You’ve probably heard from the legions of people out there telling you how to write blogs that subheadings are a great way to improve readability and make your blog better.

This is a gigantic steaming pantload.  Here are three reasons why.

1. Subheadings add unnecessary words to a blog count. Look, I can see it if you’re regularly posting in the upper hundred / thousands of words count, but for your basic hundred-plus word count blog, adding subheadings is like adding a spoiler on the trunk of your Ford Focus.  It’s not going to do a whole lot of good and it’ll just look dumb.

2. Subheadings can easily be seen as patronizing and insulting to the reader. Again, in very certain circumstances this isn’t true, but if you’re going for any blog tier much higher than basic education (this can also work well in entertainment if all your subheadings feature jokes), you’re going to be preaching to a crowd of experts.  They don’t need your subheadings to tell them what they’re about to read.  They’ll either grok your point within a few words and go on from there or they’ll read the whole thing to see what they can glean from it.

The Continuation of  The Reason List, Or, See What a Bad Idea This Is?

3. Subheadings break up the flow of a blog.  When you break up a post to announce stuff like I just did above, you’ve just done something horrendous to the way the entire post was moving.  I know phrases like “organic flow” make me seem less like a writing guru and more like a crunchy-granola eco-trippy type, but let’s face it.  Every blog moves along at a certain pace. Now, obviously, you would never put a subheading in the middle of a paragraph, and with careful placing, it can help.  But in many cases, all it serves to do is shatter flow.

Subheadings may have a place, in a certain limited fashion, but chances are, unless you’re in a very specific set of circumstances, the best thing you can do is just blog.

Popularity: 4% [?]

I once read a great blog post that describes six great functions of a blog, and how, if you incorporate them into your blog, you’ll likely have more success than you would if you don’t provide them.

The six are, in no particular order:  entertainment, education, information, debate, news, and community.

If your blog can incorporate one or more of these functions, you will build a more engaging and, ulitmately, better blog that’ll also help you improve your bottom line.  So today, we start with entertainment.

If you can make your reader laugh, you will have a friend for life, or at least for that day.  Laughter is one of the greatest forces and most powerful commodities on earth–this is why, despite all reason and logic and good common sense, Dane Cook still has a career.  He made some people laugh once.  These people, in turn, follow him everywhere in the hopes that he’ll manage to do it again.  At this point I could jam you full of psychobabble on intermittent conditioning and slot machines and why people play the lottery despite the fact that you have a greater chance of being hit by a lightning bolt that was attracted to the meteor that fell on you than you do of winning.

But suffice it to say that people love to laugh.  It is the very best of medicines.  It relieves stress, decreases tension, and generally improves your outlook on life, again, despite all logic and reason and good common sense.

Make your readers laugh, dear readers, and you will KEEP readers.

After all…you’re still here, aren’t you?

Popularity: 3% [?]

Maybe you’ve noticed something of a trend in the last couple weeks.  I’ve prefaced a blog post with a little something about my own life experiences.  Even though I’m only three quarters of the way to being, as Jimmy Buffett described, a pirate looking back at forty, there’s still plenty of bits to mention.  And when you can tell a little story about something relevant to the post, you infuse that post with a little extra value.

Compare a boring blog post to your boring drive across Iowa, for instance.  Don’t be afraid to drop a name or two–like yesterday when I gave you the name and location of my favorite remote working spot.

You never know who’s reading your posts, and what they might gather information-wise.  But even if you don’t have readers near your favorite coffee shop or who would even be interested in trying to drive across Iowa, the added value of the personal touch in your posts will spark reader interest.  A good story well told never hurts, and often helps.

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Now, while we’re working on the subject of “really obvious ways to make your blog look better”, and by doing so improve your bottom line, one great subject to look at is the topic of CREDIBILITY.

Credibility, basically, is the standard people use to judge the weight your opinions carry.  For instance, if I went up to you and asked, who would you sooner ask for stock advice, Joe who runs the Edward Jones office downtown or Crazy Larry who lives in the alley between the Edward Jones and the Chinese take-out place, who would you go with?  Clearly, Joe–if for no other reason than Crazy Larry won’t stop screaming about how the government took his fillings in the seventies and replaced them with cheese.  But if I posed that same question, replacing Crazy Larry with Warren Buffett, the so-called Omaha Oracle, Joe sort of looks like, well, Crazy Larry when put alongside the Buffett.

It’s all about your credibility.  What do you bring to the table?  Have you been working in HR for years?  Your HR blog now makes a lot of sense.  Been weaving baskets since you were a kid?  A crafts blog is a good fit for you.  If you’re an auto mechanic, you probably shouldn’t be writing about marine biology, nor should a software salesman be writing about canning fruit.

Remember, outside a court of law, the term “expert” really only means “person who’s really good at or knows a lot about something in particular”, and if you’re an expert in anything, it’s a great topic to start a blog about.

Popularity: 2% [?]