When making public posts about your reflective learning journey, it is crucial to consider your audience. I tried to sum up here some tips that could help you while writing your reflective blogs.
Keep it as a draft until you are ready to post
Writing a short, interesting, and cohesive blog post takes time. You are likely to write way more than what your readers are wanting to read, so editing is usually required. Many bloggers choose to draft their posts in Google Doc/Word before bringing them to the blogging platform to be published. If you choose to do this, keep in mind that copy-pasting straight brings all the styling with it, so use a "paste as plain text" option.
Quality is more important than quantity
You might ask yourself what type of blog post you would rather read yourself? This is your chance to create some meaningful content on the internet. People tend to read things that are worth their time. We want useful, moving, noteworthy, unique, relevant, inspiring, and well thought out content. We want to read or view things that help us to improve some aspect of our lives.
Shorter posts are also best for generating discussion but need to be at least 250 words long to be searched by the search engines. Jeff Goins, like many others, claims that 400-600 words long is a good length. The reason I'm referring to him is that his thoughts line up well with ours, your reflective entries while studying at The Mind Lab should be kept short too.
Remember to acknowledge your sources and position yourself within your writing
Remember the people who are the subject of your reflections, as well as the intended audience of your posts. These posts are about you, but you might be referring to people close to you. Remember to be respectful, and make sure that you write anonymously if needed. If you want to acknowledge them, make sure to ask their permission. And when you talk about your own thoughts, feelings, and insights you have gained, make it clear that those really are your own reflections.
When you keep your readers in mind, you should help them to differentiate which parts are your own ideas and which are someone else's. Also, help them to find more information about your sources by acknowledging them accordingly. As you might have noticed I haven't been sticking to APA referencing in detail, but my referencing is hopefully clear enough.
Even if while blogging hyperlinking is enough, I strongly recommend adding full references to the end. This helps your readers to find your sources even if the link URL's change.
Make your posts scannable - for humans and search engines
Since we scan through the content, editing is essential. By we I mean mainly us humans, but Search Engine bots are scanning through your content too. Bots have been taught to respect the same things as we humans do. If you are not yet familiar with how search engines work, I would suggest you read this article by Google. After that, you might for example realise, how important and useful proper hyperlinking really is.
Jeff Goins talks also about scanning in that informative blog post of his, and he suggests that sticking to a topic, and having clear titles and subheadings helps too. I most certainly agree. Writing an easily scannable article means again that you write for your readers, not just for yourself. Also bear in mind the possibility that your readers might be using mobile devices or screen reading software. Your audience might be wider than you think, and the
References
Goins, J. (2015). How to Write Scannable Content for Your Blog. http://goinswriter.com/write-scannable-content/
Google. (2016). How Google Search Works - Search Console Help. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/70897?hl=en
Make Use Of. (2019, December 16). 5 Ways to Strip Formatting When You Copy and Paste Text. https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-ways-strip-formatting-copy-paste-text/
UPDATE 6/11/2020: Naturally, we humans learn and make mistakes. Instead of editing your old posts, we should comment on them or make new ones. If you do make changes to your post, a good practice is to have a changelog (like this) at the end of the post. Keep in mind that you most definitely shouldn't edit your posts as a response to comments - instead, you should add your own counter-comments. That is the essence of blogging!
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