Blogging: Does Your Blog Need A Proofreader?

By Alyice Edrich

As writers and business entrepreneurs, do you always PROOF your posts or comments? Do you spend hours agonizing over the content on your posts only to decide not to post? Do wonder what would happen if you forgot to include a comma or used a hyphen in the wrong spot? Do you wonder if one misspelled word is going to cause you to look less professional?

Well wonder no more! The cyber police aren’t going to come banging down your door to fine you for improper grammar usage and unless your post is riddled with inconsistencies, huge grammatical issues, or hard to read sentence structures, your readers aren’t going to care, either.

Blogging isn’t like traditional publishing. Every “i” doesn’t have to be dotted. Every “t” doesn’t have to be crossed. And every comma doesn’t have to be in its proper place. After all, in traditional publishing more than one set of eyes has gone over that reading material before it hits publication. When work is submitted to traditional publications, editors come back with requests to improve or clarify the work based on recommendations from their proofreaders and/or copyeditors. With blogging, there are usually no second pair of eyes.

Blogging isn’t about being “error-free”, though it couldn’t hurt. Blogging is about spontaneity. It’s about communicating with your readers on a more personal level. It’s about engaging in a conversation with your past, present, and future customers. It’s about sharing insights and showing a more human side to your business. It’s about being real. And being real comes with mistakes—grammatical or otherwise.

So go ahead and post. Post daily. Because the truth of the matter is this: If you spend your time fretting over every typo or grammatical mistake, you will never take part in this fascinating community of bloggers. And you’ll lose out. You’ll lose networking opportunities. You’ll lose viral marketing opportunities. And you’ll lose the awesome ability to build “friendships” with your readers and connect with your customers on a level you’ve never imagined. And you’ll lose the financial benefits of indirect sales.

And if you should receive an email informing you of a misspelled word, the wrong word usage, improper punctuation, and so forth, thank the reader, edit your post, and move on. In time, you’ll discover that your writing has vastly improved and you’ll feel less conscientious about your writing skills and more confident in the content you produce.


Alyice Edrich is the editor of The Dabbling Mum®, a free parenting publication, and the author of several work from home e-books designed to help parents earn extra cash while spending more time with their children. To learn more, visit her at http://thedabblingmum.com/ebookstore

The Three Fatal Flaws of Blogging

There are, of course, some highly successful blogs. Well-done, news-oriented blogs, for example. And blogs that are not really "blogs" in the usual sense but that merely use the software to build more traditional Theme-Based Content Sites. In both cases, it takes the truly exceptional to succeed without a complete step-by-step process and all the tools needed to execute flawlessly.

These successes are the exceptions that prove the rule of blog failure. There are fundamental reasons why typical blogs fail in such high numbers...

Fatal Flaw #1) Blogs Do Not Deliver Useful Information Resources

A blog is like a stack of hundreds of dated back issues of newspapers. Aside from "today's snippet," blogs are generally not useful resources for information. And information is what people search for; it's what they crave on the Web.

Blog posts are created and stored in chronological order. A good blogger will produce a post that is useful today, but who will read it in three months? Even when bloggers go to the extra effort of archiving their posts by "keyword categories," the articles are dated and not rewritten into coherent definitive articles. Usefulness plummets with time.

How does a Theme-Based Content Site differ? Instead of a stack of old newspapers, each resembles a good resource book about its theme, composed of useful, original articles ("Web pages") that cover related topics in some depth. Written in each small-business owners's unique voice, and based upon that person's experience in the field, they are useful resources that visitors return to over and over.

To summarize, Theme-Based Content Sites are evergreen, useful and usable, long-term momentum-builders. Blogs are short-term "today's snippets." The differing results are profound

Humans respond to blogs and Theme-Based Content sites differently. And Google measures those reactions in hundreds of ways, rewarding your ranking accordingly. That is why Theme-Based Content sites are easier to create and build longer-lasting traffic. Continuing this analysis...

Fatal Flaw #2) Blogging Navigation and Internal Organization Are Inherently Awkward

Generally, blogs have no immediately logical organization of material by categorical tiers, sub-tiers, etc. At best, there may be a collection of "keywords" under which posts are filed. The various posts on a topic are never pulled together into cohesive articles, since they generally start as news pieces or thoughts of the day.

Theme-Based Content Sites are organized more logically. And Web pages are updated, not re-issued as new posts. These sites are easier to find and are simpler and more fruitful to explore by your "human" visitors (your pre-customers!).

And what about your "spider" visitors (the Search Engines)? Site Build It! makes it supremely easy for all engines to spider and list your pages. And critically, superior human response becomes obvious to all engines (as mentioned by Google itself above).

"Spider and human" work synergistically together to build substantially greater long-term traffic momentum. And the beauty is that all you have to do is "keep it real." This has nothing to do with "SEO" or any kind of Search Engine manipulation. The results are natural, long-lasting, and evergrowing.

Fatal Flaw #3) Blogs Do Not Meet the Natural Needs of Most Small Business Opportunities

Some fields of business lend themselves well to blogging. For example, there is an overload of bloggers covering and commenting on even the most minute developments in the fast-moving, Web-savvy field of Internet marketing. Most of it is "noise" that will ultimately mean nothing. Nevertheless, "Net marketing" is a natural for blogging.

But the nature of your business and its related subject matter is most likely inappropriate for blogging. Your own business is almost certainly better served by a Theme-Based Content Site. Why? Because your future customers will be better served by information delivered in this manner. Theme-Based Content Sites flex to meet the goals, knowledge and circumstances of everyone...

Whether you are a dentist or asphalt sealer...

Whether you are a copywriter or java programmer...

Or perhaps you are a stay-at-home mom or pre-retiree who wants to start an online business from scratch...

Whatever your business or plans, build a Theme-Based Content Site, not a blog.

Here's how to get off to a great start, to understand how and why only this approach builds a profitable online business, no matter what that business may be...