So, you’re a great writer with some excellent ideas and you’re ready to break into the world of blogging. Well, it’s not as simple as pouring your thoughts onto a blank page and hitting post – at least not if you want to find success with your blog writing.
Far more goes into blogging than meets the eye, and one of the most important things to pay attention to is your blog post format. How do you format a blog post? We’re here to tell you!
Outlined below is a brief guide to formatting the perfect blog post, keep reading to learn more.
Increase Whitespace
Unlike most other forms of writing, good blog writing means using short paragraphs and sentences. Your paragraphs should be no longer than three sentences long.
Why? Because whitespace is a blogger’s best friend. If potential readers are met with a wall of text when clicking your blog, you’ll scare away a large portion of your audience.
By keeping your sentences and paragraphs short and sweet, you increase the amount of whitespace on each page, making your blog friendlier for readers.
Break up Text
Continuing with the idea of avoiding intimidating walls of text, it’s important that you break up your text often with bullet points, charts, infographs, images, and other media.
Try to put as much important information in these portions of your post as possible. That way, if someone is scanning your blog (as most people do), they’ll be able to catch all the information they need at a glance.
If you don’t have images of your own that you can use in your blog, you can take advantage of free stock photos. Anything you can do to add variety to your blog structure is a good thing.
Use the Right Headers
When you write a blog post, you have five header options to choose from, H1 to H5. Your H1 heading is your post’s title – there should be no other H1 headers in your post.
The main headers throughout your post should be H2, with H3-H5 reserved for subheaders only. Now, be careful with using H4 and H5 headers, you don’t want your blog structure to become confusing.
For SEO purposes, try to include some of your keywords in your headers. Keep it natural though! Jamming keywords in where they don’t really belong will hurt you more than help.
Inject Personality
It takes less than a second to form a first impression. And chances are, at some point you’ve clicked on a blog only to hit the back button almost immediately because you realized it wasn’t going to capture your attention. You don’t want this to happen when people click your blog!
To avoid this, find your writing style and inject plenty of personality into each post. Your return readers come for the information you can provide, sure, but they also come for you! Let your readers get to know you and you’ll increase the number of people who keep coming back for more.
Find Success With This Blog Post Format
If you want to maximize user engagement and profit with your blog, learning the correct blog post format is a must. Luckily, as you can see, it’s not at all difficult. It just takes a bit of know-how.
By using this guide every time you write a blog post, you’ll see the improvement in your analytics in no time.
Interested in learning more about finding success online? Take a look at our blog!