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I don’t know the perception of all my readers, but I’ve received many compliments that my writing style is easy to read, understand, and digest. Throughout grade school and high school, I never really had the impeccable writing skills of a novelist, they were just slightly above average. This, however, turned out to be a good thing when I started learning about business writing.

Using long paragraphs and big words doesn’t really work in business conversation, and the same can be said for blogging. Most of your readers aren’t sitting down next to a fireplace with a cup of coffee to read your words as if they were a novel. Instead, they are trying to extract the usable information from what you have to say.

Writing and developing a reader friendly blog does not need to be a painful task. In fact, the guidelines are simple and actually make blogging easier than most other formats of writing if they’re just practiced. Unfortunately, sometimes we all get carried away and forget how simple it should be. This article will give you some tips to get back in touch with the secrets of a reader friendly blog.

  1. Create Catchy Headlines - The first thing a reader sees, often even before they make the decision to click that mouse button and proceed to your blog, is the headline. Write them descriptively, but keep them just alluring enough to draw the reader’s curiosity and the click that follows.
  2. Explain Above the Fold - Tell your readers right upfront what you plan to elaborate upon in the rest of the post. Don’t make them have to scroll down just to figure out what they’re going to read.
  3. Save The Eyes - Our eyes are sensitive, especially when reading from an electronic screen. Keep your blog eye friendly by using a large enough font (or at least one that the reader can scale up), proper contrast, and lots of white space - no more than 4 brief sentences per paragraph.
  4. Establish Scannablity - Help guide readers to what they really want to see. Use bold headlines to break up a post at the transition points throughout. Think of this tactic like an ongoing table of contents.
  5. Paint the Picture - I don’t mean you have to actually use your own artwork (even though it’d be cool if you’re good at it), but sometimes illustrations help the reader understand what’s going on. A picture might not always be worth a thousand words, but I bet it’s usually worth at least half of that!
  6. Chat Up Your Readers - Whether writing for a blog or the web in general, it’s accepted practice to write in a chatty, friendly, and conversational tone. When writing, just picture your target audience and begin talking to them through your keyboard. Blogging shouldn’t be stuffy.
  7. Don’t Create Distractions - If there is just one caveat to the tactic above, it would be that it is easy to get carried away while ignoring traditional rules of grammar. Use your blogging liberty where you’d like, but try to revert back to what you learned in school the rest of the time.
  8. Spell It Out - And for goodness sakes, with spell check and a quick proofreading, there’s just no excuse for incorrect spelling unless it’s for expressive purposes. And even that’s a stretch…
  9. Break It Up With Bullets - Use bullet points and lists whenever possible. A blog reader is much more likely to finish an article that cuts straight to the point and just presents the meat rather than struggling through paragraphs upon paragraphs of fluff.
  10. Use Even More Whitespace – When in doubt, space it out! If you’re using bullets or a numeric list style format, make sure there’s enough space between the lines so it doesn’t all just blur together in the viewer’s browser. Plus, it makes it easier to read between the lines. Also, try increasing your line height to increase the space between each line of text.
  11. Let Your Readers Share - There’s nothing worse as a reader than reading to the completion of a great blog post and wanting to share a few thoughts, then finding out that the blog doesn’t allow comments. Let the reader share their piece!
  12. Punctuate For Readers - Don’t be afraid of the … or the — They help web readers understand tone that is usually lost when translating spoken word to written text. Also, put some emphasis on your words with question marks and exclamation points… using nothing but periods can get boring.

Writing your blog for your readers is more than just telling them what they want to hear. It’s also about writing so they can read it easily!