Writing Great Blog Content: Painful?

Rich Brooks of Flyte Media says that writing content is painful, and compares it to having dental work without novacaine! What do you think?   

For me, writing - whether for my blogs, website, my email broadcasts and newsletters - is more like getting my teeth cleaned: it can be painful, but then you come out with a pretty white smile!

Take this series I'm undertaking on how to write great content for your blog. This morning's addition to the list of tips is about scanning your favorite blogs for relevant ideas, then taking an excerpt from it, linking to it, and making your own comments. (If you want to boost readership, go for disagreement and controversy. But that's a different topic.)

Here's what Rich says: "No matter how much you love your job, no matter how passionate you are about what you do, writing content is going to be much more work than you think."

The passion makes the writing start like a burst of energy. Education and discipline, however, are the tools that have to kick in to make your content readable, search engine optimized, and interesting to other people.

I agree with Rich that writing always takes more time and work than you think, even when it is full of passion. Passion isn't enough, some hard thinking and decent grammar should back it up.

Your thoughts on this? Is passion enough? Does grammar even count?

Comments

[Rich Brooks]

Patsi,

You and I both write a lot; it's a big part of our jobs. Like you, I love to write (or I wouldn't be contributing to three separate blogs right now!)

But most of flyte's clients aren't writers by trade. They sell cheese, offer benchmarking services, or run inns.

For them, creating 5, 10, 50 pages of content while doing their "real" job is a big hassle. Many of them come with unrealistic expectations of how much time and energy they need to put towards the content creation--the most important part of their Web site's success!

My job is to prepare them, and to manage their expectations of themselves.

Plus, to make the coffee for my crew.