When you write for the Web, make sure your main points are easy to find and that your text is scannable.
People will look briefly at a blog post to see if it's of interest to them. If they see nothing immediately, they might leave without reading.
How to Style Your Blog Posts
To engage your readers, make use of the following:
- Images are a form of visual storytelling. As an artist, you have a leg up on other bloggers who struggle to find images for their posts. Aim to use images of your art with every post.
- Image captions are often read before or instead of other text. Don't miss the opportunity to add credit lines or good image descriptions in your captions.
- H3 heading tags (like the “How to Style Your Blog Posts” above) help divide your text and tell search engines what's important. If you don't know what a heading tag is or how to use it, conduct a Web search to find instructions for heading tags in your blogging platform.
- Vertical lists and bullet points make your text scannable.
- Bold text emphasizes important points.
- Short (1-3 sentence) paragraphs break up the space on the screen.
Indented text in a different font, color, or background color also adds variety to the monotony of text.
This may seem like a lot of work, but it becomes second nature after awhile because it looks so darned good on the screen. I think I used them all here, so you can judge for yourself.
6 thoughts on “Blog Post Styling for More Engaged Readers”
Thank-you very much for this. I went back to my last post and made some adjustments. I found the heading tag suggestion very useful – I had no idea what that meant. I followed the link on that to read more about it. I don’t often use image captions – do you recommend using them for every image, or just the opening image? I was kind of adverse to the little grey frame that WordPress places around the image when you use ‘captions’.
Morgen: I absolutely suggest captions – especially if it’s your art. You must add credit lines to your images! (click on the credit lines link in the above text to read more about that)
You can change the styling of WordPress images – but you might need to know some code to do that. Worth a Web search to see if it’s something you want to tackle.
One other suggestion–sites like Facebook often pick up only your first image. Try to make sure that one is strong and relates to the theme of the blog post.
Helpful, thanks. I never really thought about it – I knew people read e-mail different, but makes sense – blogs are read differently too.
THANKS for this post. Glad to have the info on heading tags. Off to search for how-to instructions — nothing in the linked article told how to actually insert the codes that indentify H1, h2, etc. for the search engines. I suspect that if I just type Blah blah blah , that’s exactly what shows up on my blog post (including the ).
OOPS! The [h2] didn’t show up in my comment. Guess that answers my question.