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There are plenty of blogs out there meant for sharing just with family and friends or a personal diary kept in a public sphere, but if you’re blogging for business or to promote a personal brand, your goal is to attract and keep an audience.

Christina Katz offers these sixteen basic tips for writers in her book Get Known Before the Book Deal so your voice has a better chance of standing out in the crowd.

1. Keep your content fresh. Don’t blog about what everyone else is blogging about. Respond to a buzz topic with your fresh perspective, drawing on your expertise. Give folks something to think about that they won’t find anywhere else.

2. Avoid politics, religion, or anything that might offend your readers, if none of these are your expertise. (Learned this the hard way.)

3. One more time with emotion: Consider what your audience cares deeply about and revisit those topics often. Encourage, inspire, cajole.

4. Use reporting techniques. Can you back that up with a fact? Then go ahead. Trends, statistics, news, and current events are all more interesting with a few facts sprinkled in.

5. Demystify whenever possible. The tip and list forms work well for this.

6. Offer round-ups of your best previous posts.

Full story at Writer’s Digest.

A guide to better blogging.

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