Service sections will also give you precious information for the rules and the requirements about writing blogs. And that is not only valid for bitLanders, but for every website out there.
Everything that I mentioned so far is a reflection of my own experience here in bitLanders, but I will be very glad if I managed to give you some ideas about writing quality blogs.
Thanks a lot for spending time with me!
- by NinaB
