What do your blog posts look and feel like?
Are they more like a glossy magazine or a crusty old scientific journal?
Did you know the design of your blog posts can trigger a positive or negative emotional response within three seconds of a visitor landing on the page (See Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink)?
Let’s examine three ways you can build more user friendly blog posts:
1. Pictures Boost Blog Appeal
Pictures are the hook your posts need to generate immediate interest from visitors. That’s the reason magazines spend so much money hiring photographers and designers to capture breathtaking images.
You can do the same with your blog!
Check out sites like Stock Exchange and Flickr’s Creative Commons for free stock photos. You can edit them with free photoshop-like tools on Picnik.com. I recommend adding a crisp picture to the upper left side of your post to draw readers into the content.
2. Add Headings and Shorten Paragraphs
I read some terrific blogs — well, they could be terrific — but the problem is the paragraphs are way too long and mashed together. People have short attention spans, so the better you can guide their experience while reading your work, the better. I don’t suggest adding headlines just for the sake of breaking up material.
–However, white space is a good thing–
Kind of like this.
3. Video = Free, Relevant and Embeddable
How often do you embed free YouTube videos into posts?
The men and women at SEOmoz have written extensively over the years about the way adding more different types of media adds an SEO boost to your site (while simultaneously creating a better user experience).
YouTube and other video sharing sites offer huge amounts of free content to help drive your point home. Think of it as a royalty free video library you can dip into whenever you like.
TED Talks is one of my favorites:
Bottom Line: Make your content lovable. People want to like your blog, but it needs to be easily digestible. Follow these three steps and your posts will pass the three second test with flying colors!
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