We are delighted to welcome back Keren Lerner as our social media guest blogger and director of Top Left Design

We love blogs and want lots of people to blog on their websites. Having a blog changes your site from a static one to one which gets updated regularly. But many people misuse this opportunity and end up with blogs on their sites that look unprofessional and out of date.

So, in order to simplify things I thought I would highlight the Golden Rules of Blogging

1. For each post, always use at least one picture, and make the picture the same width as the column. You can splurge a little and spend £1-£30 pounds on buying an image from Istockphoto – or you can find SOME good free images on Stock Exchange. I would recommend you resize the images and make them the same width as the column of text within the blog – this looks a lot neater and more impactful. Have a look at our blog for an example.
2. Blog regularly – at least 3 times a month! This way anyone looking  at your blog will see a blog post written within the last 2 weeks.
3. Make sure you break up your posts with subheadings and bullets. Aim for no more than 2 paragraphs of text before you put in a subheading or a bulleted list or an image. This will make your blog post easier to read as people tend to scan things online. By having useful well written subheadings, people will get an idea of what your post is about just by scanning the page.
4. Vary the types of posts – there are many types of posts you can use – including case studies, roundups, how tos, best ofs, interviews, and reviews.  Have a look at our post Types of Blog Posts that Make Blogging Easy

Please send me links to your blogs when you have put these golden rules into practice, as I am happy to have a look and give further advice. You can email me on keren@topleftdesign.com