Blogging 101: Part 3
You’ve spent hours crafting an insightful, educational, and engaging blog post. You followed the advice in our previous Blogging 101 post and are proud of the quality of your content.
You give it a final proofread, upload it to your website, and wait for the influx of views, comments, and shares.
A week later, you’re disappointed to see there’s been no engagement.
The post has tanked, and you have no idea why.
The good news? It may have nothing to do with the quality of your writing. A lot of blog posts fail to capture readers’ attention due to the way they’re formatted.
In this final part of our Blogging 101 series, we’re going to give you the lowdown on blog formatting and leave you with a few best practice tips to ensure your readers keep coming back for more.
Let’s get into it.
Why is formatting important?
People consume blog content differently to printed content. Web content is rarely read word by word. Instead, people scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences.
For this reason, your blog posts need to be clear, easy to read, and scannable. If they’re not, readers will move on.
Here are some top formatting tips to bear in mind when writing your next blog post.
Keep your paragraphs short
A blog post doesn’t need huge blocks of text to communicate depth. Let the value of your content speak for itself. By keeping your paragraphs short (2-4 sentences), you’ll give readers the gift of whitespace, which has been shown to increase reading speed and comprehension.
Break up the copy
No one wants to be faced with a wall of text - it’s a surefire way to turn readers off. Break up the copy by incorporating these formatting tactics:
Subheadings
Subheadings are effectively mini titles. They act as “signposts” in the copy, so readers can easily identify what each section of the blog is about. If you’ve got four key points to make in your post, you’ll likely need four subheadings.
Lists
Lists are the cornerstone of scannable content. They’re generally used to summarise/highlight key information or lay out a sequence of steps in a process.
You can itemise your lists using:
Bullet points: use these when the order of the information doesn’t matter.
Numbered lists: use these when the order of the items is important, (e.g., steps for following a recipe).
Images
A picture is worth a thousand words, so make use of them.
Striking images can drive a point home and elicit an emotional response.
Diagrams or gifs can help you explain complicated topics.
Infographics are a great way to highlight the impact of a campaign.
Include internal links
Internal links are links from one part of your website to another part of your website. For example, this internal link takes you from this page to part one of our ‘Blogging: 101’ series.
Internal links are important as they help readers navigate your website and find information they want to read.
They’re also important for search engine optimisation.
The number of internal links pointing to a page is a signal to search engines about the importance of that page. So, the more internal links a post or page receives, the more important it’s perceived to be by the search engines.
In other words, you can use internal links strategically to give the most important pages on your website an SEO boost.
Incorporate keywords
If your blog content ranks highly on Google, you’ll get web traffic consistently over time. But you can’t just publish any old content and expect to be inundated with visitors. You need to write about topics that people are searching for.
This is why you need to include keywords in your blog posts.
Find out more about keywords, read our post titled: improve your SEO in 5 easy steps.
Best Practice tips
That’s the lowdown on formatting. Let’s round things off with a few best practice tips.
How long should a blog post be?
If you google this question, you’ll get a million different answers, because there’s no hard and fast rule. There’s evidence to suggest that long form blog posts (1000 words+) rank better on google, but there’s no “one size fits all” solution as different topics require different depths of content.
The one thing the experts agree on is, for SEO purposes, a blog post should be 300 words minimum, but over and above this, it’s a case of quality over quantity.
How often should you post?
Search engines favour blogs that are updated frequently, so the more content you publish, the better your chances of climbing the search engine rankings.
However, you can’t compromise on quality, so be realistic about what you can produce.
Start by posting once a week. You can increase it once you know how time intensive the process is.
Build up a reserve
Whether you’re posting once a week or daily, you need to be consistent - both to establish credibility with your audience and keep them coming back for more.
To ensure there are no gaps, build up a reserve of content. Aim to have 3- or 4-weeks’ worth of posts written in advance, so you don’t get caught short.
Need some help/advice with your blog? Our content manager can help. Give us a call on 0203 750 3111 or email info@bamboofundraising.co.uk to get started.