Few days back, I’d attended BlogCamp Delhi and I met my blogger friends Abhijeet & Abhishek and as one can expect that when three professional bloggers will meet then they’ll discuss blogging only. While the discussion was heating up, the topic of repeat posts came up and we all agreed that if one news hits a major blog, then how most of the blogs talk about the same thing and the trend follows.

Abhijeet made a good point at that time and said that it’s really the presentation of the post which can make the difference and give a fresh look to the blog post and Abhishek & me nodded in agreement. Now the point comes in that how can we make a post look presentable ?

Formating the post : Consider a situation where you are looking at a post with nothing but text in it and that too which fails to highlight the important points and on the other hand a post with relevant images, funny images, important text highlighted with bold, italics or may be different color. Which one will you prefer to read ?

I’m sure the answer will be the second one. The reason is simple, a person just doesn’t want to read and bury his eyes on the text. Making the text bold or italicized, creating lists will ensure that the person doesn’t skip the important points because the normal readers on the internet tend to scan the content and as a writer you should concentrate a little bit on making the post scannable. So here’s how I’ll sum up the things and things which will help you in making the post scannable -

1. Creating Lists : Create lists of important points as they help in going through the content pretty fast. It also helps in engaging the reader and that helps in ensuring that they’ll read the whole post.

2. Highlight important points : Make the text bold, italicized and make use of various colors to highlight important points which don’t fit in the lists and can be written in form of paragraph only.

3. Relevant or Humorous images : A picture is worth thousand words and in this case if you include a relevant image or photograph then not only the post will look more presentable but readers will be able to see that fresh perspective to it.

Fist two points are fine & I can manage them but how to handle the third point ?

The biggest problem which most of the bloggers face is that they don’t know that how can they get royalty free images for their blog posts and I would list out various services or plugins which can help you in this regards.

1. Stock Exchange : This is one of the biggest source of getting royalty free images. Each and every image has a license attached with it and according the terms mentioned on the images, you can make use the photos in your blog posts and make them look presentable.

2. Creative Commons : I love this service a lot and whenever I want to search for royalty free photos or images which I want to include in the blog post then I head towards this search engine. Just ensure that you credit the original owner and that’s it, you are free to use the images anywhere (just ensure that the license allows you to use them at commercial places).

3. FreeFoto : Another excellent service which allows you use the photos for free only if you agree to linkback and credit the right people.

I hope that these little ideas will help you in making your blog posts presentable and in case you think that something else can also be done to enhance the blog post, then feel free to share it with us.

Image Credit : Cauzinha