Part of being a good writer is understanding the impact images have in your work. What you write should be supported and enhanced through your choice of imagery.

Image source Brian Auer

So Many Image Sites

The images you select and where you choose to find them will vary depending upon their application. There are enough different types of image sites out there to find exactly what you need.
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No matter how much great copy you write, how many cool images you add, how well you format or how much HTML you know, if you don’t proof read before you publish it is all wasted.

For most writers this is a no-brainer, checking your work should be part of the process (as should research).

Wordpress allows you to view your posts (as they will appear on your site) while you write and edit them.

This is a handy feature that should be used frequently as you write, format and edit your posts.
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A good image is worth a thousand words, use them to add impact, humor and personality to your writing.

Selecting images that get noticed is an art itself and a few things need to be kept in mind during the selection process:

1. The Internet audience is overwhelmingly male.
2. People are attracted to pictures of people, particularly faces.
3. Studies indicate that even women prefer to see women in advertisements.

I’m not saying add pictures of hot chicks to every post on your blog, I’m just saying for best results, know your audience and be clever in your selection.

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Knowing a little code is essential to creating the kind of post that will do well, it allows you to insert a little personality and to organize and format your information.

Wordpress does have a built in editor, but it can become cumbersome and confusing to use. I recommend turning the visual editor off and doing it the old fashioned way: actually learning the tags you’ll need most often.

HTML Code

Although it looks complicated, the basics of HTML are sensible and easy to grasp. Code is inserted on either side of the text you’d like to affect and there is always an opening tag and a closing tag.
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Think about how you read; when you are researching, when you are learning, when you are browsing social media. Do you read every word? No, you scan images, headers and bold text to determine if the post is worth reading, relevant and credible.

My point is: write that way too.

Formatting

Here are a few tricks to use which will help get your words noticed, and make your posts more readable.
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The competition gets tougher every day when it comes to writing online. There are so many bloggers out there now that the web is saturated with strong opinions and conflicting views about almost everything.

As professional writers it’s our duty to ensure that we provide the most relevant, well researched information in a format that makes it easy to use, understand and source. Writing a good post can earn you credibility, more traffic and a long-lasting authoritative voice.
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The junk drawer of my writing world, this is a collection of all of my tricks, tools and resources, put together and made easy to understand with screenshots.

Each link is something I use on a regular basis (a few of them are links to places I think are cool or gain inspiration from).

All of them provide either useful information and / or services to writers and most should be helpful no matter what your skill level.

So use them wisely and don’t be greedy, share yours with me too.

Essential Resources

These are some of the tools that quickly earned themselves prime real estate on my bookmarks bar.
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By now I expect you’ve checked out the article I posted on writing jobs and I’m sure you’ve seen ads for a wide assortment of different projects.

Making sense of all of that information helps when you have a firm understanding of the terminology people are using and what will be expected of you.

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Now that you’ve got the basics understood, it’s time to move on to the juicy stuff.

This installment is dedicated to insider tips and important lingo basics.

Pt. 3 is dedicated to even more terminology, specifically types of content and Pt. 4 will offer tools and resources found across the web.
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There may already be college courses designed to teach Perez Hilton clones the fine art of blog posting.

Until you find the time to take a night class or two you can use this series of simple (but long) guides to writing a blog post with a solid foundation.

The Basics

Here are some of the basic elements of writing on a blog, whether you use it to find work or write about your favorite hobby.

Every bit of reading I link to in this series of articles is essential for those who want to write online and do a good job of it. Read them once, then read them again. I still go back and read through many of them from time to time.

In fact, some of the examples I use in this series are over ten years old. A testament to the idea of quality content.
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