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Blogging

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Blogging is a great way to promote your research in a short and snappy format. It can open your work up to a wider audience outside of your immediate network, and even outside of academia. The Edinburgh University Press blog, for example, attracts an audience of readers from a broad scope of fields and levels, from entry-level researchers and seasoned academics, to general interested audiences and even the local press.

If you’ve recently had an article published in a journal, you may be asked to consider writing a piece for the publisher’s blog. You may even wish to reach out to publishers proactively and pitch a blog piece to them.

Another option you might consider is starting your own blog. There are a variety of different tools you can use to do this, like Wordpress, Wix, and Blogger. They offer basic themes and templates to get you started in setting up your blog, and the only thing you really need to worry about is the content itself! While this section of the Early Career Researcher Hub focuses more on the different kinds of content you can create to help promote your research, you can always check out these helpful guides about setting up your own blog:

With that being said, let’s focus on the content of blog posts, how to get readers engaged, and how to tackle the different formats that they can come in.

Jump straight to:

Types of blog posts

Blog articles come in a variety of shapes and sizes. What you write depends on what you’re interested in highlighting, and ultimately where you want your audience to go once they’ve finished reading (most likely, to seek out more of your research).

Let’s take a look at some different blog article formats:

Excerpts from books and articles – this is self-explanatory and can be an effective way to give readers a flavour of your work. You may wish to take a section of your chapter or article and use this to create an article. Don’t forget to include a short introduction, as well as a closing paragraph that guides readers back to the full text.

An article based around the themes and topics of your current research, book, or journal article – try summarising your current research in 800 words or less. Think about the language you’re using and make sure you tailor it to a blog audience. Think short and snappy, like a newspaper article, and don’t forget to link to your research throughout so that readers can find out more if they wish to. These types of posts work well as a stepping stone to help readers get to grips with complex ideas that you delve into in your work.

Interviews – for example, you could interview the editor/s of a journal or a book series, or someone within your academic network around a topic that interests you both. You can use this type of post to connect your research to the wider field or show how it’s relevant to an area people might not immediately connect it to.

Q&A – interview yourself! Create a list of questions around a topic that you could answer in a Q&A format. Why not take a look at our list of suggested Q&A questions?

Lists – lists are a great web-based article format. They’re snappy, easy to scroll through, and from our experience at the Press, highly engaged with; they’re particularly popular on social media, and it’s highly likely that a list article (or “listicle”) will get shared far and wide if done right. Why not run down the top 5 findings in your research, or the top 5 things people may not have heard of in your research area? If you’re a film scholar, you could list a certain director’s films focused on a certain theme, or if you work in the literary studies field, you could list examples of books that use a certain trope. The possibilities are endless, and lists can be really fun to compile and write – and read, too!

Multimedia galleries – e.g. photos, images, graphics, videos, podcasts (note that these should be public domain, shared under a Creative Commons licence, copyright cleared or created by yourself). This breaks from the usual article ‘norm’ and can be a great way to display visual aspects of your research, if appropriate.

Profiles – you could write a profile on yourself, what brought you to academia and your area of research, and what you plan on doing next.

How to write a blog piece

You’ve been asked to write a blog article for your publisher, or you’re about to write your very first article for your own blog. Where do you start? Take a look at some of these tips to help guide you through the process:

  • Successful blog articles are short and snappy. Remember, you’re not writing a thesis here! You want to be able to engage and entertain a web audience, so we recommend that you keep your blog posts to no more than 900 words.
  • Blog posts are more casual than journal articles, so write in an engaging and conversational tone. You should avoid difficult language, long sentences and the passive voice. Imagine you are explaining your research to an undergraduate student during an informal coffee meeting. Keep it light and to the point, but add some personal flair.
  • Split long paragraphs into two or more shorter paragraphs, as this makes the content easier to read and digest on screen.
  • Break up the text: always include subheadings, and consider including other elements like bulleted lists or block quotes, where appropriate.
  • Include a summarising paragraph at the end of the piece, to direct readers on to your work for further reading.

Writing for SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It means optimising online content so that search engines, such as Google and Bing include it as high as possible in their lists of search results. Writing your blog post with SEO in mind helps interested readers find it, which means more people find out about your research.

Step 1 – choose your keyword. Choose a specific keyword or phrase that people who are interested in your work might search for. Try to find the sweet spot – avoid words and phrases that are too broad (e.g. ‘politics’) or too specific (e.g. a neologism that isn’t in common use yet).

Step 2 – use your keyword. Your keyword should appear in your article and its metadata between six and eight times. Remember that you must always write your keyword in full.

For example, say your chosen keyword is ‘folk horror’.

  • Include your keyword in your title: ‘The folk horror films of the 2010s’.
  • Include your keyword in the opening paragraph.
  • Include the keyword once or twice in the main body of the article.
  • In the conclusion, include an inviting question that uses the keyword again, e.g. ‘What are your thoughts on folk horror?’ or ‘What’s next for folk horror?’
  • If you’re submitting your post to a blog that isn’t your own, the blog owner will add your keyword to your post’s metadata. Remember to tell them what the keyword is!

Step 3 – include external links. Another good practice for SEO is to include links to other websites. You could link to related blog posts, your academic publications, news articles, your own blog or webpage (if writing for a third party), and anything that you reference in the post. When linking, fully describe the source in the link text; avoid link text like ‘click here’.

For example:

  • Good practice: Find out more about Moreana
  • Bad practice: Find out more here

Linking out to other sites with content that is relevant to your post helps search engines to figure out what your post is about and what searches it should be included in. Having links back to your post from other websites (e.g. a personal website or your department’s webpage) helps with this as well.

Include your biography

If you’re writing for a third party, like your publisher’s blog, it’s a good idea to provide a short biography that they can include at the footer of your article. Try to keep it short and sweet – 40 words or so, about yourself and your research. You could also include a headshot, and links to your website and/or social media.

Including images in your blog post

Images are a great way to break up the text of a blog piece, and to provide visual points of reference within an article. It also makes long chunks of text much easier to read, not to mention more visually appealing on screen. You may wish to use your own images, or source images from third parties. Legally, images will have to meet one of the following criteria:

  • They are in the public domain.
  • The creator shared them on a Creative Commons licence.
  • You created the image (e.g. took the photograph or drew the diagram).
  • You have cleared permission with the copyright holder to use them in your blog post.

Some good places to find images:

  • The Creative Commons search – a helpful tool to find free-to-use images on sites like Flickr, Google Images and Wikimedia Commons.
  • Unsplash, Pexels and Pixabay for images shared on a CC0 licence.

Sharing your blog article

Share your blog post as widely as possible! Facebook, X, Academia.edu, Reddit, websites, blogs, email: share the link wherever people might be interested.

You could also ask the blog owner if they’re happy for you to re-publish or repurpose the article on other websites or blogs.

Where to now?

Blogging | Edinburgh University Press