Five blog posts to help you become a better blogger

Blogging is a great way to engage your online audience, build your reputation, and add value to your personal or corporate brand. That’s great news, because  your LetsHost hosting plan already includes all the tools you need to create your own successful blog.

But effective blogging is about more than tools… it takes time, commitment and dedication. It also takes a little bit of know how.

To help you with that, and because we know your time is at a premium, we’ve done some of the legwork for you. We’ve rounded up five great blog posts from A-List bloggers around the web, all offering their expert advice on how you can become a more effective blogger.

So without further ado, check out these pointers and take your blogging to a whole new level:

• Copyblogger: The 8 Habits of Highly Effective Bloggers

  Brian Clark and his Copyblogger team maintain one of the most highly respected blogs about content marketing on the web. It’s crammed with priceless tips on how to create more effective content across all of your online marketing platforms — including the original content marketing platform: your business blog.

  In this post, contributor Annabel Candy shares eight habits shared by highly effective bloggers.

• ProBlogger: Nine signs of an effective blog post

  Aussie Darren Rowse is an A-list blogger from down-under who deconstructs the anatomy of a successful blog post in this insightful entry on his highly influential blog, ProBlogger.

  Although we’re not all explicitly trying to sell something with our blogs, the rules that apply to good sales copy apply just as well to good blogging. — Darren Rowse

• Matt Cutts: Straight from Google: What You Need to Know

  Google’s resident anti-spam guru Matt Cutts gave a talk at the WordCamp San Francisco 2009 (a conference for WordPress) explaining how Google works and what bloggers can do to help them rank better in the worlds pre-eminent search engine. Okay, so it’s a video, rather than an actual blog post, but  if you want to attract search traffic to your blog it’s a great place to start.

• Chris Brogan: A Simple Blogging Formula

  Super blogger and social media guru Chris Brogan has been at the top of the blogging game for many years. In this insightful post he distils all of his knowledge and experience into a simple blogging formula to help you emulate his success.

• Copyblogger: The Two Most Important Words in Blogging

  Brian Clark’s Copyblogger makes it in here for a second time — this time a post from the man himself with some really great advice for bloggers everywhere. Focus on your reader with the word you, and make your posts more persuasive by offering the reason why using because.

  One of the most important characteristics of compelling, persuasive content is specificity. The more specific you are, the more credible your points, arguments or sales pitch. — Brian Clark