Blog Editing for Your Posts and 5 Tools That Will Help You
Editing your freshly written blog post can feel overwhelming, especially after putting so much time and effort into your first draft. It’s important to walk away for a bit so that you can have fresh eyes read it over before you begin your editing process. Once you find a workflow that works for you, blog editing truly can be the most fun part of the process!
Once you’ve gotten everything onto your post, you will want to go back through and condense it to a place where readability is best. It doesn’t have to be perfect the second you finish getting all of your thoughts down. It is important to note that your first idea, no matter how amazing it was, does not have to match your last idea about part of your blog.
Finding your workflow after your workflow is the next hurdle to clear before finishing a great blog. You have done the hard work of putting together the actual blog, and now you need to focus on making the readability and optimization as seamless as possible.
Do not be afraid to move things around if it makes more sense or sounds better with the final layout. This is where you can really start to play around with your paragraph structure and mix and match all the puzzle pieces to fit in a way that makes the most sense and flows effortlessly.
1. Grammarly Premium
Grammarly Premium is not only a great grammar tool but a proofreader and plagiarism finder as well. It is well worth it to upgrade to the premium when you are writing on a heavy schedule and will use to added benefits of the premium plan. There are multiple plans from monthly, quarterly, and annually. The cheapest of which would be annual coming out to $12 per month. Having Grammarly Premium will streamline your editing process to give you several things all at once. You have a deep dive into grammar and sentence structure, as well as available readability replacements underlined.
2. Yoast
Search Engine Optimization is one of the most important parts of blogging. With that being said, Yoast, or another optimization tool is arguably the most important plug-in to have for your blog. Yoast helps optimize your blog to meet search engine standards. It has a place to find keywords to match your blog to help with optimization.
3. Hemmingway App
Hemmingway is essentially a readability tool. It grades your writing and uses a multicolored system to break apart different areas. You can even edit straight from the app itself. There is a toolbar to keep your writing all in one space so you do not have to continuously copy and paste back and forth when digging through the different colored edits.
5 key colors used:
Red for complete restructure
Yellow for needing a push of change
Purple to take away jargon or complicated text
Green to show passive voice
Blue to show your adverbs.
4. Writer
Writer is an AI app that learns the way you and your team write, and the way you speak to your audience, and takes that into account when creating future content. This app is great for brands trying to up their content but also keep their brand consistency. For bloggers, it does not take away from your overall creative freedom, and you will still be in every step of the process, but with less stress and pressure to find each point of readability and optimization while staying “on brand” or within your typical voice.
5. Word Counter
Though its namesake does give an idea that the app will be a resource for your word count progress, it is also a tool to help you keep track of the actual words and their uses. For example, it will help you see if there is a word you have repeated a few too many times. This helps with sentence structure, flow, and readability. The ease of use of this tool is a simple copy and paste into their website for it to tally your final word count to make sure you hit your marks, but it will also highlight the top 10 keywords from the post to ensure you are not overusing or underusing a term of importance.
Conclusion
Blog editing can be a quick process, or a lengthy process depending on how put together your original draft was. There is no exact method for editing, but you will be able to craft your own workflow that is the most helpful for you. Take these tips and begin moving your editing process around to find the best method for your own specific madness that is the writing process.
