Recently, I came across an English language blog whose author is not a native-speaker of English. His blog is several years old and he has been a pretty consistent professional blogger. On many of his posts, he discloses the amount of money he makes from his blog. Given the fact that he is a full-time blogger, what he mentions is decent amount. I am sure he would have earned much more had he put some efforts on polishing his English. His sentences make sense and can convey the idea across –but overall each of his post is studded with glaring language related mistakes.
It doesn’t matter which language you use for writing your posts –but you should learn to write properly. You don’t need to have a literature level command on language but your grammar and spellings must be correct. It is one such very important aspect which, more often than not, is ignored by those who wish to take blogging as a career.
One key requirement for having success in the area of blogging is to have good amount to traffic on your blog. And, as you must know, a blog should rank well in search engine results to get that sort of traffic. Major search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo! get you most of your search traffic. Of course, Google is undoubtedly the king. These search engines ranks your website on the basis of hundreds of parameters –all of them trying to judge the quality of your content. Needless to say, higher quality content is ranked higher. Remember, here I am talking about your place in search results for specific keywords. I am not talking about rankings like Alexa -these are not important and in fact quite farcical.
Blogging is a nice way to make free money.
Even years ago it was very easy for search algorithms to pick spelling and grammar mistakes present in the content and mark the content as that of low quality. Over the years, through various updates, search algorithms have become even smarter. Now they can pick connotations, understand what is written and thereby even deduce the meaning!
So, if your writing is full of language mistakes –it may cost you quality marks. And that would be very bad… and sad. Google and other search engines, however, also penalize a website for a lot of other reasons as well.
If you know your subject well and if you’re not well-versed in English –it is always better to write blogs in your mother tongue (first language). Not writing in English indeed lowers your income because English language still commands most of the Internet –but I am certain that it would be better than writing wrong English. Wrong language not only lowers your search ranking but also it fails to impart confidence in your readers. Readers will not be able to trust information given by you.
Freelance writing is a great way to work while you relax!
If you have to blog in English and you believe that your command on English is not up-to-the-mark, you can hire a person as English editor. She can correct language of your posts. This adds a big expense but it all depends on your objectives. If you are not blogging for money and already have loads of it OR if you believe that soon your blog will be able to earn enough to cover the cost of editor –it is recommended that you go for an editor.
If you’re not a native speaker of English and still want to blog in this language, it is important that you keep on learning and keep on eliminating the often made mistakes. For this, I would recommend that you read in English as much as possible.
Okay, my dear reader, this is it for today. Tomorrow, I will again bring you some more tips on how you can blog better –just like a professional blogger! Until then, happy blogging!
in that case English is not an Indian native language. and mistakes will keep happening. i think 99% bloggers are not perfect even though. they posses good command over English and grammer. and let me ask does grammerly extension helps in such scenario??