How To Prepare An Article For Blog Publication? — Editorial Tips

Ordered the text to a good copywriter? This is only half the battle – the finished material needs to be “packed”. Edit text, add illustrations, and write announcements and eyeliners for social networks.

We will go through the entire chain of raw material processing and show what tools and approaches will help you not to spoil a decent text and publish a strong article. You can do all this yourself if you do not have your own editorial office or reliable freelancers.

Working with text

Uniqueness

If the text was written by an unverified author or if your SEO specialist is firmly convinced that the text needs to be no less than 98% unique, check the text of the article. Uniqueness testing also helps when you study competitors’ texts.

The Advego exchange has some good tools for text analysis. Online uniqueness check is available after registration, but you can download the application – it’s more convenient for permanent work. In the application, you can change the text analysis settings.

We also recommend conducting a semantic analysis of the texts – you will be able to assess the spamminess, and “wateriness”, and make sure that the text corresponds to the ordered topic. This is not a dogma, but a guide.

On Text.ru, you can check online. This can be done for free, but you will have to stand in line. But in the service, you can immediately check the uniqueness, spelling, as well as SEO indicators.

Literacy

A good author checks their texts themselves. If you are interested in the perfect condition of the publications, you can hire a live proofreader and send them all the articles.

If you want to check spelling and punctuation at no extra cost, use online services.

The most common service is Spelling. Registration is required, there is a limit of 6,000 checkmarks for free. The spelling works thoughtfully, and carefully, even checking the letter “yo” in the text.

You can check the text in Lebedev’s Spelling for free and without registration – the spelling of the first thousand words will be checked. The check is very concise, especially in comparison with Spelling. Doubtful words will just light up for you.

A similar tool is LanguageTool. Only 20 thousand characters are checked for free, then you have to pay. As in Spelling, words that have caused doubt will simply be highlighted.

To resolve complex situations, you can ask a question or look for an answer among the ready-made explanations on Gramota.ru.

Lifehack: Enable spell-checking in the browser. For example, in Chrome, this is enabled in the advanced settings (see the end of the list). This will save you from ridiculous mistakes and typos.

Text quality

The content and quality of the text are best determined by a live editor. But you can run the text through several services, and if the indicators alert you – study the text more meticulously, or even give it to be rewritten.

As has long been known, a high score on Glavred is not a guarantee of high quality, but a low score is still a signal. And in general, it is useful to look at the text through the glasses of a good Glavred: there is always something to cut.

Readability.io. 5 readability formulas are used, and the complexity of the text is determined. The result is quite academic, but it can be useful. For example, if a text intended for leaders in a complex B2B field is assessed as suitable for audiences in grades 7-9, it is worth re-reading it more carefully.

You can analyze the text according to Zipf’s law. The algorithm calculates the frequency of words in the text and compares it with the natural distribution. Naturalness above 50% is already good. If the text shows a lower percentage, it’s a good reason to reread it and check the uniqueness, because it may be a clumsy rewrite.

A similar tool is LanguageTool. Only 20 thousand characters are checked for free, then you have to pay. As in Spelling, words that have caused doubt will simply be highlighted.

Lifehack: Enable spell-checking in the browser. For example, in Chrome, this is enabled in the advanced settings (see the end of the list). This will save you from ridiculous mistakes and typos.

The content and quality of the text are best determined by a live editor. But you can run the text through several services, and if the indicators alert you – to study the text more meticulously, and even give it a rewrite.

Preparing the text for layout

The main rule when preparing for typesetting: the typesetter should be comfortable working with the text.

Therefore, it is necessary to agree with the person who will write an article on the rules of preparation of materials. What to discuss:

Where everything will be stored?

For example, our blog content is in a separate folder on Google Drive. Inside, folders are made for each article, they contain Google Docs with text and pictures for the article. Access is configured so that you do not have to share the doc every time.

Lifehack: If you configure access to the entire folder, all the materials you save to it will inherit these accesses.

What should be prepared for the layout?

Text, pictures, covers for the site and social networks, rubrics, and tags, announcements for social networks, etc. It is worth combining all these rules into one document, so that you can, for example, immediately introduce a new person to the case.

How to prepare the text?

The text can be in Word or in Google Docs. Marking can be done explicitly (tags are written in the text) or through paragraph styles. Pictures are signed or not. And so on.

For example, there are different ways to transfer text from a document to a layout – export/import or paste via Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V. It is important to agree on whether paragraphs in the text will be broken by an empty line — or not.

When you don’t know the layout designer’s preferences, it’s best to separate the paragraphs with a blank line.

Most importantly: the text must be clean. The text should not contain unnecessary HTML markup, which sometimes “comes” to the text when copying from other documents or sites. The text should contain only the markup that you agreed with the typesetter.

If you want to “make it beautiful”, you can type the text with the help of a Typographer. This service will insert inseparable spaces, long dashes, correct quotes, and other small elements that make the text comfortable to read.

A more practical and functional service – Reformator. It clears excess garbage from the text, allows you to arrange everything correctly – to mark the headings, subheadings, and lists, and then “gives” clean neat text or HTML code, ready for placement.

Creation and processing of graphics

There are a few simple rules that will help you prepare photos for the article without painful thoughts about how best to do it.

Always prepare a set of necessary illustrations.

For example, we prepare a package of illustrations for each article. This is a thumbnail for placement on the main page, a background cover for the article, and two formats for reposts on social networks – a square and a rectangular image. All of them are made exactly to size, for example, for social networks the picture is 1200*630px, and the miniature is always 300*180px.

Maintain the desired size of the photos.

If you do not specify the size and take pictures as you go, you can imperceptibly harm your own blog. For example, in a miniature (300*180px), you can put a photo with a width of 1600 pixels and no one will notice the difference — except for those who leave the page without waiting for the photos to be uploaded. And if you resize a picture for social networks, it will be killed in the most unpleasant way.

Keep a uniform design style as much as possible.

Minimum requirement – keep a uniform width of illustrations in the text. Here, too, it is worth finding out what the optimal size is and sticking to it.

Design screenshots uniformly. If you have pictures with white margins – make frames for them, and the same.

Tools for processing illustrations

Of course, if you bought Photoshop and Illustrator, you may not need these little alternatives. But sometimes you need to do something quickly and easily — and these applications will help you.

PIXLR is an excellent graphic editor that can replace Photoshop for simple tasks, and it’s free. Available simply in the browser, you can use Pxlr Editor or the updated Pxlr X, there is a vector editor, and you can download the application.

Photopea – online Photoshop, which can open a lot of formats. He will open vector files as Photoshop – sort them by layers and convert them to Path.

You can work for free or pay $9 a month to disable advertising.

Remove.bg – solves a narrow problem, but easy and free – removing the background from the photo. In my own experience – the better the picture (more pixels), the more pleasant the result will be.

Image resize is a free tool from Slide.ly. There are many such services, but we prefer this one. You can set your parameters or choose a ready-made template for social networks.

Canva is a great image designer. Lots of substrates, decorative elements, the ability to upload your photos and logos. Many ready-made formats for all the needs of a digital specialist, a lot of ready-made designs, paid and free. There is even an infographic editor.

Lifehack: you can choose a ready-made design, and then disassemble it, delete something and add it to get a unique illustration.

It is convenient to process photos on the phone with the help of Snapseed. Smartmockups.com – a service for creating previews. If you need to present your design or site page in a beautiful package, just upload the image to the desired template.

Screenshots

Joxi.ru is a well-known service for creating and sharing screenshots.

Monosnap.com – an application that allows you to make copies of the screen, add arrows, comments, and other useful things to the screenshot.

There are many such services, for example, macOS has its own screenshot, the same functionality. The PrtSc key on the keyboard still takes a copy of the screen and sends it to the clipboard.

Lifehack: in order not to multiply files on disk or in the cloud, take a screenshot in the clipboard (in Monosnap, for example, it is sent there automatically) and immediately paste into a message or document.

Snapito.com is another useful screenshot, it captures the site with a full page, no matter how many screens, so you do not need to shoot screen after screen and glue them.

Sources of illustrations

We have already made a selection of 30 sources of illustrations, and you can read about how not to infringe copyright on images. Below are our top 5 photo stocks.

• Unsplash.com
• Savepice.ru
• Pixabay.com
• Stocksnap.io
• Ccsearch.creativecommons.org – there are many collections posted for public use.

Lifehack: if the service allows it, sort the search results by the number of downloads or views. Among the not the most popular pictures you can always find something that suits you and at the same time is not too widely distributed on the network.

Bonus: life hacks on collaboration in Google Docs

Google Drive is the most popular and powerful collaboration package. There is no need to explain how to use it, but here are some life hacks that will make life and work a little better.

Accesses

First and foremost: try not to share free access to the link to the documents. Do this only when the document can really be safely displayed to everyone on the Internet.

You can always ask the Google account of the person who should see the document, or offer to request access to the document.

You can assign access rights not only to one document but also to an entire folder. The magic is that after that, all the docs that you save to this folder will inherit access rights. Instead of sharing each dock individually, you can simply put them in the right folder.

To find out in which folder the document is located, you need to click on the folder icon in the title. There you can move the dock to another location, create a new folder for it, and most importantly — open this folder in the next tab. It is often necessary to find accompanying pictures to the article.

Customize styles

If you want all the texts to look comfortable for you – displayed in the font and size you like – set the default styles. First, you need to mark the piece of text as you like. Make the main text and headings H1, H2, and H3. Then select the appropriate paragraph and set the style based on it.

When all the styles are set the way you like, you need to go to the settings and make the custom styles – the default styles.

In each document, your own or someone else’s, you can choose “Use default styles” – in most cases, the display of text will magically change.

Only documents in which everything is difficult with the marking of the text do not change, most often because texts from other places were carelessly copied to the doc. For such a doc, it is useful to use formatting cleanup (Format menu). But at the same time, all the markings made manually will disappear, so be ready.

Ordered the text to a good copywriter? This is only half the battle – the finished material needs to be “packed”. Edit text, add illustrations, and write announcements, and eyeliners for social networks.

We will go through the entire chain of raw material processing and show what tools and approaches will help you not to spoil a decent text and publish a strong article. You can do all this yourself if you do not have your own editorial office or reliable freelancers.