When you read the words "style guide," you likely imagine a list of rules pulled from an outdated Chicago Style Manual by a fifth grade teacher desperate for an early Tuesday evening.
Someday, you won't need a style guide for your blog. It'll be as easy as tying your shoes. I'd say it'd be as easy as tying a necktime, but I think there really might be a shadowy cabal of YouTubers that are controlling the youth through lessons on how to tie a tie.
That's (only sort of) a joke.
In the simplest terms, crafting a blog style guide is an advanced energy expenditure to make your eventual blogging less of a freaking hassle. Less to remember, less time spent.
So, let's get down to it.
Building A Blog Style Guide
The internet is vast. It is not strange though. It's based on a set of rules. The blog style guide's objective is to mount those rules to your advantage.
Why do you need a blog style guide?
Starting form scratch every time you write is excruciating. It not only makes your efforts haphazard, it demonstrates lack of commitment. The best explorers chart a course. Morning commuters examine real-time maps to determine the easiest route. Football teams scout their competition each week.
Idiots make stuff up as they go. Idiots have short memories. Idiots can be skilled, even gifted in their abilities, making the correct guess a few consecutive times, like a blindfolded dart player picking a winner in a Super Bowl pool.
Imagine if they had a plan?
A blog style guide reduces effort to write a scheduled post. In time, it turns the action into a normal habit. The action had become refined. The effort formerly applied to recall the blog writing's execution is hardly effort at all.
I can write fast. I can write roughly 2 pages in 60 minutes. That's roughly 550 words. Most blog posts are between 300-600 words.
Knowing those numbers alone will establish just how much time is required to assemble a blog post. When you know on average how long it'll take you to write a post, your anxiety around the action is lessened. It can be factored into your day the same way you can recite, in a heartbeat, "yeah, it takes me between 40-60 minutes to get into work every day, depending on traffic."
How do you establish a blog style guide?
Write down the rules. The fewer rules, the better. That way, they're tougher to break.
You can use a calendar. You can determine who is responsible for a certain blog post. It might just be you. It might be a team. Everyone follows the rules in the name of uniformity, so the site's visitor doesn't have to re-calibrate their brain-manners, depending on who a post's author was, or what mood the author was in.
Write out a bulleted list to set the rules. Try this:
- Blog every Wednesday
- Blog is between 300-600 words
- Blog includes researched keyword in the title and header text within the written body
- Blog includes an instance of header text
- Blog includes an image above the <!--more--> tag
Simple and beautiful. There is room for embellishment as time goes by, perhaps concerning formatting for email distribution. Until the time comes that these rules can be followed, extra specifics will not be needed.
The rules do not require a hammer and chisel. You'll be comforted by the fact that not only are they are not gospel, each can be explained.
Make sure anybody, yourself included, understand why the guide exists. That may feel odd, but people are often sloppy, lazy, and uncomfortable with working within a system. While the topic of leadership is one for another day, anyone who will be governed by this style guide has a greater chance of success if they understand each point's purpose.
In short:
- Regularity breeds refinement and SEO (SEO is a big reason why you're at this blogging party)
- It's tough to be interpreted as valuable when you don't include a decent wordcount
- Keywords provide guardrails for your work and improve SEO ranking
- Header text structures a post and improves SEO ranking
- An image statistically increases a post's visibility, including it above the <!--more--> tag is good formatting
What's a blog style guide look like when it's done?
It looks like a list of rules. Someday, these will be habits. You won't need the list when that happens. Until then, make it a simple reference point. Make it accessible. Keep it close at hand. Time and indecision are barriers between works in progress and completed projects.
It's never a bad idea to prepare a template or blueprint to work from. With a template, it's a matter of swapping in new text. All of that energy required to tap out an introductory paragraph, paste in an image, add in a read-more separator, add header text, selecting a keyword, and checking a word-count, could all be spent proofreading a piece to make sure it makes sense to a human, your assumed audience.
Recognition why you need something, understanding how to piece the thing together, and knowing what a finished product looks like. That's how you disseminate regular information.
-- @Alex Crumb
