176: How to Create Scannable Content: 19 Techniques in 19 Minutes

Techniques to Create Scannable Content for Your Blog In today’s lesson, I want to share a simple way to write content that is much more likely to be actually read, understood and acted upon by your readers. We’re going to talk about techniques for creating more scannable content for your blog. As bloggers, we put a lot of time into carefully choosing the right words for our blog posts but many times what stops people really engaging with our content is the way those words are arranged on the page. They’re very often presented in a way that is too hard to read and inaccessible to many people. As a result our posts go unread, get no comments and have little chance of being shared on social media. So if you’re someone who wants more readers, more engagement and more sharing of your content - learning to write more scannable content is a skill that you will want to develop and this episode is for you! Further Resources on Scannable Content: 19 Techniques to Create it How to Write Like a Human 5 Google Font Combinations That Will Make Your Blog’s Design Sing Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there and welcome to Episode 176 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com; a blog, podcast, event, job board, and a series of ebooks all designed to help you as a blogger, to start a blog, to grow your audience, and to help make money from that blog. You can find more about ProBlogger at problogger.com. In today’s lesson, I want to share something really quite simple. It’s a skill that is going to help you with all of the content that you create for your blog. It’s going to help your blog to be more read by the readers who come to it, it’s going to help those readers to understand what you are trying to say to them, and to take action upon the content that you create. It’s also going to help you to get more shares on your content too. Today we’re talking about techniques for creating scannable content on your blog. As a blogger, you probably put a lot of time into carefully choosing the right words for your blog posts. We all do that. We all really think hard about those words, the things that we’re trying to convey. But many times what stops your readers from actually engaging with the content that you put a lot of time into is the way those words are arranged on your page. They’re very often the right words but they’re just not arranged in the right way and they’re presented in a way that is either hard to read or inaccessible to some of your readers. As a result, our posts go unread. They get no comments or few comments and they have little chance of being shared because people aren’t actually reading the content, they’re not comprehending it. If you are someone who wants more readers, more engagement, more sharing of your content, then today’s episode is for you because learning to write scannable content is a skill that you will want to develop. Again, let’s get into the techniques for today’s show. Studies show that the average person only really comprehends about 60% of what they read. That’s a little bit depressing as a blogger. It’s no wonder that this is true because another study that I came across today found that only 16% of people read websites word for word, 16% of people read the content that we write word for word. Most people today simply don’t read every word that is in front of them, they scan what they’re reading. I know this to be a fact because it’s exactly what I do. When I first arrive on a website or a blog, I tend to do a very quick scan around the page without scrolling whatever I see above the fold. If I see something that interests me, then I might scroll down further. But really, it’s an initial scan of the page to see if the content looks like it is relevant to me and if it’s good enough ...