Reviewing as many sites as I do, I am often asked “What do you consider a good blog entry?”. I try not to have a cookie cutter response because each niche is different and all writers should stick to their own style of writing. I was looking at a video of Jay’s the other day and it became clear why a lot of blog entries are horrible.

Jay is explaining why he hasn’t been making videos. Approximately 31 seconds in he explains how “easy” it can be to write a blog entry. A person can quote outside material, add a sentence or two and publish. That’s considered a “legitimate” blog entry.

A legitimate entry? Perhaps. A quality entry? Hell no. It’s an example of the type of video he didn’t want to make. Props to Jay to not making “a video” just to update his site. Quality is important to him and it shows in his videos.

Making video is definitely a different type of challenge but writing quality blog entries is challenging as well. For example, Tumblr makes it very easy to publish entries and particularly easy to re-publish someone else’s content.

And most Tumblr blogs suck. Seriously, they do.

It takes time to think of a unique angle for an entry when you know many people will be talking about the topic. It takes skill to properly articulate your thoughts. It takes wisdom and skill to share your knowledge accurately. Writing long entries doesn’t make your entry “good” but it can make it extremely wordy, confusing and dilute your original intended message.

In The End…

In this world the things that are more precious to us are the ones we take the time and effort in. To write quality entries, for most people, it takes practice. The more you write, the better you become. The easier it is to determine which articles to write and which ones you know will remain drafts in your content management system. You’ll be able to tell, if you are into statistics, which entries will receive more comments and pageviews. It’s a journey just like many things in our lives.

But if you take two minutes to write something, particularly if the majority of the entry isn’t even your own material, admit it’s crap. It’s not quality. Admit anyone could of done it.

And don’t take offense when someone calls you out on it.