A Quick Way to KEEP Your Readers

Formatting

I have been doing a lot of reading the past few days, both new and experienced blogs. One thing I have come across that really bothers me is the formatting of the newer, inexperienced bloggers. A lot of them will work hard, do a substantial amount of research, write up a terrific article, and then blow it all away just because they can not keep the readers focused.

Any well known blogger will tell you this is just as important as the content and topic you are writing about. You may have the best writing skills in the world or have the most interesting topic/content in the world, but without the right formatting your articles will be dull. The best article in the world will not keep the reader's attention for more then five minutes if it looks like it was written in Notepad.

Ways to spice up your articles:

Most popular bloggers, that I have seen, try to use an image in each article. This also helps with SEO if you name it correctly, but it also helps give the article some color and character. Over at doshdosh, Maki uses a different anime picture in almost every article.

Use bold and italics to your advantage. When there is a key point or something that needs to stand out, use bold. It will help distinguish your strong points and change up the pace of the article. The same for italics, they are like an alarm or siren. Both, make the reader take notice.

Use bullets and lists to your advantage.

• Use them as small headlines inside your article.
  
• Tease your readers with them.

If anything, when making a list you are changing up the flow of the article, indenting, and catching the readers attention.

Font size is another great tool. From just changing the font size you let the readers know that this is important. Even more so, if you increase the font and bold it, the reader will automatically take notice.

And the easiest of them all - paragraphs. Please, if anything, please separate your thoughts. Let the reader know you are changing lanes. No one wants to read a massive article that has no breaking point. It seems overwhelming, boring and readers will run away.

There are many other ways to format your articles, just be creative. I have seen too many well written articles today that would not get read because they were just too boring to look at.

Please take the extra five minutes after you write an article and make it look nice. You will be glad you did and so will the READERS.

Until next time,
Josh Dockery