If you’ve never written for the web before, it’s hard to figure out how to format a blog post. In the past few years, I’ve written hundreds of blogs for clients and my own sites. Along the way I’ve picked up some tips and tricks that I’m going to share with you today.

How do you format a blog post? You want to hook your readers and not give them an excuse to click away. Write conversationally in short paragraphs, and split up your text with headers and images to make it easy to digest. Bold text and bulleted lists can further improve the readability of your blog.

In this article, I’ll explain why it’s super important that you format your blog posts correctly. Then I’ll walk you through exactly how you should be formatting your posts.

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Why A Properly Formatted Blog Post Is Critical

Writing a blog or article isn’t like the type of writing that you learned in school.

People are most familiar with writing essays and more academic assignments because that’s what the education system really focuses on. But that’s now how you want to write for an online audience.

In case you haven’t noticed, people’s attention spans online is REALLY short these days, and it’s only getting shorter.

We have such an abundance of information available to us. So most people find themselves flipping between various articles and videos every few seconds.

Next time that you read an article online, be honest with yourself. Are you really reading the whole thing start to finish? Or do you usually skim and quickly only read the big bolded text first to see if it’s worth investing in the whole article?

The truth is that you only have a few seconds to catch someone’s attention when they open up your blog. So you don’t want to be writing a huge essay or wall of text like you learned in school. That will quickly bore people and cause them to stop reading.

You really need to capture a visitor’s attention from the very first sentence, and then keep them hooked.

It’s literally a fight sentence by sentence to keep people engaged.

Did they make it to the second sentence? It better be just as catchy and compelling as your first, or you’re going to lose them!

That’s why it’s critical to make sure your blog post is properly formatted to maximize your chances of readers actually checking out what you’ve got to say. Having great information is only half the battle, if you don’t know how to organize it in a way that’s easy to read.

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Formatting A Blog Post

There’s a few major things that I recommend you do to really make your blog post inviting and easy to skim through for your readers.

If you just start doing these things, you should start to notice a dramatic increase in how long people are staying on your page, and how often people click through to read more of your articles.

Write Conversationally

Like I already mentioned, a huge wall of text is super intimidating. It will cause most readers to just click the back button and find something else to read. Even if your information might be the best and most useful that’s available!

Even if you’re an expert on a particular subject matter, you don’t need to write super formally like it’s a university lecture.

Keep your writing conversational, like you’re talking to a friend.

You might notice that I do some things that would probably give my old English teacher a heart attack. Like starting a sentence with the word “but,” which is something that I do frequently. But when you’re writing for the web, that’s totally cool! You can play it a bit more fast and loose with your language rules.

If you had to learn a new skill, who would you rather have teach you? A relatable friend who can casually walk you through things, or a rigid instructor delivering a cold and dry lecture?

Make Use of Headers

Headers are a great way to break up the text of your blog post or article into nice bite-sized chunks. It’s one of the important things when learning how to format a blog post.

Psychologically, it can seem like a big commitment to readers if they see a big wall of text with no breaks in it. But by adding headers, you give them natural stopping and starting points. So they can try to read one section, and then make a decision if they want to proceed from there.

Your main sections should use H2 headers, and then you can use H3 headers for any sub-categories below those. This is great for your readers, and also helps Google to make sense of your post when it’s deciding where it wants to put you in the search results.

I recommend trying to keep each section of your blog to about 200 or 300 words long, with a new header for each section. If you’re starting to exceed that, try to think of creative ways that you could break up one big section into a few smaller ones.

Add Images To Your Blog Posts

Images can help to further break up your blog post, adding to the headers that you’re already using.

There’s no set rule for how many images you should have in a blog post, but I try to add one every half a page or so. Up to a maximum of about one image per heading. If you go with more than that, your blog post might start to look cluttered.

Wondering how to format a blog post when it comes to images? If I’m writing a 1,500-word blog post, I usually aim to have 3 images in it. For a 2,500-word blog post, 5 is usually a good number of images. So you can use that as a bit of a guideline.

If you have your own images, that’s the best way to go. But if not, you can make use of a royalty-free image website to find free images to use. Or you can pay for a membership to a stock photography website for more premium images if you can afford it.

Just pay careful attention to licenses on images you plan to use. You don’t want to accidentally plagiarize.

Wondering how long to make your blog post? Check out my article How Long Should A Blog Post Be?

Make Use of Bulleted List

Why should you use bulleted lists in your writing?

• They capture a reader’s attention while they skim an article (Got you!)
• They are welcoming and easy to read
• They help summarize information into easy-to-digest tidbits
• They break up your blog post and create more white space on the page

Keep Your Paragraphs Short

In addition to writing conversationally, this is one of the most important parts of formatting your blog posts.

Writing long paragraphs really adds to that “wall of text” took that you want to avoid.

So for that reason, I recommend keeping your paragraphs to 3 lines maximum. If you occasionally exceed that limit, it’s fine. But you don’t want to make a regular habit of it.

For some blogs out there, you may notice that bloggers even seem to give each sentence its own line!

That’s taking things to the opposite extreme. But depending on what you’re writing, it can sometimes make sense.

It feels weird at first to write this way. But try to push yourself and give it a try. When you read back your writing, you may be surprised at how much easier everything flows.

Bold Important Information

Throwing in some bolded text every once and a while can add emphasis to what you’re trying to say.

Try not to just bold a couple of random words that won’t make sense if someone is skimming your post though. Instead, use bold text to capture full ideas that will help your reader. Ideally someone should be able to get the basic gist of your article by skimming it and only reading the bold text.

In fact, this is another text that some people unknowingly use when evaluating if an entire article is worth their time to read or not!

Should you start a blog at all? My article Should You Start A Blog explains in detail.

Conclusion

Properly formatting your blog post is critical if you want to capture a reader’s attention and keep it. So spending some time to learn how to format a blog post is a must for any blogger.

In today’s fast-paced society, people have short attention spans and will click off your post at the first sign of boredom or reading difficulty.

There are several things you can do to make it as easy as possible for your readers.

Write conversationally. You want your blog to come across like you’re just talking to a friend, not giving a college lecture.

Make use of headers and images to break up your text. That way it won’t just look like one big intimidating wall to readers. Also keep your paragraphs short, so that it’s not a big commitment and things naturally flow easily.

If you follow these tips, you should notice a big increase in how long people stay on your blog and continue reading. And it will most likely help with the success of your blog overall.