Blogging on Steemit Better: Just Say No to Word Walls With These Five Blog Formatting Tips

in #writing7 years ago

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!

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Yes, you are my hero. I think a lot of really smart people miss their chance to get read because they don't learn to format well for the web.

Your post here is a perfect example of all those points you're making. Valuable post indeed. Resteemed in the hopes of spreading the word. :) Found post on Reddit.

Thanks, I appreciate it. I hope to help because I think a lot of people here have so much potential, but they try to write papers like they did for school -- and that just doesn't usually work on a blog. Following you!

Great tips, especially for a newbie like me. Thanks.

Thanks, but it looks like you're a pretty good blogger. I followed you.

Actually I'm pretty new to blogging and Steemit and I've learned a lot after joining. It seems you have good knowledge in blogging. That's very valuable here. I wish you all the best in your journey on steemit & expecting more tips too. 😊

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