The best bum marketers get good click-through rates on their links because they are able to create web pages that read well. This is something that has always come natural for me, but it has become apparent that this is a particular gift I guess - because so many others seem to have trouble with it. It doesn’t need to be that much of a problem, really. Anybody can make good-looking pages that read well.

The first problem I see a lot of is improper font selection. Believe it or not this is critical. An attractive, easy-flowing font is seductive to the eyes and keeps them in the article. A font that is more difficult will lose readers. Stick with arial. Seriously - just write everything in arial and don’t try to get fancy with the fonts.

Only capitalize titles. Titles can be the article title, or sub-sections, but never capitalize entire words. If you need to stress a word do it with bold. Try to stay away from quotation marks and use italic instead.

Don’t have long paragraphs! Nobody is going to commit to getting tangled up in some huge tower of words. People like easy things. Break them up into smaller and more manageable blocks of text. Within those paragraphs, use bold text to further break them up.

Use images to break the page up. This is critical for anything but a very short article. Also insert graphics where you can, especially graphics that have a pointing effect such as an arrow or finger pointing that brings them farther down into more text. Always break up features or benefits into short 1-line sentences with bullet points!

See how this article flows? This is just a blog post so it only needs to incorporate a few of these things. Click the peel-away ad in the upper left corner to see how to use all these elements on a long web-page environment.

Technorati Tags: Writing, Page layout, Graphics