Hitting the Bull's Eye

[Sue Waters]

The key message I learnt from a training course years ago, which I believe is helpful advice for bloggers, is the first step to organising content for a class is deciding what information is really important and what would be covered only if there is time to spare.

The idea is you list all the points you would like to cover under each of the following heading: MUST KNOW; SHOULD KNOW; and COULD KNOW.

When you write your post focus most of your content on the MUST KNOW, include a bit of SHOULD KNOW and keep the COULD KNOW to a minimum!

1. Must Know - What is the most important information you are trying to tell your readers
2. Should Know - what is the additional information that is less critical
3. Could know - What is the other information which could be of further use but is not essential

Through out the process consider the following points:

• How will you maintain your reader's interest?
• Is all the content relevant to your readers?
• Have you provided variety e.g. images, videos
• Is the post divided into manageable parts with frequent summarising

Most blog readers have limited attention span and are generally less inclined to read lengthy posts. So too many words could mean your audience is gone before the reach the final paragraph.

Make sure you break up your blogs with lots of small paragraphs, and make the first sentence of each paragraph grab your reader's attention (the aim is a bit like the first page of a book - if the first page of a book does not engage my attention than I am less likely to read).

FINAL WORD

What inspired this post?

Well, today I added new post categories and changed bad category names so then had to work through all 142 of my posts to allocate the appropriate categories to each post. Why? Because even I could not find that posts I wanted to on my own blog so what hope does a reader have!

Boy! I wish I applied the bull's eye method when I first started blogging!

And yes, this last bit was the COULD KNOW! :)