The lesson is “How to write for the web” or better, how to format your text for the web.

But before I go into the lesson, let’s put it into some context.

It’s a known fact among savvy marketers and webmasters that when people hit your page the first thing they do is scan headlines, subhead lines and banners looking for whatever they thought they would find before coming to your site.

If they find something that catches their eye they investigate.

How can you get them to get to the investigating part faster is the question of a savvy marketer/webmaster. (If your goal is to have the visitor read the content.)

Here are some tips…

1. Make sure your paragraphs are no longer then four lines long.
This surrounds each paragraph with white space which makes the page intuitively easy to scan.

Have you ever seen a paragraph 200 sentences long? Doesn’t look very inviting does it? And if it’s not written by someone you like, trust and respect, you’ll probably not read it.

Here’s what it looks like. I’ve blurred it so it can’t be read thus saving the author some embarrassment.

2. Break your articles up with sub-headlines, steps, points and photos.

Remember, I’m in scanning mode still and if one of your points, sub-headlines, steps or photos catches my eye, I may scroll to the top and read the whole article. Unless your goal is to get me to just click on banners which is a whole different conversation.

3. Use bold for points you want to stress. But Use this sparingly.

OK, those are the three main points to the lesson. I hope you found it useful.

Practice formatting as i taught in everything that you do online and it will become natural for you at some point.