How to Format Online Articles: A Post Formatting Makeover

This post is to demonstrate the impact of good formatting. A post formatting makeover, if you will. Same info, whole new look.

Notice the post below: the content and discussion Buttniks has is very thorough and informative.  It’s a long article – which is great! But long content can scare off some readers, and through good formatting you can actually get more of your audience to read through your entire post instead of deciding it’s ‘too much work.’

With some simple formatting changes you can take this wall of text and make it look amazing.

The impact of post formatting

Before Formatting & After Formatting 

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Include Relevant Info in All Titles

Notice the title change; always include the game or company you are talking about to the title.  Also, while devising your title, always keep in mind what your article is addressing and what you would type into Google to find that topic addressed.

Eliminate Unnecessary Spaces

Double spacing is done for you by our content creation box.  Don’t worry about spacing out things–if you are going from one paragraph to the next, just press enter and it’ll adjust.

Identify each of your main topics

Each main topic you discuss can be broken up into sections with titles.  This also allows readers to scan your post and have a good understanding of what you cover.  Surprisingly, this tends to keep your audience on page much longer.  Again, keep in mind how you would search for each topic on Google for choosing the wording of your headers.

Use Bullet Lists (don’t over do it of course)

Identify paragraphs where you have listed off different things and described them (for example: classes and races).  For these paragraphs, you can usually use the bullet list format to convey the information more easily and make it easier for the readers to absorb the information.  For these bullet lists you don’t always need to start the bullet point off with the name of the class or whatever the specific thing you are listing off.  Simply write whatever sentence you planned to write and bold the main thing you are discussing in the sentence.

Use All the Formatting

• Headers
• Subheaders
• Quote format
• Italicize
• Bold
• Insert images
• Center or adjust positioning of pictures
• Hyperlink into text
• Bullet lists (like this!)

There is a plethora of options to make your post aesthetically pleasing. (Just a small example, notice at the beginning of the page I linked directly to the authors profile.  I don’t suggest having a lot of links at the beginning of your post just to keep more people on your page, but I wanted to demonstrate the little things you can do to increase your and everyone else’s traffic.)

Example of quote format:

“What’s up, hows it going, blah blah.”

Always Try to Wrap Up

At the end of (almost) every post, you should be able to do a wrap up statement.  Break down the entire point of your post and give a quick stance on what you meant to get across.  They should walk away from that wrap up with thoughts and opinions swimming.  Hopefully that means they will leave a comment or better yet register for the site and follow you to get more!