It’s no secret, we live in a world with little attention span. It’s all tl;dr these days. Social media can feel like drinking from a firehose and there are over two million blog posts published each day on the internet. How does your business stand out?
If a page doesn’t grab your attention immediately you’re not going to read it, let alone think it valuable enough to share with your social circle.
So what’s the one simple thing you can do with your articles to help improve their chance of being shared? Formatting.
Simple, but Overlooked
What’s the first impression when a visitor lands on your article? Is it easy to scan? Does the content look digestible? Does it look interesting? If the answer to any of these is ‘no’, they’re going to bounce. How are you going to get them to see how amazing your content is and share it, if you can’t get them to stick around.
Three Things You Can Do Today
Use Subheadings
Not only will subheadings make your article more visually appealing by giving the eye a place to rest between paragraphs, but it will also help accessibility and SEO when you use heading tags.
Choose your headings so that if someone were to scan only them, they would have an understand of the major points of your article.
Write Short Paragraphs
People like to feel like they’re accomplishing something. Have you ever added an item to a To Do list just so that you’ll have the satisfaction of checking it off? The same applies to reading.
Using short paragraphs will make the reader feel like they’re progressing through the article quicker and give them a feeling of advancement.
Write Using the Inverted Pyramid
Since people rarely read an article word for word, you want to make sure that they at least hit all your top points. Use an inverted pyramid structure for your paragraphs to do this. Start with your conclusion and then go on to back it up.
So there you go, three simple things you can do to format your blog posts and website articles to increase your chances of engaging your visitor and having them share your content.
