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Since social networking showed up and became integrated with the ways of the Web, the whole social media frenzy has gotten hold of the mass consciousness, and has been guiding the way modern society consumes and shares information. In the middle of all this, online connections and content reign supreme, empowering sites like Twitter and Facebook to lead businesses to different directions, and to set standards online and influence how we live.

Because of this, content creators and site owners these days play an important role in the grand scheme of things. We are entrusted to deliver valuable information to our readers; much like traditional journalism services the public. This fact blurs the line that bisects professional journalism and new media content distribution, with the public relying on either platform to get information and entertainment.

Needless to say, we owe it to our readers to deliver balanced news and create valuable content they would truly benefit from. And all these must be easy to consume and presented to make your content very accessible for any kind of reader. To make sure we do this right, here is a list of skills every blogger should posses.


Writing Proficiency

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Quite a no-brainer, it’s not enough that you should be able to string words together; in fact, every blogger should have a good command over the written word. You will also need to develop your own writing voice, a distinct writing style that utilizes the narrative form well, and crafted to be compelling and engaging for the reader.

Good writing skills (plus the right attitude) will not only ensure you produce well written posts, it will also be very crucial for when you get into other forms of content. Obviously, it will enable you to write and easily carry out planning and production for white papers, other brand marketing materials, podcasts, and videos.


Eye for Editing and Proofreading

Bad grammar, dishelved content structure, unchecked punctuation errors and wrong information can ruin the reader’s perception of you, your blog and the brand you represent. Sure it’s the editor’s job to filter all these out of your writing, but that doesn’t mean you can be lax when crafting your blog posts. Mistakes become even more unforgiveable when you’re running a one-man blog, and your brand is a globally recognized one.


Online and Offline Social Skills

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Everything online exists and operates on the online interaction platform, so as bloggers and content creators, it’s become crucial for us to actually live and breathe social media. Knowing how content and links are handled, shared, and consumed online can dictate how we create and distribute it. The knowledge and the insights we acquire by actually being part of the action will be instrumental for us, our blogs and our brands to thrive on the online marketing circuit.

Outside the 1s and 0s, we also need good people skills to work and relate with other people in the field. Relationships with other bloggers within a site, potential partners, industry leaders, advertisers, the blogging community in general, and both your existing and potential customers/readers should be nurtured. This, of course, enhances your branding efforts, reputation management and future endeavors with third party entities.


Coding Knowledge

We may be using idiot-proof blogging platforms, but it will certainly pay to have a firm grasp of HTML, as well as other programming languages being used in site development like CSS or Java. We’re not talking about becoming on par with your Web developing peers, though that would be downright useful in other areas of your blog and its marketing campaigns. As a blogger, all you need is perhaps a basic understanding of the logic behind these coding languages, and actually knowing the important page and font formatting commands.

It may sound like more work, but everything will be a walk in the park once you get the hang of it. Knowing a few coding basics will grant you a spacious creative leg room to personalize your every post and make it stand out. With it, you can format text and multimedia files, customize the placement of on-page elements, and add capabilities and features your standard blogging tool won’t customarily allow you to include.


Photography and Image Editing

Image by Mr. iMaax. ☜

Knowing how to operate a camera to take good quality pictures is definitely part of the basic blogging skill set. Sure, we can find and use images from other people, but even with their various user licenses, there will definitely be usage restrictions. Also, if the image is used with some element of brand marketing, it can become associated with your blog and brand. This can cause plenty of complications as far as ownership is concerned, and you may end up having to cough up a sum to purchase the exclusive rights to the image.

Taking your own photos frees you from all these. The same goes with artworks, both digital and freehand, that you would like to use on your blog posts. Because these may eventually make their way to your other marketing materials, getting your hands on an image editing software like Photoshop or Corel Draw, and crafting your own images will prove fruitful in the long run. This way, you can resize and modify existing photos, and compose original pieces from virtual scratch.

Tags: bloggers, Blogging, content creation, online marketing, Skills, Social Media