16 Rules of Blog Writing and Layout (Which Ones Are You Breaking?)

Updated December 24th, 2020

Remember newspapers?

People used to get them delivered to their doors and read them over breakfast.

They’re big and awkward to hold and they cover your fingers with black printer ink.

Plus, getting them to your doorstep takes hours, so by the time you read a newspaper, the news isn’t all that new.

Newspapers are going out of business because their news cannot keep up with the 24/7 news cycle that is so prevalent today [and with content marketing and social media].

Newspapers have their drawbacks but one thing they do right is to make sure their stories are easy to read. By that, I mean how they format and layout the newspaper and each individual story. Of course, the first newspapers hit you with a headline that makes you really want to read more.

Something like this headline works wonders:

THE KING OF POP IS DEAD! How he really died! 10,000 pills in 6 months.
Sensational tabloids aside, the content in newspapers is usually good ~ the writing’s high quality and they usually get their facts straight.

But quality content isn’t all you expect when you buy a newspaper and it isn’t enough for blog writing either.

All newspapers make sure their content is easy to read by constraining the width of their columns and that’s what their readers expect.

Blog writers need to do the same when writing blogs and format their blog posts and picking their blog designs so they’re easy to read. Long, narrow newspaper columns mean your eye can easily jump from the end of one line to the beginning of the next without losing its place.

Proper blog layout is essential to a successful blog layout and is just a small part of what I teach in my free 5 day Start a Blogging Business Crash Course.

You’ll learn the ins and outs of what it takes to build a blog capable of making $1,000+/month.

If your blog’s column is too wide, readers will keep getting lost unless they enlist their finger to help them keep track. Even if they do that, they’ll get frustrated and won’t enjoy the reading experience.

This is just one element of traditional media and legibility knowledge that we can use on our blogs or website layout to see what a blog page looks like. Newspapers follow set rules for the formatting and layout, their stories to make them easy to read and bloggers need to follow some of these rules and have good writing examples.

Blog writing and formatting content for the Web is more complex than writing for print because how we read on a computer screen is different from how we read in print and more challenging [never mind SEO/WordPress and writing quality content].