How to Format a Blog Post Like a Boss
Amazingly, writing outstanding content is not enough to ensure that it will be well accepted, read and, most importantly, shared. Research and crafting a post can take up huge amounts of time, but formatting and styling your post to appear appealing should not take you as much. Advice that will follow is pretty simple to take, but it makes all the difference.
People will usually steer away from blog posts that appear not to have been formatted carefully. If you do not want your content to go to waste, let’s quickly go through some of the main things to have in mind when formatting a blog post.
Use Subheadings (such as this one)
If I hadn’t used subheadings here the paragraph that you are currently reading would not be clearly marked, i.e. you would not immediately know what it is going to be about. This is extremely important, not only for the reader's’ enjoyment but also for the search engine. Internet crawlers look for keywords in headings and subheadings, so it is only logical to optimize the titles so that they could easily find your post and idex it as relevant to the keywords you used and which users usually search for.
Do not Make Your Posts too Wide
Do not format your posts in such a way that the 300- word paragraph fits in 2 or 3 rows. This is a matter of convenience because you enable the reader to read faster and with greater ease. If your text is too widely stretched, the post may seem insubstantial and appear as if it holds too little information. Make your posts slim and see how it looks much better.
Use Appropriate Images
One piece of visual content per blog post is essential. Ideally, you should have at least 3 images per a 500- word blog post. Of course, this all depends on the niche or industry you are writing about. Fashion and travel blog posts require the use of multiple images, whereas business posts do not require plenty of visualisation, in most cases. Personally, I love using Flickr as it contains images for all possible industries. You can download Flickr photos in bulk using the Bulkr service and save plenty of time on loading pages on Flickr. The images you use should be relevant to the content and, other than images, you can use infographics, videos, gifs and memes.
Graphs
Graphs can be extremely useful in certain technical industries. They are also helpful for representing data. Articles which deal with a lot of data can use graphs to break the monotony of such dry posts. Visuals are extremely important for luring the reader in and to serve as types of explainers for data that is tough to handle. Do not put in a graph without any text. It is important to explain what the graph data is about so that the search engines can make any sense of it and retrieve it as relevant to user queries.
Formatting a blog post might seem as an unnecessary waste of time, however, it is one of the most important aspects of written content. Visuals make the text fit in better with its surroundings and give us enjoyment on some levels. It is enough having to look at a computer monitor whilst reading, let alone having to look at an ugly, grey page. In that case, I would rather pick up a book.