The Blog Squad: Special - How To Make Your Blog Content Pop!

We are a group of three book bloggers situated on different continents but brought together by our love for books and a penchant for talking about them. We’ve joined our forces to create a collaborative series of posts about book blogging and we hope you’ll enjoy the discussions.

A MAGICAL WORLD OF WORDS - AmyNikita 

BOOKS.BAGS.BURGERS - Uma K 

BOOK REVIEWS BY DI - Di Hewlett

This week we are doing 'How To' specials with each of us taking a topic and writing our own guide. Amy will be talking about How to Find and Design Images for your Blog and Uma will be going into 'How To Map your Blog' which includes  things like how to make your blog easily navigable, what information to provide authors, publishers and readers, and how to go about with creating the various pages of your blog.

Please take a moment to visit the other ladies' posts - there's some great info here! 

Your content is what BRINGS people to your site, but your design could be the clinching point that makes them want to return… Or not.

The first impressions that a reader forms when coming to your site are heavily influenced by your blog design. Although great blog design means nothing without having great content, blog design can still play a huge role in your blogging life and impact your traffic.

Reading from a screen is tiring. On the web, people like to be able to scan information and jump from one point of interest to the next. A huge block of monotonous text from start to finish is not appealing and is not easy to read, and you want your blog to be VERY easy to read.

So without further ado, here’s some tips to help you format and style your content so that you can attract and hold attention while making your important content POP!

• White Space & Line Breaks

Your eyes need a place to rest, which is why it’s important to incorporate white space into your blog, and the same is true of your posts! Use shorter paragraphs where you can, leaving spaces/line breaks. Even long and complex topics can be made far more readable by leaving some white space.

• Consider Breaking up your Content

A strong title is important to get your readers TO your blog, but well placed and well titled subheadings can KEEP your readers engaged. A lot of readers will skim read and look for little nuggets of information to take away.

Lists are easier to skim through and are more visually powerful than large paragraphs of text.

• Include Photos or Images within your post

You can use images to simply create a break-point and a visual ‘rest’ for your readers. They bring some colour to the page and well chosen and well placed images can also be used to illustrate a point. Sometimes an image or a video is more descriptive than just writing text.

• Use Blockquotes to make your Quotes stand out

Blockquotes are sections in your text that are taken from another source. Use blockquotes when you share exact quotes.

Blogger has built in blockquotes with the html code being:

<blockquote>Your text here</blockquote>

You can also customise the look of your blockquotes by adding CSS to your blog’s stylesheet. There are a lot of online resources and many various styles to choose from and I would recommend Googling ‘custom block quote’ to get you started.

• Use content boxes to visually offset text

Content boxes simply put your text into a coloured box. You can use them to highlight certain sections of text or, for book bloggers they can be used to offset certain things like a book blurb for example.

These will also require a bit of CSS to be added to your stylesheet and some html coding.

A really fantastic resource that I’ve found was over at Studio Press

What about you? What tips can you share on how to format your post to make your content stand out and be more readable? Do you have any questions? Let’s chat in the comments!