We’ve been talking about blogging a lot lately because we believe that a blog is one of the most valuable tools a business can use. Here’s a great post from the archives on how to create good, sharable, clickable content for your blog!
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I don’t know about you, but I’m a blog post skimmer. I wish I could promise that every blog post I open gets all of my attention and I take the time to read it all - but I don’t.
Here are some tips on what I find makes a blog post easy to read, skim, and decide if I want to spend more time reading all the words.
1. Clear content
Introduce what you’re going to be talking about and what the goal of the post is. I did this by introducing the topic by saying I need blog posts to be easy to skim and saying I was going to give tips on what I find works to achieve this.
2. Section headings
If the post is broken down by section headings that jump out at me and give me a feel for the topics in the post, I’ll have a better sense on whether or not the post is hitting points of interest for me. It lets me quickly skim the post to see if it’s what I thought the post was about and whether or not I want to keep reading what the person has to say.
3. Bullet points
- skim-able
- succinct
- don’t require full sentences
- people don’t like to read long paragraphs of text
4. Photos
Photos in a blog post make your post more readable by:
- giving a visual relating to what you’re talking about
- breaking up the text making it more appealing to the eye
- making your posts more clickable
Here’s why: When posting to other sites (like Facebook) it will pull in a few lines of text as well as an accompanying image. It has been proven that having a thumbnail image in a link update increases click thrus.
5. Questions
If you want to make it easy for people to engage, ask a question so they know you want their opinions and input. The more specific and easy to answer the question is, the more likely you are to get a response.
What additional tips would you give for generating good blog posts?