I’m no writing expert, nor do I claim to be one. I’m simply a passive observer who’s read more than 500 blog posts in the past year.
I’ve seen some things in those blog posts that I wanted to point out. And yes, I made many of the mistakes myself.
1. Your Post Title doesn’t tickle my balls
The title is your billboard. Your title is the blip on someone’s timeline. You want people to treat it as an incoming cruise missile instead of a regular bird on the radar.
Your title needs to be crystal clear, it needs to tell me what value I’m getting or at least pique my interest because of some mystery, and as a bonus, it’s best when it triggers strong emotions.
For instance, the title of this piece is cheeky and arrogant. It was written to force a strong reaction: ‘Who is he to judge my work?!’
It’s triggering by design, and you instantly want to know what I have to say because you want to disagree with it or learn from it. Either way, I have you hooked.
2. Horrible colour schemes make me cringe
Fortunately, I haven’t seen this too often, but I have seen some horrible colour combinations for blog posts. This really throws me off instantly.
They work because they trigger me to stop and think something of it, so they have that going for them, but it’s so painful that I usually skip the entire post and keep on scrolling.
3. Bad formatting fucks with my focus
- I’m struggling with this myself, but lousy formatting will throw people off really quickly.
- So let me show by giving an example:
“My friend told me straight up he wanted to die.”
I was stunned after he said it.
I did not know how to respond, so I stayed silent.
Then, finally, he explained how he was planning to do it:
“Sometimes, I think the best way is to just shoot my car into the guard rail while going 80mph.”
-The end-
Do you see what a horrible impact improper formatting has?
Quit it with bold, different font sizes, colours, and random bulleted lists. It’s distracting and horrible to get through.
Keep it elegant and clean.
4. Large text blobs scare me to death (like below)
It’s because I’m ultra lazy. I want to see bite-sized chunks with clear headers and separators. I can nearly make it through five lines of text. The less text, the more comfortable I feel. Subsequently, I think large blobs are scary because I’ll have to focus more. If only 15% of people were the same as me, you’re missing out on many likes you so desperately crave. If you need more text to explain something, try to cut it up to look less intimidating.
Hopefully, you got something out of the above without hating my guts.
I’m a student like you are.
I’m learning and sharing in the open.
Let’s get better together!
Ciao.