You've written a blog post. Before you publish it, make a few small improvements and watch your shares, return visits and readership go up.

1. 8 Little things
To make your blog post better

2. You’ve written your blog post

3. You’re ready to publish

4. Hang on

5. You can still do a few little things

6. Little things can make your readers love you

7. Little things can make your readers share you

8. Little things can make your readers come back

9. These things take a few minutes

10. Here goes:

11. 1. Simplify your language

12. I love Hemingway Editor

13. www.hemingwayapp.com

14. If you can, have a person read your post, too

15. 2. Proofread

16. Pretty please. With sugar on top.

17. Grammarly works well

18. www.grammarly.com

19. Get a human being to read it, too

20. 3. Get smart (quotes)

21. Smart quotes are those curly cue things like
“”

22. Straight quotes are those sad little marks like ""

23. Don’t paste curly quotes!!!

24. They get all screwy. That’s a technical term.

25. Learn to create smart quotes in HTML

26. To get this smart quote Type
single right quote ’
single left quote ‘
double right quote ”
double left quote “

27. (Wordpress Visual mode will do this for you)

28. A few other symbols

29. ellipsis …
& (ampersand) &
em dash —
en dash –

30. 4. Use lists

31. This text

32. Looks like this on a web page

33. On the other hand, this text

34. Looks like this on a web page

35. That’s much easier to read

36. If you don’t know HTML, don’t panic

37. Your tools probably do this for you

38. Want bullets instead? Use “<ul>” instead of “<ol>”

39. 5. Resize images

40. Make all of your images the same width

41. Make sure image width = column width

42. That’s my personal taste. Yours may vary.

43. On the Mac, just use Preview
Handsome devil, isn’t he?

44. On the PC, try Paint

45. 6. Compress images

46. Smaller file sizes load faster

47. Faster pages get more readers and shares

48. On the Mac, try imageoptim

49. www.imageoptim.com

50. On the PC, try Caesium

51. www.saerasoft.com/caesium

52. 7. Control your text

53. Max 5 lines/paragraph (I prefer shorter)

54. This is terrifying

55. This is not

56. 8. Use headings

57. First, use real headings

58. This is bad

59. This is good

60. Using <h1></h1>, <h2></h2>
means cleaner layout…

61. …and may be better for SEO

62. Second, use headings to organize your prose

63. Scary

64. Friendly

65. It doesn’t take much

66. A few little errors can erode your audience’s trust

67. A few little improvements can build it

68. Do these 8 little things, and see what happens

69. By Ian Lurie
@portentint
CEO: Portent
www.portent.com

70. Learn more cool stuff at www.portent.com/blog