Since launching Better Marketing in May, we’ve run over 1,500 articles through our four-step editorial process. The goal of this process is to help good authors become better. These are the steps:
- Review — We assess the content of each piece before considering it for our publication. Is it an event or trend that hasn’t been covered yet? Does the author give us a new perspective on a well-known topic? Are the instructions specific enough and well-documented? If so, we’ll accept it.
- Position — Once we’ve accepted a piece, we’ll do a quick assessment of its positioning. Does the title focus on the most important aspect of the article? Is it properly formatted? Is the author over- or under-promising? Does the featured image fit the theme? Is the intro focused on the outcome? Or does the author get lost on a tangent? How can we get the reader to board this train, and what’s the clear destination it drives toward? We update the positioning parts of the piece based on these questions.
- Edit — Next, our wonderful team of copy editors goes through the piece line by line, fixing grammatical errors, typos, deleting misplaced white space, and uncovering any factual mistakes or big plot holes. Sometimes, we float the piece back to the author to fix them. Most of the time, we can just make minor updates and run the piece.
- Promote — Finally, we promote the piece on and off Medium to our 25,000 followers of the publication and our 100,000+ followers on social media.
Of course, the single-best way to become a more popular, better-earning writer is to write better, more important articles. That’s a long and difficult journey, but one that every writer should be on at all times.
What’s not a long journey at all, yet one that few writers are willing to take, is the journey our team goes through in steps two and three. In my five years of writing, I’ve seen thousands of pieces that could have had twice the impact they did, if only the author had spent five extra minutes formatting a few different parts of their article.
Here are four of those parts and how you can go the extra mile without taking a big detour at all.
1. Go Beyond the First Page When Choosing an Image
Unsplash is a great way to find high-quality, royalty-free images for your writing. It’s also a fantastic opportunity to be lazy. If I search for ‘writing,’ these are the results on the first page:
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen every single one of those images. A quick Google image search for the typewriter reveals over a dozen links to articles using it on Medium — and those are just the ones Google catches off the bat.
You might not know this but, until a year or so ago, Unsplash ranked images based on popularity. They showed how many likes (hearts) each image had, and those with the most likes showed up highest in their search results. They’ve removed the likes — but the ranking still works the same.
What’s good about this is that the high-up images are vetted. What’s terrible is that everyone is using them, including you. Now, imagine for a second you dare venture to the second, third, or even the fourth page. What would you find? Chances are, some images you — and others — have never seen before.
I happen to have a good memory, so I can get quite obsessive about not re-using images in my own writing and spend up to 30 minutes on picking the perfect cover. You don’t have to do that. But if you stop on the first page and pick the same image thousands of others have picked before you, well, then don’t be surprised if your article drowns in a sea of a thousand others.
2. Format Your Title as an Actual Title
The Medium team published a piece with Tips for Formatting Your Title and Headers. To date, it has less than 100 fans and five responses. Yet every day, thousands of stories show up on Medium with poorly formatted titles. It’s quite a mystery to me.
I see titles using sentence case…
This is a title but I couldn’t be bothered to capitalize the right words
Titles without formatted subtitles…
Okay, I Did It for the Title, But the Subtitle?
Why should I bother?
And titles that are hard to recognize as titles at all.
This Is A Title, But Unless I Tell You, You’ll Never Know
When you highlight any line of text in the Medium editor, you get a ‘Big T’ and a ‘Small T’ that you can click on to format text as a title or subtitle. Or, if it’s not at the top of the piece, a large subhead (H1) or small subhead (H2). On Wordpress, there’s a similar option. The same applies to Substack, Quora, and pretty much anywhere you can write on the internet these days.
Use. These. Features. Put a title up top, add a subtitle, and format them. Next to your image, your title and subtitle are the only chance you have to convince readers to read your work. If you don’t make the most of those, why should we expect anything beyond them is worth reading?
3. Choose Sections for Your Piece and Name Them — or Don’t, but Choose Sections
At Better Marketing, we get a lot of submissions that, initially, look like this:
Ouch. It literally hurts your eyes, doesn’t it? Why would you hurt your reader’s eyes? Be gentle. Add some paragraphs. It’s not just the eyes, either. Let them breathe. That’s what blank space is for. To allow your reader to breathe.
Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum, some people are obsessed with separating their ideas. They add multiple breaks in a row, probably thinking, “Better be safe than sorry!” Unfortunately, in writing, there is no being safe, but a lot of feeling sorry. You can never please everyone.
Watch out, part 2 is coming. Subhead just around the corner!
Is this good now? Did I make it clear? Maybe one more. Just to be safe.
What you can do, though, is acknowledge your reader isn’t four years old. She understands when a mental cut is made. She knows the concept of loose ends. She’s perfectly able to piece your arguments together on your own if you craft them well. There’s no need to scream, “Hey! See this? This here? It’s a break! Yeah! A section break! Look, I’m adding three more separators for good measure! Got it? Got it? Good! Where were we?”
When you give your reader a list of points, it might make sense to number them. When you tell a story in sections that you want to come together at the end, maybe, it’s best to add separators but no subtitles. When you have long sections explaining big concepts, you could tease the experience with a mysterious subhead or a fun-fact they’ll be excited to find.
Whatever structure you choose, choose a structure for your piece. Don’t send the reader down a mineshaft with no lamp or shovel, and don’t treat them like they don’t know their right hand from their left one. Take five minutes to scan your piece from top to bottom and ask: Did I mark my sections properly?
4. Remove Excessive Formatting Like Bolding, Italics, or Pre-Highlighted Text
Text formatting is similar to white space in that people tend to choose too much of it or none at all. When it comes to formatting, however, none at all is a better fallback than the alternative. Look at this fake bit of text:
It doesn’t overwhelm your eyes as much as the wall of text before, but it has your brain chasing its tail all the same. What’s important here? It’s nearly impossible to tell.
If every other sentence is emphasized, underlined, bolded, or half-factored out with parentheses, how can you know what matters? Well, you can’t, and chances are, neither could the author. That’s why they went overboard.
Every bit of text you highlight with some means of formatting is a piece of information you masticate for the reader. You don’t allow them to choose what’s important — you tell them. “Here, I didn’t just write this for you, I also read it and chewed it, and these are the final bits you should swallow.”
The worst form of this is going into your finished article and highlighting parts for the reader. It’s flashy, colorful, and impossible to unsee. You can never unread a highlighted line. Who are you to choose that for me? Oftentimes, it’s a belittling experience.
Of course, there is a time and a place for bolding, italics, and pull quotes. Maybe, you want to draw attention to an item that’s three or four structural levels down in a long section. Maybe, you want to consistently mark dialogue in your piece.
But if you’re not sure why you feel the urge to highlight a part of your text one way or another, don’t do it. Chances are, your reader won’t understand it any more than you do.
All it takes to catch this is to review your piece one last time before you publish. Zoom out, scroll, and try to remember why you highlighted what you chose to mark. If you can’t, remove the formatting. Your reader will thank you for it.