Online, it’s important to break text up into chunks.

Online reading is not like reading a physical book. The online reader needs to be able to immediately scroll through content to get to the subheaders and the bolded content and even bullet points. For example, here is how I’ve applied bullet points and different font sizes to the same content in order to make it more visually appealing:

BEFORE

Story Bistro offers many unique services and programs to help your business get the attention it deserves. These include both group and private offerings like content coaching, story coaching, mentoring, and masterminds. To learn more about Story Bistro course or service is right for you, visit us online: http://storybistro.com/lets-work-together/.

AFTER

Story Bistro offers many unique services and programs to help your business get the attention it deserves.

These include both group and private offerings like:

  • content coaching
  • story coaching
  • private mentoring
  • group masterminds

To learn more about which Story Bistro course or service is right for you, visit us online.

Other Formatting Rules of Thumb

1. Keep your paragraphs to four lines or less. Don’t worry about whether or not your paragraph is structured according to the rules of grammar you learned in high school (or college!). The key here to is to keep your reader’s eyes moving down the page. More than four lines tends to overwhelm online readers and they may click away.

2. Use sub-titles or sub-headlines to denote key ideas. In WordPress, you can format these differently by applying heading styles (see the second row of editing options on your toolbar).

3. Incorporate pull quotes and tweetables. When you feel there’s something important and pithy that helps reinforce the overall meaning of your post, utilize the pull quote formatting (again, see the WordPress editor’s toolbar) or make your phrase tweetable. (Use a Tweet-this plugin to make this super easy.)

Your assignment: take another look at your blog post and see if you can reformat it to include more white space. Is it scannable?