How To Structure Your Online Articles (A 1-Minute Guide)
When you don’t structure writing properly, things get weird. Or better put…they get boring (and no reads).
Remember how good your essays in school used to be? Everyone in class would pass their essay around and each student would be giddy with excitement to read someone else’s work. Our teachers would talk about how much fun they had reading them.
Just kidding — that never happened.
Writing essays felt like forcing words to come out of my mind and on to paper. I remember my friends and I procrastinating writing our essays until a night or two before they were due. We wanted to do anything besides write them.
And I have a strong feeling our teachers wanted to do anything but read them.
Why do essays suck?
One reason is because of structure. The second reason is because of voice, but we’ll focus on structure in this week’s training.
When you don’t structure writing properly, things get weird. Or better put…they get boring. You might have even noticed this recently in books. Less books are being written in the format of long chapters and more have shorter chapters with sections inside. Online articles follow the same format. They’re broken up into a bunch of sections.
That’s the key to writing a great article.
How to create sections in your articles
Sections are broken up by H2 headers.
An H2 header is the second largest header in your article (with the first being your title, H1). There’s an H2 header right above this text, ‘How to create sections in your articles.’ With H2 headers, you’ll break your article up into 2+ sections depending on how long it is.
Inside each section, you’re going to structure it even further. Each section is going to have:
- Short paragraphs
- Bold, italicized, or underlined words and sentences
- Bullet points
- Images
This structure is key to getting your article read. Not only does it make it the opposite of what our dreaded essays looked like, but it makes your article skimmable. The ‘skim-ability’ factor of your articles is really important.
Look at your own online reading habits. Do you just hop right into an article reading it from start to finish right after clicking on it or do you skim the headlines and some of the content first before deciding to read it?
The more structured your article is, the easier it will be to skim. The easier it is to skim, the more people you can get to read it. The more people who read it, the more readers create a relationship with your personal brand and sign up for your newsletter or hire you.
Aesthetics in your article are just as important as the content itself. Before you hit publish, just look at your article to see if it looks readable. If it looks anything like those essays we used to write, structure, structure, structure.
And if you need any structuring inspiration, here are a few articles to help you out:
How To Land $98,000 In Retainer Writing Contracts in 3 Months
The 1 Thing Holding You Back From Being a Paid Writer
How to Use Discovery Projects to Find What You Like Writing About
P.S. My 8-week mentorship program for content writers teaching you how to use cold pitching to turn the faucet on when you need writing clients and off when your schedule is full is open for enrollment.
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