Writing an article that attracts readers is as much about formatting as it is about actual content.  Attractive images, lists, clear paragraph breaks and more can turn your blog from an intimidating wall of text into an easy-to-read post that invites the reader in.

I'm sure you've seen the blogs/articles where the author just puts everything down as a giant block of text.  No breaks.  No pauses.  Nothing to visually divide the content.  The result?  A post that is incredibly hard to read, and may drive the reader off immediately, never bothering to even scan to see if there's interesting content worth reading.

You could write the most interesting article ever posted to the Internet, but unless you know how to format it, no one will read it.  Formatting is the key to taking a good article and making it great.

JoeUser is a site designed around the idea of community and giving your blog the highest exposure possible.  Here, you don't blog in a vacuum, where the only person to read your blog is you.  When you post an article here, everyone on the site knows about it.  Combine that with the fact that your content is cross-posted throughout the Stardock Media network and you have a lot of potential eyes on what you write.

So you want your articles to both be interesting, and easy to read.  Here are a few tips we've collected over the last 5 years running the site:

1. Catchy Headlines
2. Images
3. Paragraph Breaks
4. Lists
5. Fonts & Sizes
6. The "more" tag
7. Anchored Links

1.  Catchy Headlines

The first thing anyone will ever see of your post is your headline, so you want to grab their attention early with a headline that is both enticing and accurate.  Do you want to talk about the latest political scandal in your state?  "Representative Jones Found With Dead Hooker" is better than "State Representative Murder Suspect".  Both could be accurate to your article, but one will draw people in.

Don't be a sensationalist, just look for a more interesting way to describe your post.

2.  Images

While a blog is typically text, the use of images to break the post up visually can be a great help, especially if it's a long post.  Place images in your article where appropriate, and experiment with alignments for best visual effect.  The image at the top of this article, for example, uses a right align, so it sits to the right of the text instead of above or below it.

3.  Paragraph Breaks

One of the worst things you can do is to write up a lengthy article and not put solid breaks between the paragraphs.  Without breaks, your article will be a "wall of text" and nothing drives readers away faster.  Imagine you're writing a paper for school, or your job and format accordingly.

4.  Lists

Lists are your friend.  If you have multiple points to make on a topic, dividing them up into a numbered (or unnumbered) list will make it much easier for a reader to quickly scan your post.  On top of ease-of-scanning, it helps you organize your writing.

5.  Fonts & Sizes

Sometimes the urge may strike you to switch away from the standard set of fonts and font sizes.  Maybe it's because you think Verdanna or Times New Roman is just ugly, and size 12 is just too tiny.  Before you reach for your custom fonts and sizes, think about how it will look with the rest of the site, and if the change actually makes the article better or easier for the average person to read.

6.  The "more" tag

This is a feature new for JoeUser 2.  By default, your main blog view will not display the entirety of each post.  Instead it will take the first 500 or so characters and display that, stripping it of formatting, images etc.  If you want your formatting to work on your blog index, you'll want to use the new "more" tag.

Simply find a point in your article that you think acts as a good teaser, to entice people to click to read more.  At that point insert [ more ] in the editor.  This will also make your article easier to feature on the front page of JoeUser.

7.  Anchored Links

Is your article a long one?  Do you have distinct sections you want people to be able to quickly navigate to?  Then you want to use anchored links on your article.  This is a more advanced formatting topic, and for instructions on how to use anchored links, I suggest you read this article from w3schools.com

While not exhaustive, this list and set of examples should help you write articles that are easier to read, and thus more attractive to your potential audience.  Just by writing on JoeUser, you already have a readership tens or perhaps hundreds of times larger than you would on another blog.  Take advantage of that exposure, write better articles and actually develop an audience.

You'd be surprised how much of a difference formatting makes.