Who’s Reading Your Blog?

According to Jakob Nielsen, author of Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed, people who surf the web don’t read. They scan information instead.

Writing for the web is much different from writing print articles and newsletters. The speed of the Internet coupled with pages and pages of information at your fingertips means readers want instant gratification so they spend more time scanning content online than they do reading it word for word.

Writing scannable blog posts is much easier on the eyes and allows your readers to quickly digest the information you provide. Here are a few tips for writing scannable blog posts:

Use a Friendly, Conversational Tone

Pretend you’re writing to a good friend so that the tone of your posts is easy and conversational. Write the way you naturally speak. For instance use contractions (e.g. isn’t instead of is not) and common colloquialisms instead of writing in a formal tone.

Remember the Inverted Pyramid Writing Style

The inverted pyramid style of writing simply means that you start your post presenting your key points and conclusion first; and then you provide background information and other details.

The first line or two of your blog post could determine whether or not a reader decides to stick around for more so grab their attention right away.

Keep paragraphs short

Forget what your high school grammar teacher taught you about paragraphs consisting of four or more sentences. Keeping paragraphs shorter with white space between to break up the copy is much easier to scan. One tip that might help is putting only one idea at a time in a paragraph.

Use Bullets

Bullet lists are a great way to summarize important points. They really stand out.

Use interesting headlines

Headlines are important because they serve two purposes: They entice your reader to keep reading and they let the reader know what the next paragraph is about.
Your reader can scan your post and get the gist of what you’re saying by scanning the headlines. Many times they’ll go back to read more in depth the get to the meat and potatoes of your topic.

Your content is what draws readers to your blog so it’s important to make sure it’s easy to “read.”

photo credit: auntjojo