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The true importance of subheadings in your blog posts

Your headlines may be catchy. Your writing may be amazing. Well crafted words, punchy sentences, and amazing insight into the minds of your reader.  But if your blog is longer than 150 words,  you need to add subheadings – or build them in as you go!

Big blocks of text can feel like a chore to read

People have so much media coming their way that they have to process quickly – they tend to put aside for later anything that will take them more than 30 seconds to process.

The solution: Break up your text with subheadings and bullets

Copy in a blog shouldn’t go more than 2 paragraphs without something to break it up. This can be an image, a bulleted list, an outtake, or a subheading.

One ultra important further tip: Use subheadings that have meaning
Subheadings within your blog post break up the text and if written well – they serve to inform as well. It’s not unusual for your readers to be skim reading on screen or on their phones. Making your subheadings  useful and meaningful means people will get more from their skim reading. The’ll get more than just the jist – they will get your key points.

Now –a challenge – go back and make your blog posts better

A good (if challenging) exercise is to choose a blog post you have already written and posted, read it, and see where you can add subheadings. You will probably  find a bit of a rewrite will be needed to make your paragraphs make more sense. This will mean that the addition of subheadings will not only make your post easier to read (more scannable – more meaningful) but also you may even make your writing clearer.

My favourite is to write with subheadings – that’s definitely more efficient than putting them in later!

Examples of blogs with great use of subheadings:

Hopefully now that you have read this (or at least skim read the subheadings) you will be a subheading convert!
Happy blogging!

Tagged in:
  1. blogging
  2. subheadings

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