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OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY EXTENSION
Live Smart Ohio
Blog Author’s Workshop 2015

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Blogging
Best Practices
Follow along with an old blog post.

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OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY EXTENSION
Keep your target
audience in mind.
Who are you writing for? Who do you want to reach?
• Different generations search for different topics online.

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OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY EXTENSION
Source: Social Media Today

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What’s Trending?
How are you finding topics to blog about?
• Google Trends, Twitter Trends, and your Facebook newsfeed are
good outlets to find what’s trending.

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Give your post a
good title.
• Include keywords that are “searchable”.
• Include digital or interactive media in brackets. [INFOGRAPHIC]
[VIDEO] [WEBINAR]

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OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY EXTENSION
Keep the body of
your post to less
than 300 words.
• Different generations consume online content differently, but they
all agree that 300 words or less is the “sweet spot”.
• Curated lists and bullet posts help reduce the size of your blog
post and hold readers’ attention.
• Consider breaking up an in-depth topic into a post series.

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Include a quality
image.
• A quality image or photo MUST be included in each post. This
makes your blog post not just more visually appealing, but more
shareable online as well.
• Use royalty-free images from recommended sources.

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Include embedded
links.
• Embedded links take readers to more information and provide an
opportunity to showcase your other posts, programs, etc.
• Embedded link how-to video available on the Ed Tech blog.

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OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY EXTENSION
Have a call to
action at the end.
• Point readers to additional resources, a program, your “About”
Author page, local Facebook page, etc.

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Think of ways to
repurpose the content
of your post.