eROI Days Email Agency

Darren Rowse wrote an awesome article on ProBlogger.net about “How to Polish Posts: Individual Blog Post Design.”  Since we, at eROI, are slowly developing an overall strategy to encourage all employees to create blog posts on one of our 5 blogs (The Email Wars, eROI Days, Return on Subscriber, Cross Pixel Nation, and the soon-to-launch “Fresh” creative blog), I thought a few tips would help me and others in the company with more engaging blog posts in the future:

How to Polish Blog Posts:

Following are a number of areas that I consider when polishing blog posts. I’d love to hear your thoughts on what you’d add to the list - I’m sure there are plenty more.

• Images - images on posts are gold! They draw the eye and grab attention, they illustrate points, they inspire, they engage the imagination and they connect with visual learners. In a largely text based medium - the use of good image can set a blog post apart from the crowd - learn to use them!
• Charts and Diagrams - similarly, good charts, graphs and diagrams add depth to content and give posts a visual point of interest.
• Formatting - one of the big mistakes that I see guest posters submitting posts to me making is that their posts come to me largely as large slabs of uninteresting looking text. Most people don’t ‘read’ content online - they ’scan’ it. As a result you need to work hard to break up your text and draw attention to important points. Using lists is one way of doing this, as is using bold, italics, font size and color, blockquotes and other formatting techniques.
• Sub Headings - I am a fan of sub headings - rarely a post goes by that I don’t put <h3> tags around some important part of my post to draw the eye, start a new section or break up a slab of text. One quick tip I’d give on sub headings is to think about them in similar ways to ‘post titles’. The purpose of a subheading is to get people to read the text under it - so ‘craft’ sub headings using some of the same techniques as we mentioned in our post on crafting titles.
• White Space - a simple line break or a little extra space around an image can have a big impact upon how your post looks. Let your content breathe.
• Short Paragraphs - one edit that I often make with posts submitted by others on my blogs is to break up paragraphs into shorter ones. This makes posts seem less overwhelming and more achievable for readers to read.
• Break Posts Up - at times after writing a post it becomes clear that you’ve written something that is simply too long or covers too much territory. Rather than publishing it - breaking it down into a couple of smaller posts can do wonders for how the post looks to readers. Many readers would much rather read two single posts that are more focused than a longer rambling one that covers too much ground. This is actually what I’ve done with this very post - originally it was the 2nd half of my post on Quality Control but I realized that while related, the topics were perhaps a little too different to cover in the one post.
• Highlight and Reinforce Main Points - pay attention to using some of the above techniques when it comes to your main point and call to action. If your post is a long one - it can actually be useful to repeat your main point numerous times within your post (in the introduction, main body of the post and then as a closing sentence).