Dr. Deborah Bosley of the Plain Language Institute preaches a simple concept that may spell the difference between the success and failure of your blog content. Dr. Bosley calls this "the Golden Rule of Communication": Communicate unto others as they would communicate unto themselves. It sounds simple enough, but in practice very few bloggers follow this rule.
The trick here is to be as clear and unambiguous as possible when writing your blog posts. And that can only be done by clarifying who your audiences are, putting yourself in their shoes and understanding what it is they need from you. Then you need to write to them in the language that they can perfectly understand. You need to write to them as they would write to themselves.
As you can imagine, this takes a bit of effort on your part. It means identifying your audience segments, divining what each segment is after and then creating content that provides for this need, and in a language and style that is best understood by them.
If this sounds like much more work than you are prepared to provide, Dr. Bosley does recommend the following general tips to follow when preparing your blog content. Keep in mind that these are general recommendations that you can fall back on in the absence of some concrete information about your readers. There may be times when these tips may not be applicable.
Keep Your Sentences Short and Concise
It's not as constricting as composing tweets, but Dr. Bosley recommends sentences to be 15 - 18 words long, 25 words maximum. This lets you keep the subject in focus, and that is good for the reader.
Keep Your Paragraphs Short
Each paragraph you produce should be around 3 - 5 sentences. One of those sentences should contain the main idea of that paragraph, with the rest of the sentences providing support for the idea as well as a way to transition to the next paragraph. This, too, is to keep you in focus, which then makes it easier for your reader to understand what you are writing about.
Use Headings to Mark the Sections
By now you know that when reading stuff online, people tend to scan the content, rather than read it entirely. Clear, concise headers help the reader get a quick, overall view of what the content may be all about, and help him come to a decision on whether or not it is worth his while to read through it.
Include Visuals
A picture paints a thousand words. And they're great at stopping readers in their tracks, calling out to them for a closer look before they decide to move on to other things. Many a blog has been made or broken by interesting photos (or the lack thereof).