Before you blog, write.
Take something you would teach,share, explain, opine -- and write about it. If it's good, if you like it, you have material ready for the future. If you realize it sucks, nothing was lost.
Your Company Blog Is Not The Place To Practice
You're not a born writer. Those don't exist: writing is simply hard work.
You don have a lot of experience. Finding your voice is hard.
Writing good comes from writing regularly. Are you writing regularly?
If not, is your company blog the best place to practice?
Probably not. Not at first. Not like that.
Where To Start
- Figure out who you write to today. A business owner? The type of person who would be a company client? Other professionals in the industry? A journalist doing research? The who will automatically help you set tone and content.
- What do you write about today? Do you want to teach something (a "how to...")? Give an opinion on something? Use the "...which is interesting because..." test to tease out your best ideas.
- Write what you want to say to the person you imagine as clearly as you can. Don't waffle.
- Save what you wrote. Set a reminder to get back to it in 10-14 days.
- Repeat steps 1-4 every day or as often as you can. Repetition makes the whole thing easier by a factor of holy shit, look at me go!
- Reread what you wrote when the time has come. You'll see cruft. Needless sentences. Cut them. It's not how many words you end up with, it is what they do. 100 words that teach making coffee clearly and simply beat 1000 words of hard to plow through instructions.
- Keep what's good and good enough. Don't be overly dramatic or difficult about it.
- After 30 days you'll know your flow, recognize your habits, and have found your own voice. You'll write like you. As an added bonus you have content ready to go with.
Conclusion
Like all things, writing takes practice. Get that first and only then get experience on the blog.
Question: do you think this goes too far and that people are better of jumping in the deep end?
Agreed with point no. 6: Less is always more! As for your question, jumping into the deep end is never a good option when it comes to crafting good blog posts. One should almost always test the waters first. Developing a schedule that suits him/her is essential. While the schedule that you’ve mentioned is good enough, everyone has his own )or should develop one that is he feels comfortable with).
Writing a bit before it is The Day certainly helps, right? Get a bit of experience, get comfortable.
I really like to let a post hang around a bit before publishing. What seems like sane A-B-C reasoning to me when I write sometimes turns out to be a jumble of disjointed arguments when I read it back later, the idea no longer fresh in my head.
True and this has happened with me more times than I can count! When you revisit a draft post next morning, it seems strange, sort of like a confused ramble rather than a proper argument. It is generally a good idea to review it with fresh eyes and a fresh mind (or have fresh eyes go through it).
About letting a post hang before publishing it, it depends on what you write about. For instance that is no doable if you have a news blog (current affairs, sports, celebrity news, etc). Since things are happening pretty quickly and pretty much all the time.