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Creating Captivating Blog Posts (or how to write for goldfish)

You’re smart enough to decide within a few seconds if you’re getting what you need from this post. And it’s my job to keep you here so that you can at least get to the first subheading.

But there’s a good chance that you won’t finish this blog post. In fact, I’ll bet that you don’t finish it. (If you actually do finish reading it, let me know by clicking here).

Elephant Goldfish

If my stopwatch is correct, it took you approximately 21 seconds to get to this point. That’s three times longer than the attention span of a Petco goldfish.

Now goldfish don’t take Ritalin and it’s better to assume that your readers don’t either. There are many reasons visitors bounce off your site within the first seven seconds:

• If they don’t find what they want on your site, they can easily search for it on Google.
• The web is an interactive medium. Visitors feel that if they’re not clicking content, they’re not getting its full value.
• More people are reading with mobile devices which severely limit the amount of content they can view at any moment.
• The bells and dings of real-time web notifications (think Buzz and Tweetdeck) are a constant distraction.

You with me? Good. So how can you get readers to read your entire post?

Simple: By getting them to stick around for seven more seconds. And then seven more seconds after that – and so on.

Seven ways to re-captivate attention

1. Use subheadings - Every two paragraphs break up the text with a subheading. This way, readers can scan the post for the section they find most relevant.
2. Use bullet points – Like what I’m doing here. People like lists. It puts your content in a nice container.
3. Use white space – Line height is important in posts. Most premium WordPress themes allow you to multiple ways of creating more white space.
4. Use images – If you read CopyBlogger, you might notice that authors always put an image at the top of every post. Sonia Simone calls these images “steroids for your headline”. Where applicable, use images through your post, like I do in “Essential Social Media Connections For Your Blog “.



5. Ask a question that begs and answer – It’s one thing to provide information based on your expertise, but what about asking the reader questions that get them thinking about their experience? Like I just did in the preceding sentence.
6. Keep the focus on them – Try writing your posts as if it’s an email to a specific person you have in mind. Maybe it’s a client who asked you a thoughtful question. For me, this way of writing flows more naturally, and comes across more personal.
7. Keep word count under 500 words – Most of my posts are less than 500 words. And my screen casts are less than 4 minutes.

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Published by: Grant Griffiths

Full post as published by Blawg for Profit on March 11, 2010 (boomark / email).