I’m slowly writing and exploring the principles behind what I’m calling Calm Marketing – my own values-aligned approach to becoming discoverable online without burning yourself out or having to be online all the time. This post is part of that. Read more about the Calm Marketing Methodology.
A little while ago, my friend and fellow business owner Dani Gardner and I started meeting once a month. Dani has cleverly coined it our ‘minimind’ – like a mastermind but for just the two of us, to keep each other accountable and share what we’re noticing in our work.
One thing that came up recently was blog posts that are hard to read.
Not necessarily hard to read because the writing is bad – most often the writing is great.
But because of the way the blog post has been formatted and structured. When a blog post is structured poorly, reading it feels like hard work.
If you’ve been around here for a while, you’ll know I’m a huge fan of blogging. I often talk about how blogging is a form of marketing that can support your energy, rather than drain it. When done right, blogging is a very gentle and sustainable way to market and grow your business (so much more than social media).
So when I see blog articles that aren’t formatted correctly, I always think that this is such a shame. Because the consequence is that your visitors don’t stick around and that incredibly helpful article you’ve poured hours into writing never reaches the people who really need it.
You might even start to think that your content sucks because people are clicking away, when actually, it’s just your blog formatting letting you down. With a few little tweaks you could improve the whole experience for your readers.
Dani noticed this with her clients and so did I.
So here we are. This is part one of a two-part series on structuring your blog posts.
This first part is all about how to format your blog posts for readability. We want the experience someone has while reading your article to be calm and gentle on their nervous system so they actually stay, read and feel good while they are doing it.
Part two covers how to structure and write search-friendly blog posts so the right people find it in the first place.