We all know that visuals are very important on microblogging social media sites like Instagram and Facebook, and they are just as important for blogs. I might even say that visuals on long-form social media content like blog posts are even more important to keep readers engaged. Unlike microblogs, long-form blog posts need visuals to get attention, create scanability and also to keep readers engaged through reading longer posts.
I know, I know. You want to be fresh and original in your writing, so why would you ever want to follow a formula for writing an structuring your blog posts? And a list! Doesn’t the world have enough list articles and blog posts?
Writing effective headlines, or titles, (I use these terms interchangeably) for your blog posts (and news articles, press releases, magazine features and even social media posts) is essential but not always easy. In fact, writing really good headlines for your posts can be super hard, unless you have some formulas and the best guide ever written, which was not written by me but I will share.
Writing your first blog post is an accomplishment (yay you!), but writing a blog post and formatting it so it’s optimized for online reading are two different tasks. While it’s a complete overstatement and simply untrue to say people don’t read on the web, they most certainly do, it is true that before reading, they will quickly scan to see if they should read or not. The key to scannable text is to make the post chunky.
Blogging is rewarding and fun, but it’s a lot of work to create an audience-centered blog with loads of great content that attracts followers. It’s easy to get overwhelmed as you get started. There is a lot of good advice out there (I know because I’m always looking for it) on how to get started, but here are 15 best practices that are truly and simply essential. If you follow these 15 core practices, you will be establishing your blog’s solid foundation. Here we go…
