Last Updated 2 years by Emily Standley-Allard
A blog can be a great way to share information, cultivate a network and even generate revenue. However, the popularity, reach and value of your blog is dependent upon its views, shares, and endorsements. Due to this, it’s essential to format blog posts to ensure they’re getting the most shares possible.
Most bloggers spend a long time creating top-quality content. While this is certainly a great way to attract views and traffic, your blog formatting could be mitigating the impact of your high-quality content. By learning how to format blog posts professionally, you can make sure that your carefully crafted content gets the attention and recognition it deserves.
How to Format Blog Posts
Formatting blog posts needn’t be a difficult task. To ensure your content is widely consumed, shared and enjoyed, take a look at these top blogging tips now…
Make Content Easy to Read
Most blog posts are comprised predominantly of text. Furthermore, the evolution of search engine optimization, or SEO, means that long-form content is more popular than ever. With bloggers routinely publishing posts in excess of 1,000 words, how can you grab the reader’s interest and persuade them to read and share your post?
Making your content easy to read is, perhaps, the easiest way to format blog posts. A great wall of text is always going to look overwhelming, no matter how engaging or insightful the content really is. By making your content more user-friendly, you can reduce your bounce rate and engage readers in no time.
To make your content easier to read, try these sure-fire blogging tactics:
- Add subheadings to your post
- Feature lists
- Include bullet points (like this!)
- Break up text with quotes
- Bold or italicize text to make it stand out
- Highlight important text or messages
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Include Images
Images are essential for every blog post you publish. Regardless of the topic or subject you’re writing about, it’s vital that the text is accompanied by images. Of course, choosing the right images to accompany your text is equally important.
When viewing a post, users want to know that the information it contains is relevant to them. As we process visual imagery more quickly than text, images are the fastest way to convey that your content is valuable to the user. The right images will convince a user to stay on your webpage and actually read your blog post.
As well as being valuable in their own right, images have a secondary use in terms of breaking up text. As well as using subheadings, lists, and quotes to separate text, you can strategically place images in your posts to help break up chunks of text.
Creating your own images or infographics is a great way to connect with your target audience. If you’re publishing a business blog, for example, featuring images of your staff helps to convey your corporate personality.
However, you don’t have to create your own visuals.
If you’re lacking the time, equipment or artistic prowess to create your own customized imagery, try using royalty-free stock images instead.
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Whether you choose to take your own photos, create bespoke visuals or feature someone else’s artwork (with permission!), incorporating imagery into your posts is a critical element of formatting your blog. In the words of renowned SEO guru, Neil Patel:
‘Imagery should be an integral part of all blog posts’
Get to The Point
When you start writing your blog post, don’t mince your words. Your user will still want to be convinced that your post is worth reading, so tell them why it is. Logically, it may make sense to build towards the main points or the conclusion of your post but, in the world of blogging, this isn’t the best strategy.
Instead, start off with your conclusion and work backwards. Tell the reader what the point of your blog post is within the first few lines and then expend with the details. By capturing their interest from the start, you’re far more likely to convince them to read your content and subsequently share it.
If a user is unsure whether your post is really going to be useful to them, they’ll abandon it within seconds. If you can persuade them that your content is going to answer their question, inform them, educate them or entertain them, however, they’ll keep reading.
Plan the structure of your blog post before you start writing, as this will help you to adapt to a new writing style. Experiment with restructuring some of your existing blog posts and compare views and shares to confirm your new blog formatting is working.
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Use On-Page SEO
If you want people to read and share your content, they need to be able to find it. Although you may already have some die-hard subscribers, most people stumble across content when they’re searching for something online.
By optimizing your blog to rank highly for certain keywords and terms, you can ensure that your content will reach your target audience. What’s more – you can be sure that the people viewing your content are actively interested in the subject you’re writing about.
On-page SEO needn’t be as tricky as it sounds.
In many cases, it encompasses the idea of simply formatting a blog post for easy reading. Using header tags, such as (h2) and (/h2) are handy ways to ensure your text is broken up by subheadings, for example.
Adding a meta description and title will tell users what your post is about on search engine results pages (SERPs), so it’s another way to confirm the relevance of your content. Of course, featuring social media links ensures users have an easy way to share your content straight away.
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Increase Your Reach with Formatted Blog Posts
If you want to increase page views, gain subscribers and boost the number of likes your posts receive, it’s essential to format each and every post before you hit ‘publish’.
With the right styling, you can increase the reach of your blog and ensure your content reaches your target audience every time you publish something new.
Not getting the traffic you need from your blog? Schedule a blog audit with us today!
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These are very helpful tips, Emily! I love adding images to my blog posts. I totally agree with you in terms of getting to the point. We want to be able to consume the much-needed information with ease.
Thanks for taking the time to comment Marissa! You have wonderful Pinterest tips as well! 🙂