Business Blogs: 5 Ways to Make Your Blog Posts Easier to Read

How quick are you to judge an article before reading it? How often do you instantly click the back arrow? It happens more often than you would think. You head to an article looking for an answer to your question, or information on your topic of interest, and you get handed a blog post that looks like more trouble to read than the first draft of a dissertation.

Despite the possibility that that blog post may have the best information on that particular subject, it’ll often get turned down from just the way it looks. First impressions matter, that’s why we will be looking at 5 different reasons people may struggle to read your blog posts.

1. Use a numbered list.

Directly from my title, you can tell what you’ll be getting out of this article: Business Blogs: 5 Ways to Make Your Blog Posts Easier to Read. What if instead of numbering each point, I just wrote it all out in a paragraph?

Most people wouldn’t bother to stick it through, because I promised simplicity, but handed them confusion. By using numbered lists, your readers will know what they’re getting into, how much information they’re going to walk away with, and even how much time it’ll likely take them to finish.

2. Whitespace is your friend.

I know, it’s intimidating, breaking every rule on the length of paragraphs that your high school English teacher taught you, but break those paragraphs up! It helps your reader focus on the content, not the clutter.

Use whitespace around images, not only does it help draw attention to the images, but it makes the entire page look more organized by default. Remember, the issue is not the length of your article, what usually makes readers run is the length of your paragraphs.

3. Use bold, italics, and/or hyperlinks.

By bolding, italicizing, or adding hyperlinks to your text, you help draw the readers attention to them. For example, did you know, statistically, users read 20% of the text on a page. (An Empirical Study of Web Use)

That way, even if a reader is just skimming, you can make sure your most important information stands out and is remembered. As an added bonus, those links can help boost your SEO.

4. Include images.

Images visually break your text up and make your post easy to scan. They also help your reader get an idea of what your post will include. At the very least, using a cute or funny picture may be just enough to make the reader click.

After all, who doesn’t smile when looking at a picture of puppies?

5. Use bullet points.

We’re all busy people. In fact, most of us may only have time to take a quick glance at articles during breaks. We often don’t read entire articles for the simple reason that we don’t have the time to!

• Bullet points make it easy to process important information.
• They help you highlight the key points.
• They give readers the ability to skim and quickly find what they want.

Remember, bullet points are meant to be brief for a reason, don’t put long-winded sentences behind bullet points and expect your readers to find value in them.

First impressions truly make a difference. In following these 5 tips, you can build blog posts that are visibly pleasing, easy to read, and ultimately will attract more eyes to your blog.

*Image courtesy of changehall via Flickr.