How to attract readers with blog text formatting?

When we write a post, we want to take 10 - 20 minutes of our daily time from readers so that they read our post and learn something from him. I know that we will still not reach our goals, but if at least 10% - 15% of readers read my post from cover to cover, then I will be very pleased.

In standard blogs, only 2% of users spend more than 2 minutes reading a post.

Even fewer people read the post word for word.

Good the news is that your blog doesn't have to be typical - it can be better and attract readers.

There are many factors that affect how long the average reader will spend reading your posts:

• Site loading speed.
• Interest in theme.
• Record quality.
• Entry formatting.
• Entry length.

These are elements that we can mostly control, so it's important to understand each of them.

In this post, we will focus on formatting content. I'll give you some tactics on how to engage readers with the right post presentation.

These will be the most relevant and frequent overlooked content formatting tips that can have a very big impact on the average time readers spend on your site.

1. Pay attention to the width

Imagine that your application will be placed on a huge movie poster.

As a reader, you must spend a lot of time reading it, not to mention turning your head from left to right to find the next line of text.

This is very annoying and makes it difficult to focus on the text.

The same happens if your input is too wide. Surely you have already noticed that even in Word, the text does not take up the entire width of the screen. For the same reason.

Now imagine you wrote one word on one line. Now, not only is it difficult to write sentence after sentence, but you are scrolling endlessly.

In this regard, the optimal solution is somewhere in the middle.

Let's leave our thoughts and move on to some serious research.

Studies (let's just focus on the results as they are the most interesting) regarding fast and slow reading have summarized the following:

• A slow reader will prefer 55 characters per input line.

When creating a blog, it is important to consider serve the interests of slow and fast readers.

Why?

Because only a small fraction of readers will read the post from A to Z.

However, most of your readers are of the so-called scanning type. These readers will read 20 to 30 percent of the content of a blog post, even if they really like it.

Each Every day we read dozens of posts on the Internet that are additionally clickbait. In this regard, "scanning" of articles is necessary in order to check whether we are interested in this or that article. If so, we often save the article and come back to it later to read it in full.

If you optimize the content of your posts for "scanning", they will be able to better understand them, which will give you a better chance of attracting readers for a long time.

What is the reason for this, what is the optimal input width?

I think it's safe to say that each line of the article should be 55 - 100 characters long.

Remember that each letter, space, and punctuation is also a character and should be counted.

Here are two additional factors to consider:

• Font size.
• Font type.

The larger the font, the fewer characters will fit on one line. There are also many types of fonts - some are wider, some are narrower - and this is also something to keep in mind.

2. Rethink the role of the sidebar

The sidebar is a hallmark of blogging that is often overlooked and left as the default position or form. This is a mistake.

Most readers almost never use the sidebar. According to statistics, the click-through rate for sidebar items is only 1%.

Why is the sidebar so important?

The problem is that your sidebar distracts readers, especially new ones. When a new reader lands on your post, it takes them 4 - 5 seconds to decide if it's worth reading.

The sidebar will grab their attention very quickly, so it actually takes 2 seconds to engage readers.

According to this Therefore, we decided to remove the sidebar from one post, leaving it on the rest of the blog pages.

Test your sidebar and see if the number of readers and time spent on the site increase if it is removed.

3. Use photos

I'm a big fan of adding photos to posts, but you need to be careful about this and add them correctly

Good selection of images has a positive effect on the time users spend reading the message.

Even if you don't choose particularly eye-catching photos, line spacing will have a decisive impact on your readers' time on your site.

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How do you select images for the contest?

(a) use appropriate image type

First of all, any photo is better than no photo, so that beat the text.

However, there is a fundamental difference between these types of images.

If you browse the top blogs in your niche, most of them will have photos in the form of color images, charts, infographics, and stock photos.

Some of these images are not realistic. In this regard, someone has to create them in modern graphics programs. Do you have enough time and budget to create such images? Probably not.

Graphs? They can be created very easily and you can add a citation and research source to each chart. The diagrams are not only interesting, but also make the reader take a few seconds to understand what is at stake.

Stock photos? I don't recommend using standard stock photos, but if you don't have a choice, I suggest you read this post, which features 22 free photo sites.

(b) use the appropriate number of photos

Imagine you use one a photo for a 5,000-word entry. It can help to some extent, but I think not much.

On the other hand.. .

Imagine a post with 1000 words and 100 photos - it will be unreadable. Unless the entry was, for example, about a trip to Chernobyl and your feelings about this wonderful trip.

According to our independent research, the best articles featured an average of one photo for every 350 - 450 words.

Keep in mind that this is just an average. Some records had more of them, and some had none at all. Please note that our work often has nothing at all other than the main photo. site loading speed. If you overload the post with photos, the page will load indefinitely.

If you have a lot of photos, you should use a CDN and fast hosting . Also don't forget to optimize the size and size of your photos, this is very important.

4.break text into different elements

The reason photos are an important part of any message is, of course, in that they can break up raw text, which certainly increases the chances of engaging readers.

Whatever no matter how good a blogger you are, no one wants to read a wall of text because it's boring.

Though images can be your primary way of punctuating text, there are many other ways to achieve better text formatting.

The first way is lists

Most of these are easier to read than plain text. Also remember that you have many list options to choose from:

bulleted lists are great for breaking a block of text

numbered lists provide variety

each list can be changed at will

How to change the appearance of the list?

/* CSS code for the list */

li {

list-style-image: url("images/green_dot.png");

}

Second method - social button th networks

What could be better than a content-breaking element? An element that can increase your likes!

Embedding social media elements is becoming more common because it just works. Especially if your site isn't saturated with them yet.

How do you do it? If you want to frame your posts from your Facebook page, just fill in all the fields in this tool. As a result, you will receive a code with which you can include the Facebook profile field in your posts.

Third way - tables

Although the use of tables is much more limited than in previous options, they provide a combination of image elements and text.

Tables are very useful when writing an article that compares many things.

If you're using WordPress, check out the TablePress plugin. If your WordPress theme is written using the Bootstrap framework, then you don't need to use a plugin, but first you should familiarize yourself with how the HTML code for tables is built.

Don't forget to test every table on mobile devices as not every table will display correctly.

How to attract readers? - summary

The average time a reader spends on your posts is one of the most important metrics you can care must be taken.

Also, this is another mechanism that will show you if users really like and appreciate whether they are what you write for them.

If you made it to the end of this post, please share, Which of the following tips was the most useful for you and helped to attract readers.