Tips for creating timely yet comprehensive blog posts

How can you break news in your niche and also ensure that your posts are comprehensive and of maximum benefit to your readers?

Blogging style certainly seems to have evolved over the past few years.

When I started blogging, there was a strong emphasis on writing blog posts and then not changing them afterwards. In fact, it was almost a cardinal sin to change anything — even a typo — after the author had published the post.

Perhaps that worked well for personal experience/diary blogs, but tended not to be as effective for niche subject blogs.

It’s quite common to see blog posts, both new and old, updated with new information over time, and I think that’s generally a good thing.

It’s this that can form the basis of writing articles that are both timely — they break news quickly — and comprehensive — they include in-depth opinion and links to other relevant articles both on and off the blog.

If you want to aim to break news in your niche but also create more detailed posts that last, I’d suggest the following:

1. Write a short, succinct article that gets straight to the point, outlining the breaking news, and containing relevant keywords. Link to one source if applicable. Publish and ping.
2. Ensure that you are using some kind of “related posts” plug-in. Although these aren’t perfect, they’ll provide the first readers to arrive at your article with a way of discovering other possibly relevant posts.
3. Consider what additional information you want to include in this article. Perhaps you have an opinion forming about the topic, or have found other web sites/blogs that are worth linking to.
4. Add to or even replace the original article with a more in-depth one, including manual links to other relevant information. Publish, ensuring that the permalink remains the same. This ensures that search engines and other sources that have already indexed your page will still send you visitors.
5. If you often break news, it may be worth having a plug-in that pulls relevant headlines from other RSS feeds (assuming you have permission to use them) based on keywords you specify and publishes them alongside your articles.

Most major news organizations (BBC News, for example) create “Breaking News” pages as soon as the first pieces of information arrive, developing the page as new details emerge.

It may be more appropriate to create a new, in-depth post and link to it from your “breaking news” page, but don’t be afraid to update information on an existing post. After all, you’re trying to be as useful as you can to your readers.

What strategies do you use for getting news out quickly and then developing more detailed posts?