5 May 2011

Online readers tend to skim read – this is something that has been well documented and studied, so let’s think about how we can grab that reader’s  attention so they stop and read your articles.

There are some key areas that you can tweak to get better results and engage your readers further….best of all this is very easy to do and requires no fancy technical tricks!

The first two elements a reader sees are the headline and the associated image of that article. These two elements are contained on the category pages and the article page of your PressJack publication.

Check out these screenshots – see how prominent these areas are and how key they are to grabbing attention?

Online copywriting experts Copyblogger wrote a great post ‘How to write headlines that work‘ (something worth keeping as a handy reference) it says:

“a headline can do more than simply grab attention. A great headline can also communicate a full message to its intended audience, and it absolutely must lure the reader into your body text.”

There are some great tips that are worth checking out in the post.

What about those images? Perhaps a cliché, but the saying ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’,  is very true, particularly for those ‘scanners’. A huge area of text can make readers turn the page to the next article, there are lots of ways of breaking up long text articles including the use of bullet points, lists, quotes and images.

PressJack collects the images that you insert into your blog, if there’s more than one image then a image gallery is automatically created to display these. If you are stuck for an image then don’t forget to make use of resources such as Flickr.

So by inserting catchy headlines and images into your blog post you digital magazine will be more appealing and have a much better chance of getting the full article to be read! Why not experiment with your PressJack publication by adding multiple images and looking at your headlines to see if improvements can be made.