If the graphic above caught your attention, good. I achieved my purpose of getting you to read the start of this post. It’s amazing what a bit of colour and fancy fonts can achieve…anyway, this is my response to the 2011 Edublogs Teacher Challenge – Kickstart Activity 2 (Advanced). I’ll be using a post from the Rapid eLearning Blog by Tom Kuhlmann – Here’s How to Help Your Subject Matter Experts Build Better E-Learning Courses. If you don’t already follow Tom’s blog, I suggest you sign up straight after you sign up for my blog! 
In reading the post about Nine Signs of an Effective Blog Post I was reminded of my days teaching secondary school English. I used to teach an Advertising unit and I was struck by the similarities between writing blog posts and designing adverts. Effective advertisements and blog posts both try to:
- CAPTURE attention
- ENTICE the reader to find out more
- Cause the reader to DESIRE what’s on offer
- Cause some form of ACTION or response from the reader
Capture attention
An effective advertisement captures its audience’s attention in some way. This might be with a striking dominant visual image, a buzz word such as ‘Free’ placed in a dominant position on the page, the use of colour contrast and/or manipulating the size (text or shapes) of features that were intended by the advertiser to stand out. So too does the blogger try to capture his/her reader’s attention, most commonly by the headline as that’s usually what we click to get to the post in the first place. One thing I’ve noticed is that headlines of posts that stand out for me include a phrase that I may have Googled, or at least have been thinking about something I wanted to know.
How did the Rapid eLearning Blog post capture the reader’s attention?
Whilst the headline is wordy (‘Here’s How to Help Your Subject Matter Experts Build Better E-Learning Courses), it contains the key phrase, How to. In fact, as I looked back over the previous 10-12 posts written on the Rapid eLearning Blog I noticed that Tom Kuhlmann uses two key phrases in his headlines, over and over again:
- How to
- Free
These capture the reader’s attention because in both cases, the reader knows he/she will take something away after reading the post regardless of the topic. This ‘goody bag’ so to speak may consist of a tutorial that introduced a new skill or it may comprise free PowerPoint downloads. Either way, the reader knows that he/she will not walk away empty-handed by taking the time to begin reading the post.
Entice the reader
With the reader’s attention captured, both advertisements and blog posts need to maintain the reader’s attention by drawing him/her further into the content. If the reader’s attention is lost immediately after it was gained, then neither the advert or the post was effective as the reader has not spent the necessary time to garner the content. Adverts tend to draw the reader into them by placing the headline at the top of the page and the main content further down. Blog posts, given the nature of the medium, entice the reader with the first 1-2 paragraphs and/or with the use of a suitable image.
How did the Rapid eLearning Blog post capture the reader’s attention?
Tom Kuhlmann placed an interesting image immediately underneath the headline. The image acts as a bridge between the headline and the opening paragraph. The sentiments of smart people, or experts is repeated from the headline to the image to the opening statements. This bridge idea is a way to keep the audience reading the post because he/she has familiar ideas presented in three visually different parts of the post. This helps to reinforce the topic of the post as most of us tend to stop reading relatively early if we question where it’s going, content-wise.
Create desire for the content
It’s one thing to get readers to begin looking at an advertisement or start reading a blog post, but it’s another to maintain their attention to the end. Although adverts and blog posts achieve this in quite different ways, the intended outcome is the same. If we’re interested enough to spend longer than 5 seconds looking at an advertisement, we need to be rewarded for our interest by being given further information about the product on offer. Likewise, blogs posts need a logical flow of ideas and interesting facts in order to maintain the reader’s interest.
How did the Rapid eLearning Blog post capture the reader’s attention?
You’ll have to take my word that each paragraph built upon the one before and the flow of the post had a clear beginning, middle and end. If not, please feel free to read the post at your own leisure. Maybe it’s the English teacher in me, but I over-analysed the post in question and have decided not to rewrite the other post about Nine Signs of an Effective Blog Post.
What I do want to highlight is how Tom Kuhlmann took the structure of his content and effectively combined his text with key presentation elements. I think this is important for blogs because it can be an effort to read essays of text on a computer screen.
Kuhlmann split his content into smaller chunks. He did this via:
- images
- bullet points
- sub-headings
- colour
- links to other related posts that he had published previously
When we continue reading a post these simple, yet effective, presentation elements go a long way towards keeping us engaged and motivated to read to the end.
Cause action
Finally, an advertiser’s ultimate aim may be to get you to part with your money, sign up for a cause, ring a phone number, or something similar. Blogger’s have many reasons for writing posts and this impacts the type of ‘desired action’ from readers. A post may reinforce a reader’s opinion or it may challenge preconceived ideas. It may get us to delve further into a topic, read other posts from the same author and/or subscribe to the blog. All of these can occur when a post connects with the reader in some way.
How did the Rapid eLearning Blog post contribute to a reader’s subsequent thoughts and/or ‘actions’?
Towards the end of the post Kuhlmann provided a number of hyperlinks to previously published posts. This is effective because it allows readers to follow up related ideas
(a) at their own pace
(b) in a guided order
(c) all within the same blog (no sense in reader’s being left to their own devices afterall!)
Kuhlmann also posed a question (presented as a graphic) to the reader towards the end of the post – What am I supposed to do with all of this information? This was then quickly followed up with three suggestions. Each tip was written as an imperative and briefly expanded upon. Combined with the hyperlinks, the reader was left with ideas AND the beginnings of an action plan.
Summary
Effective blog posts have much in common with effective advertisements. Capturing and maintaining the reader’s attention is the most critical part of the battle. To be truely effective, and thus have a lasting impression on readers, blog posts and advertisements need to offer us something and/or challenge us in some way, however small.
