How to Format Your Blog Posts

A couple days ago I was reading a great post over at Smart Passive Income. Pat was talking about how to not look like a newbie blogger when you’re a newbie blogger. He had some great ideas. One of which was to make sure you format your blog posts, and I realized I haven’t talked about it at all, but it’s really important.

Why format blog posts?

Most internet readers SCAN. It is a fact. So you want to create your blog posts so they are easy for the scanners to take in your content, but also keep the scanners reading until the very end.  There are quite a few ways to do this, and there are no right or wrongs, and you will end up creating your own techniques that are unique to you and your blog.

Subheadings

These are the best and easiest way to keep the reader interested and moving through your whole post. As you move on to topics just create a subhead ~ bold it or use the header 2 setting to differentiate it from your content. This allows people to look down and see different areas and topics of your post. While they may scan this section they may see something further down that really grabs their attention and dive in further down the post.

Bold

Using bold is a good way to make a point, it’s also a great way to draw attention to something really important that you want to make sure your reader reads. However, do NOT over use bold. If you use it too much it just becomes loud text that people scan through and it will not catch the readers eye.

I don’t use a lot of bold, but rather find myself using caps where others would probably use bold. Whatever works for you ~ but there will be words or phrases that you want to make a little louder than the rest of the words on the page. Bold is one way to do it.

White Space

It can be incredibly tough to read on a screen. This is made even more difficult when there are huge blocks of text to read.  Writing on the internet is nothing like writing in English class. You do not need to 5 sentences in every paragraph to get an A. In fact, smaller paragraphs with spaces in between make it easier to read which means people will be more likely to actually read what you’ve written.  (The same holds true for emails, lenses anything people read on a screen)

Images

Images are an excellent way to pull readers in and get them to start reading your content. They also break up large blocks of text. An image that suits the topic well can really add to a post. As with bold you don’t want to overdo images. One or two images per post is probably just right.

Graphs/Visual Aids

If you are trying to explain something a graph or visual depiction can be an excellent asset to your post. I use these quite frequently ~ not graphs so much, but images that show what I’m talking about. People learn in very different ways ~ so if you are trying to teach something it’s always smart to add as many different learning mediums as possible which could be text, images or even video.

Links

Links are always a great thing to add to your post. It’s wise to use links to link to other bloggers/posts. It might be a post that talks further about what you’re discussing. It may be a post that inspired your post idea. It could be links to posts that will help people learn more about a step you’re not covering in your post.

Links to products are also a great idea. Especially if they are completely congruent with what you’re talking about in your post.

The thing about links ~ as with most things in a post ~ too many can be well… too many. If you have tons and tons of links in your post the likelihood of people clicking them goes down. Depending on how long your post is 2 to 4 well placed links can be very beneficial, but if every other sentence is a link you’ll find your clickthrough rate goes down dramatically.

Video

It seems “everybody” loves video these days. As you may know I’m not really one of those people ~ but I get it that many people do. Just remember this when using video on your site.

1. not EVERYONE loves video.

2. There are still lots and lots of people on dial up. So you might want to offer them a recap in text if it’s a tutorial type of video.

Using video is great, and I’ve found it very helpful to help me illustrate points from time to time. Just remember who your target market is. If you’re in a niche where people may be more likely to have dial up than high speed you may want to think about how much video you’re using.

How long should my blog posts be?

Please, please, please understand your blog posts do NOT have to be as long as my long winded 1 to 2 thousand word diatribes. I’ve read repeatedly that 400 to 700 word blog posts are the most read. I just can’t fit everything in my brain into 700 words. Don’t let the length of your post intimidate you into not writing. Your niche and your readers will help you identify the post length that works best for your site.  Try a few different types of posts, some short posts, some long posts, some list posts (check out the content creation series for more post ideas) and see which ones go over best.

Once you gain some readers you can tell which posts are most popular by the number of comments, the retweets on a post as well as the traffic you get to the post. Keep trying things out until you find something that works well for you!

There you have some tips on how to format blog posts. I hope you’ve found it helpful. If you have some formatting tricks of your own I’d love to hear them.