Why Take Time to Format Blog Posts for the Web?
Steemit has encouraged a lot of brilliant and inspiring people to start blogging. Many of these new bloggers come from backgrounds where there previous writing experience has been papers for school. Writing for the web and writing the kinds of academic papers that will earn an A are two very different things.
Here's the deal. Internet readers are in impatient lot. By taking just a couple of minutes to make blog posts more readable, most of you can begin to engage more readers, attract more followers, and in turn, start to earn more Steem.
Five Tips to Format Blog Posts Better
The first tip is that nothing is set in stone. Feel free to violate any rules when you believe you need to. However, you'll probably find that following these suggestions makes your Steemit blog posts easier to read and more likely to attract positive attention.
Tip 1: Use Subheadings
You can use the simple markup of enclosing your headings in a pair of asterisks to bold them. This helps break up your text into digestible chunks.
Tip 2: Keep Paragraphs Fairly Short
Nobody wants to read your Word Wall:
If your average paragraph starts to run over four or five sentences, it's probably getting too long for typical web writing. You might need somewhat longer paragraphs to explain some ideas, but on the other hand, some of your ideas may be well expressed in once sentence.
Tip 3: Use Lists
It's also pretty easy to summarize your points with a readable list:
- Tip 1: Use subheadings.
- Tip 2: Keep paragraphs short.
- Tip 3: Use lists.
Tip 4: People Like Pictures
We humans take in most information visually, and it really is true that a picture is worth 7 gig of words sometimes. Even if you don't have a really relevant picture, you can use a photo to engage readers. As this photo illustrates, you can always take a picture of your dog. Who doesn't like dogs?
Tip 5: Here's the Markdown Guide
If you don't want to use the WYSIWYG editor, you can use the text editor but add some of these simple markdown commands form the Steemit Markdown Guide: https://guides.github.com/features/mastering-markdown/
What Formatting Tips Help You?
I'd love to hear from fellow Steemians about new blogging tips!