It's no secret that I read blogs daily. But most of you probably don't know that I read at least 100 blogs per day. I often read 300 blogs or more daily when I get a chance. "How the heck can you read that many blogs?" "Well, I scan for the important points. If it is an interesting (keyword: interesting) story or antidote, I pay a little bit more attention."
As an avid blog reader, scanning is very important and crucial to make life easier on myself and also able to get some other things done and occasionally, like any small business owners, go out and have a life once awhile. So please please pretty please, write with style. Not only with literally style, stage your blog with style so your readers actually will read the entire thing and will absorb some information at the end of the blog.
- Write in bullet points. Like simplicity is appreciated in staging, it is so in real life and especially in communications. Bullet points make everything easier to read. It makes information easier to consume.
- STOP WRITING IN ALL CAPS. Like we use bold & loud colors to accent the room, we don't "punch" the room with colors. We don't recommend overwhelming accent wall colors for the entire home for a good and specific reason. We ask for neutral colors. Similarly, in writing... When people write in all cap, even if they don't mean to, but I feel their "angry" words screaming at me through the screen. Caps do mean "scream" in internet language, so let's stop screaming and actually communicating.
- Stop writing in all bold, it makes it difficult to read. Bold should only be used sparingly, like hot peppers. It helps you to accent your article, not dominating it to make it too hard to absorb.
- Look at your article from a different angle. It's true that PC & MAC read and display things differently on the screen, same with your post. I have found that sometimes when you copy and paste your written blog post onto the blog platform, it copies it with all bold print. It makes the eyes very hard to scan and read. Chances are it will get very quickly scanned and disposed. Keep in mind that different platforms display your articles differently. So test your blog sometimes to make sure it is displayed in a format that is pleasing to the eye to actually develop your readership.
- Leave some space. You don't have to jam all the words together to make your post look like you actually wrote something. Leave some white space to let the readers' eyes rest, like you would when you stage or install artwork in your home. Would you put up paintings on every single piece of walls and cover every inches of white space? I think not, right? Sometimes less is more, and white space too can creates balance and harmony.
At last, make your conclusion obvious. When I read that many blog posts a day, I only read bullet points, first few sentences and the last few sentences. I scan the middle very quickly to see if there are actually anything juicy in the meat of the article there. I hope these tips will help you deliver better results to your readers and also I thank you for sparing my eyes from reading all bold prints. Happy blogging!
Cheers,
Cindy
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