Bloggers Editing and Proofreading Services

Somebody searches how long to leave paint before a second coat. They land on a post that opens with a childhood memory of a grandmother's kitchen, moves through a house move, and reaches the answer in paragraph fourteen. They did not read paragraphs one to thirteen. They pressed back at paragraph two and the site lost them permanently.

We edit what independent bloggers write — posts and their structure, headings and summaries, evergreen guides and how-to content, personal essays and their openings, about pages, category and archive pages, and the email versions of posts. Our editors work on writing that has to survive a reader who arrived from a search box.

Getting to the answer before the story is the structural decision that determines whether a blog grows, and its failure is a preamble in front of the thing the reader came for. A reader who has to scroll to find out whether they are in the right place will leave rather than scroll. We work through these so the answer appears in the first hundred words, in a form that can be read and acted on without reading further, since the visitor with a question is the majority of a blog's traffic and they are lost in about four seconds; so the story that follows is placed after the answer rather than removed, because the personal material is what makes the writer worth returning to and it simply does not belong at the top; so the opening states which question the post answers and which it does not, given that a wrong-page visitor who leaves quickly is better than one who reads to paragraph fourteen and resents it; so the headings are written so somebody can navigate by them, as most readers scan headings before deciding to read; so a summary box carries the short version for the reader who wants only that; so the caveats and exceptions come after the general answer rather than before, since a post that qualifies before it answers reads as evasive; so anything that goes out of date carries the date it was written and the date it was checked; and so the email version can open differently, because a subscriber came for the writer and not for the search result. Posts written this way keep the searcher and the subscriber.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including drafts, traffic figures and commercial arrangements. We are editors rather than search or marketing advisers, and we offer no view on traffic, rankings or monetisation. What we can do is put the answer where the reader is standing.