How should I format my blog?

Well, there’s no one right or wrong answer. As with all good marketing, the answer is “it depends”. Cue eye rolls everywhere. But I’m here to provide you with some handy guidelines to get you started. 

If you only take one thing away, let it be this: boring content can get in the bin. 

Why is blog formatting important? 

If you want people to read your content, find your services, and consider you an important part of their learning journey, you have to keep it simple. 

You need to make things as easy as possible for your readers. 

A well-formatted blog should be 4 things: 

• Easy to scan for information
• Easy to read
• Visually appealing 
• Clearly organised

How do I make a blog easy to scan or skim-read? 

First things first, you need to understand why this is critical. We read differently on a screen than we read on a physical page. And on a screen, we instinctively scan in an F pattern. 

Here’s a great blog from UX planet about F pattern reading.

The first step in this process is using subheadings. These headings are crucial for a few reasons. Firstly, they allow you to signal to Google what the content in the article is about. Secondly, these headings allow your readers to check over your article before they stop to read it to decide if it’s useful for them. 

And if it isn’t useful, they’ll leave.

It may seem harsh, but why would someone waste time reading a blog or an article that isn’t relevant to their needs? If someone who’s never interacted with your content before arrives on your blog, they’re probably looking to learn something. They need an answer to a question. 

Are you going to give them that answer? And are you going to make it easy to find?

How do I make a blog visually appealing? 

It’s not about bright colours and wild graphics. If GIFs work for your brand, cool, crack on. Images are absolutely fine. 

Do your best to use them consistently. So (for example) roughly every 300 words or after each subheading could be a great place to start. You don’t want to clutter your blog with images but keeping a consistent pace with the imagery can help your readers feel more comfortable as they scroll through the page. 

But it is about more than graphics. The way your website is designed is also important. 

A few important website design things to focus on early in your marketing journey:

• Fonts that are easy to read – a sans serif font (like Arial) is much easier to read on a screen than a serif font (like Times New Roman)
• High contrast font and background – the best combination is black text on a white or light background
• Plenty of white space – ok, it doesn’t have to be white, but plenty of background space is a good thing. It makes the text a lot easier on the eyes 
• Size 16 font minimum for your paragraph text. Yes, minimum. Size 18 is even better.
• Mobile-friendly – this should just be standard in 2022, but a lot of website builders require you to tweak the mobile version as you go. Make sure you do this before publishing your content. It’s essential

So once your website is designed and set up in a way that is readable for your audience, it’s time to focus on the writing. And the all-important formatting.

What does good formatting look like? 

The best way to format a blog is to give people’s brains plenty of new things to look at. Now, I’m not talking flashing lights and distracting GIFs every 5 seconds, but there’s no bigger turn-off than a giant wall of text. 

Break. That. Shit. Up. 

Good ways to break up text include the following: 

• Keep paragraphs relatively short
• Vary the length of your paragraphs
• Including single-sentence paragraphs like the one above
• Use subheadings 
• Add 2-3 images (of GIFs if it works for your brand) 
• Break up lists into bullet points

Hope this helps! And best of luck on your blogging journey.

First published on alicerowancontentmarketing.com