Blog Exercises: September Random Editing Day

It is September and the number is now up to 9 posts to edit on our monthly Random Editing Day exercises. Each month in the Blog Exercises series, I challenge you to edit random published posts on your blog, adding one for every month of the year. This month is nine posts. You can do […]

Blog Exercises: Page and Post Abuse

If you are on WordPress, you are familiar with the concept of Pages and Posts. If you are on another Content Management System (CMS), it is likely you have similar content with a different name. In WordPress, Pages, with a capital P, are pseudo-static web pages on your site. They exist outside of the reverse […]

Blog Exercises: May Random Editing Day

May. It’s starting to warm up outside in the north, and growing a bit chilly down under, but it’s that time again. It’s the May Random Editing Day. In this Blog Exercise you will need to edit five random posts from among your thousands – okay, maybe dozens of published articles. What should you look […]

Blog Exercises: How Long Are Your Paragraphs?

How long are your paragraphs? Have you measured them lately? One of the telling differences between traditional writing and writing for the web is the length of the paragraph. Look at the example below. Which is easier to read? On the left, the paragraphs are huge, long blocks of text. On the right, the paragraphs […]

Blog Exercises: April Random Editing Day

It’s the April Random Editing Day in our ongoing series of Blog Exercises. With Spring in the air, flowers and trees blooming, it’s time to flex your editing muscles on four blog posts this month. If you are having trouble finding random posts, think of a keyword that best describes your site or a topic […]

Blog Exercises: What Words Do You Abuse Redundantly?

So, it’s word check time. Well, time to check all the words we abuse. Specifically, all the words we abuse redundantly and unnecessarily. And I’d like us to focus on the little words we add to our content, words like like, and, so, because, cause, cuz, specifically, well, and so on. In the last two […]

Blog Exercises: Preview Posts

Do you preview a post before publishing? If not, consider adding this extra step to the publishing process. Why? I’m human. So are you. We mess things up. No matter how careful you are, you will make mistakes. That’s life. By double checking what your post will look like before you release it to the […]

Blog Exercises: Bottom Up Editing

What if you blogged from the bottom up? In this Blog Exercise I’d like you to take a look at the article you are working on, preparing to publish it on your site, and take the last paragraph and put it at the top. We are often locked into our basic language education that taught […]

Blog Exercises: Clean Up Your Most Popular Posts

“It’s dated 2008. It must be useless.” This was the response to an article I tweeted out recently. Yes, the article was dated 2008. Did that mean it wasn’t a valid, timely, and invaluable resource? It was, but that’s not the point. Some people equate old with useless. With the aging population gaining the majority […]

Blog Exercises: Make Post Titles Matter

Post titles are the titles of the articles you publish on your site. They represent the subject matter of the article. Newspapers and magazines are famous for their sensationalism when it comes to titles, lurking in readers with “Sexy Siren Stabs Six.” Or they include number counts to impress. “101 Best Ways to Cook a […]