WebProNews » formatting

Design Your Posts to Guarantee They Get Read

Steven Bradley — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 14:56:58 +0000

Of all the edges I know of, embracing amazing design is the easiest, the fastest and the one with the most assured return on investment.

–Seth Godin Free Prize Inside

Looks matter. We don’t always want to face it, but it’s true. People will make judgments about the quality inside based on looks alone. A pretty package gets more attention every time. So how can you make your posts more attractive to help guarantee they get read?

Better Formatting for More Readable Posts

You’ve seen the advice to make your posts more scanable. While some will debate that people do read online, scanability aids readability. The more visually interesting you can make your posts the more your post will draw the eye all the way through and the more your words will get read. The good news is it’s fairly easy to do if you keep formatting in mind as you write and remember a few simple design tips.

A well formatted post makes use of a few elements that contrast with the dominant paragraph style.

Images
Whitespace
Headings and Subheadings
Lists
Bold and Italics
Color
Blockquotes

The key is the contrast between the string of words that make up your post and the visual element.

Mea Culpa: My Poorly Designed Post

I have to admit I’ve not always done a good job formatting posts. My post design has improved over time, but it still has a long way to go. In part my poor formatting is a result of an overall design that didn’t anticipate a blog. When I created this site I opted for a liquid layout over a fixed layout. The fluid design means the width of the main content column changes making it more difficult to control how the images will display. I’ve shied away from adding images in the past, but that’s no excuse for poor formatting.

Take a look at the image to the right. It’s an older post stripped of the site design around it. Not very inviting is it? You have to really want to read that post to get through it all. The post does make use of subheadings throughout, but it’s about as poorly formatted as a post can get. Ironically it’s a post arguing that graphics are important to a balanced design.

David Airey pointed out the irony in a comment on the post and neither the irony nor the lesson was lost on me. I’ve been more conscious of post formatting ever since.

Compare that post to the two below and notice how much more inviting these two posts are. In addition to subheadings, each makes use of images, whitespace, and lists. If you had to choose between either of the posts below and the one above, which would you read?

Consistently Well Designed Posts

While I’ve done better with the formatting of my posts over time, I still have much to improve. There are blogs that consistently get the formatting right and they make a great example for learning. Look at the three posts below from DoshDosh, SEOmoz, and CopyBlogger. Each links to the original post as do all the screen shots in this post. I cropped the DoshDosh and SEOmoz posts a little. Both continued longer down the page, but the formatting you see continues to the end.

Notice the liberal use of images in Maki’s post on the left. There’s a rhythm to the post. Heading, text, image, heading, text, image, heading, text, image, etc. The images also add a lot of color to the post. Rand’s post (above center) makes use of images as well with the same pattern, though the images don’t contrast as much in their color.

Brian’s post on the right has only the one image, but it includes headings, lists, and a blockquote. The blockquote itself is a list. The post is more distinctly formatted above the fold, which makes sense as once you’ve gone below the fold you’re probably already hooked. Still the post contains a good deal of whitespace throughout.

By the way if you click to any of the three sites above take a look at the subscriber counts they show. Yes, all three have great content, but ask yourself if the post design also contributes to those counts.

Formatting isn’t only in the Images

The screen shots above might lead you to believe that a good post design is all about the images. Images are the most powerful of the elements listed above, but they are not the only way to format a post. A post without images can still be inviting to read. Consider the two posts below, one of my own and one from Daily Blogging Tips

Neither post contains an image, though both use lists to create whitespace. My post includes a blockquote at the top, but Daniel’s post is designed better as it uses shorter paragraphs to create additional whitespace.

Both posts are limited in their formatting, but neither is particularly long and so not a lot of formatting is required. The key to crafting a well formatted post is in the balance. Too little and you have a long and boring string of text, too much and you have a crowded mess with everything in the post fighting for your attention.

The post to the left is from SEO Book. It does contain two images; one for the post date and one in the blockquote, but both are subtle. Most of the formatting is text based in the use of lists, a blockquote, and three levels of headings. Aaron’s post makes great use of color in the subheads as well as the links. The post is very inviting.

SEO Book posts are generally formatted well, but if you look through them you’ll notice very few have additional images beyond the two this post uses. The formatting is nearly always done through text elements.

Your Presentation Improves your Information

It might sound strange to think that the way your information is presented can actually improve the information. The information is still the same isn’t it? Yes. but the way you present your content does make it easier or more difficult to comprehend and that does alter the information received by the reader.

Look up to the original screen shot of my post that used no formatting. Would you read it? I probably wouldn’t. I’m surprised anyone did. I could have made a great argument for using images in your posts, but who would know. If you did read it you’d likely struggle through, which would lead you to absorbing less of what’s said.

As you write your next post think about how you could improve it visually. Images will have the most visual impact, but you can create an inviting post without them. The key is to find some way to create areas on the page that contrast with the standard paragraph.

Are you conscious of your post design as you write? What elements do you use to format your posts and create a more appealing visual design.

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Old Media, Time To Find The Missing Link

WebProNews Staff — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 16:49:08 +0000

There is an inherent competitiveness within the media industry, and any given entity goes about its business as though parallel organizations don’t exist – and throwing the competition a hyperlink is tantamount to endorsement. After all, if you sell shoes, you wouldn’t willingly direct customers to another shoe store, would you?

Old Media, Time To Find The Missing Link

But maybe in the New Media, we’re talking of a different animal. The New Media is more about conversation and cooperation than it is about competition.

Maybe. You still want to be the number-one go-to resource in whatever niche you’re in. But it seems unrealistic (or perhaps overly-optimistic) to think that media hasn’t already fragmented into a million pieces.

News Flash: Readers now how have unlimited sources, and yours is just one of them.

Writing for CenterNetworks, Allen Stern criticizes WashingtonPost.com for publishing an article on the 20 best travel websites but not linking to a single one of them.

"The newspaper sites still don’t get how to join the conversation," he writes. "It starts with something as simple as a link to the sites and blogs who provided the content. In this case, the links should be provided to the travel sites that are mentioned."

In fairness, though, WaPo has been pretty aggressive about incorporating blogs into its everyday content, and linking out is standard practice among them. The same goes for the New York Times. However, in their main "newsy" articles, they’re both stingy with the link love, usually opting to link within their own sites rather than out to somewhere else.

That, and you have to tell them your life story via registration to view that content, another cardinal Web sin. Other sources often let their content expire, which is a prime cause of "link rot." Click on a link from an older story to find that newspaper site’s content is no longer available.

And this is really too bad, mainly because it is really an old-fashioned, Old Media approach to the New Media.

Note also how WaPo and the NYT are still attached to their serif fonts, as though reading from a screen and reading from paper are the same. I’m with them on that; I dig the little tails – they look nicer to me. But sans-serif makes for speedier reading online.

This isn’t so much an essay on where the major newspaper sites have fallen short during their online migration as it is a treatise on usability. I’ve written before about how the editorial process is changing because of the Internet.

Content has always been tailored (or at least should have been) to the end user. And in this case, the end user wants links to related sources. It’s been this way for years on the Internet. And not just links, but deep links that take the user directly to the information rather than linking to the website homepage.

News Flash #2: The end user doesn’t want to hunt and gather more than he has to. Information overload is no joke, and the easier you make the discovery process, the more likely the user is to return to you.

That means not delaying discovery with registration pages, making it easier and speedier to read, linking out to related sources, and keeping your content alive forever so the reference doesn’t die.

So, I disagree (a bit) with Stern’s assertion that the major newspaper sites don’t get how to join the conversation; I think they do (finally) get it and are trying. Where they’re failing, though, is tailoring their design and content with the end-user in mind. It’s a new end-user they’re not used to dealing with, one that reads from a screen and not from paper.

Google AdWords Number/Date Formatting Feature

Kevin Gibbons — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 19:10:47 +0000

Google AdWords seems to be rolling out some useful features recently, last week it was the snapshot date range comparison and today’s is the option to change number, date and time formatting.

This is a great addition for UK users to avoid any confusion between US and UK date formats.

Here’s the Google AdWords account alert (click for full-size/readable image):

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Exploitation of Passion for Profit

Aaron Wall — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 19:45:14 +0000

Buying Attention & Building Trust

With content that you freely distribute you are primarily trying to build relationships with people who don’t know you and have never bought from you. Since attention is limited you have to make your content accessible to gain market attention.

Highbrow = Low Readership

Most potential buyers can not distinguish between great information and average information, but most people…

can distinguish between well formatted information that is easy to read and information that appears too complex Formatting plays a big roll in selling content.

follow the crowd and look for signs of trust from others (recommendations, on site comments, etc.)

care about enthusiasm and topic selection (why read a site that is not unique and/or too negative?)

Some of My Errors

One of my biggest problems from a conversion standpoint is that I often write copy that does not sell…content that speaks well to some, but not to the buying market. Many posts exhibit the following traits:

are focused on big picture ideas and broader market relationships

are seen as being negative for being too blunt & honest

offer too much information for people to get through

try to convey too many different ideas

People want to feel the comfort and accessibility of reading a for dummies guide one page at a time while being told they are becoming gurus / experts in the process. Which creates an interesting problem for anyone trying to sell how to information. Do you aim to make it as accessible as possible? Or do you aim further along the learning cycle and write at a higher level?

Where to Aim if You Are Looking for Profit

There are more people at the bottom of the pyramid, and if you capture their attention that will likely make you considered an expert to most outsiders looking to your field. As the online experience improves hobbiests use the web much more frequently. Yahoo! and MediaVest have done research about hobbyists, calling them Passionistas:

Passionistas heavily engage with communities of like-minded consumers who use email, text messaging, and instant messaging significantly more than typical users, and are more likely to create and share user-generated content online such as photos, blog posts or videos about their passions.

Because of their intense engagement around sharing information, Passionistas are 52% more likely than typical users to recommend or influence others about brands aligning with them.

In the SEO market (and probably most business related markets) it seems passionate hobbyists new to a field are much more likely to exuberantly promote brands than those who have been in the field for a great deal of time. I am not sure how well that translates to other fields though.

How Can I Use This Post to Help Market My Site?

Become a Platform for Passion

If top rated competing sites lack passion you can own your market in well under a year. If they are passionate then to stay competitive you have to raise your game and become a platform for passion.

Microsoft recently held a search event for SEOs to show they are serious about search. Google gives passionate charities free services to promote YouTube and Google Checkout. Cater to the passionate and create purpose driven media – use the same marketing techniques that Microsoft and Google use.

Make Your Site Look Alive

You can always add interactive features to build community interest. When you do so people are more likely to participate (fueling more people to participate) and they are more likely to market your site because they feel a sense of ownership.

My designer place the recent comments and this week top 5 sections on this site before I ever saw it. And I love it because it gives the sense that the site is dynamic, alive, and active. If you receive awards or have many feed subscribers publishing those signs of validation help improve your credibility and bring in new visitors.

Virtual Demand is Becoming Real Demand

Amazon tapped some of their top reviewers to review transcripts for a book publishing contest. How long until publishers are no longer required? You can look at the success of shows like American Idol to see how much people want to be engaged with what they consume. Also look to the stats about how often passionate hobbyists turn to the web to fulfill their wants. Deep profit margins exist in deep pools of passion.

Eventually consumers will go from hell to create the markets THEY want. The businesses with passionate communities will grow while the remaining businesses go to hell. Look for new ways to track demand and get feedback to create what people want. You don’t even need a product off the start…just an audience willing to give you honest feedback.

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RSS Formatting Problems

Neville Hobson — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 16:08:15 +0000

During the past week, I’ve noticed that this blog’s RSS feed has been displaying content as single blocks of unformatted text. No paragraphs, no working links, just blocks of text.

I’ve had a number of emails from subscribers, too, pointing this out.

After a bit of digging around – prompted by this thread on the FeedBurner forum - I’ve narrowed the reason down to the likely culprit: the latest version 7.7 of PodPress, the WordPress plugin that enables podcasting on this site, which I upgraded to last week.

I’ve just rolled PodPress back to the version I was using before that upgrade, version 6.8. Hopefully, this will fix the formatting problem.

Apologies to RSS subscribers for any eye strain! Please let me know if you still encounter weird formatting. Thanks.

[Update @ 10:16] Yes, PodPress version 7.7 definitely was the problem. Checking the feed, I can see that all content is now correctly formatted again with paragraphs, bullets, line breaks, etc. If you still see bad formatting in your copy of the feed, try refreshing it or reloading it in order to get the latest copy in your RSS reader.

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The Three Principles Of HTML Code Optimization

George Peirson — Wed, 29 Jun 2005 22:04:58 +0000

Just like spring cleaning a house, the html code of your web pages should get periodic cleaning as well.

Over time, as changes and updates are made to a web page, the code can become littered with unnecessary clutter, slowing down page load times and hurting the efficiency of your web page. Cluttered html can also seriously impact your search engine ranking.

This is especially true if you are using a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) web design package such as FrontPage or Dreamweaver. These programs will speed up your web site creation, but they are not that efficient at writing clean html code.

We will be focusing this discussion on the actual html coding, ignoring other programming languages that may be used in a page such as JavaScript. In the code examples I will be using ( and ) characters instead of correct html so that the code examples will display properly in this newsletter.

Up until recently when coding a page in HTML we would be using tags such as the (font) tag and (p) paragraph tags. Between these tags would be our page content, text, images and links. Each time a formatting change was made on the page new tags were needed with complete formatting for the new section. More recently we have gained the ability to use Cascading Style Sheets, allowing us to write the formatting once and then refer to that formatting several times within a web page.

In order to speed up page load times we need to have fewer characters on the page when viewed in an html editor. Since we really do not want to remove any of our visible content we need to look to the html code. By cleaning up this code we can remove characters, thereby creating a smaller web page that will load more quickly.

Over time HTML has changed and we now have many different ways to do the same thing. An example would be the code used to show a bold type face. In HTML we have two main choices, the (strong) tag and the (b) tag. As you can see the (strong) tag uses 5 more characters than the (b) tag, and if we consider the closing tags as well we see that using the (strong)(/strong) tag pair uses 10 more characters than the cleaner (b)(/b) tag pair.

This is our First Principle of clean HTML code: Use the simplest coding method available. HTML has the ability of nesting code within other code. For instance we could have a line with three words where the middle word was in bold. This could be accomplished by changing the formatting completely each time the visible formatting changes.

Consider this code:

(font face="times")This(/font) (font face="times")(strong)BOLD(/strong)(/font) (font face="times")Word(/font)

This takes up 90 characters.

This is very poorly written html and is what you occasionally will get when using a WYSIWYG editor. Since the (font) tags are repeating the same information we can simply nest the (strong) tags inside the (font) tags, and better yet use the (b) tag instead of the (strong) tag. This would give us this code (font face=”times)This (b)BOLD(/b) Word(/font), taking up only 46 characters.

This is our Second Principle of clean HTML code: Use nested tags when possible. Be aware that WYSIWYG editors will frequently update formatting by adding layer after layer of nested code. So while you are cleaning up the code look for redundant nested code placed there by your WYSIWYG editing program.

A big problem with using HTML tags is that we need to repeat the tag coding whenever we change the formatting. The advent of CSS allows us a great advantage in clean coding by allowing us to layout the formatting once in a document, then simply refer to it over and over again.

If we had six paragraphs in a page that switch between two different types of formatting, such as headings in Blue, Bold, Ariel, size 4 and paragraph text in Black, Times, size 2, using tags we would need to list that complete formatting each time we make a change.

(font face="Ariel" color="blue" size="4")(b)Our heading(/b)(/font) (font face="Times color="black" size="2")Our paragraph(/font) (font face="Ariel" color="blue" size="4")(b)Our next heading(/b)(/font) (font face="Times color="black" size="2")Our next paragraph(/font)

We would then repeat this for each heading and paragraph, lots of html code. With CSS we could create CSS Styles for each formatting type, list the Styles once in the Header of the page, and then simply refer to the Style each time we make a change.

(head) (style type="text/css") (!-- .style1 { font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-weight: bold; font-size: 24px; } .style2 { font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 12px; } --) (/style) (/head) (body) (p class="style1")Heading(/p) (p class="style2")Paragraph Text(/p) (/body)

Notice that the Styles are created in the Head section of the page and then simply referenced in the Body section. As we add more formatting we would simply continue to refer to the previously created Styles. This is our Third Principle of Clean HTML Code: Use CSS styles when ever possible. CSS has several other benefits, such as being able to place the CSS styles in an external file, thereby reducing the page size even more, and the ability to quickly update formatting site-wide by simply updating the external CSS Style file. So with some simple cleaning of your HTML code you can easily reduce the file size and make a fast loading, lean and mean web page.

George Peirson is a successful Entrepreneur and Internet Trainer. He is the author of over 30 multimedia based tutorial training titles covering such topics as Photoshop, Flash and Dreamweaver. To see his training sets visit http://www.howtogurus.com

Google Mobile Launches

Nick Wilson — Sat, 12 Mar 2005 19:17:16 +0000

A Threadwatch reader, Michel emailed me a little earlier to point out that mobile.google.com had apparently, and very quietly launched.

Link: mobile.google.com

I’ve spent the last half an hour hunting around for mention of this and at least according to my searches, it is brand spanking new.
Accessing and Using Google Mobile

You can access Google Mobile by simply navigating to the normal Google home page. Presumably it detects you’re on a mobile phone and displays the correct formatting for you. You can see how it looks in a web browser by going to www.google.com/xhtml

What you can do..

You can use Google Mobile for:

Web Search

Image Search

Advanced Search

Other services such as Froogle and Gmail are not available right now. There an extensive FAQ however.

You can also Add Google Mobile to your site.

Looks good doesn’t it?

Thanks El Telendro

Nick Wilson is the publisher and founder of Threadwatch.org.

Threadwatch is a group blog, or forum if you prefer, focusing on Marketing and Related Technologies – News and discussion for those that make their living on the WWW – Register here to participate.

Formatting Your Ezine with TextPad

Pamela Heywood — Wed, 20 Aug 2003 18:02:05 +0000

One of the questions I am most often asked is how to format ezines. I always use TextPad for these, to format articles and a multitude of other email offerings. This software *fixes* hard line breaks so that everything comes out looking neat. It’s a tool I would be lost without.

(You can get a free download of the evaluation version here: http://www.textpad.com This is fully working.)

I found it a little confusing to configure at first and had to ask for instructions, so here they are for you in case you haven’t found the *secret* yet …

From the top menubar pick Configure, then Preferences

A box will have poped up. In there, choose Document Classes (Click the little + to the left of that category to expand it.)

Next click on the word “Text” within the list of choices in that section.

The right hand part of the box should now have changed. You should see a place at the bottom right there where it says “Word break at column number”

Click to put a tick in the box to the left of that statement.

Type 60, 65 or however many characters per line you wish in the little box to the right of the statement. 65 is probably “industry standard”. I like 60.

Click OK
You should now be set up correctly.

In use, there are a couple of other things you need to be aware of:

1. To make the formatting work in each individual document, you need to depress (to the IN position) the little button that is along the second to top row of the menubars. It looks like a “squiggle” or an S backwards.

If, for instance, you have pasted in some text that was previously formatted at more than your set number of characters, it will then instantly show up the “funny” breaks, which you can manually correct, or it will automatically format the new text you type.

2. Also, and this may seem obvious, but you MUST save the document in TextPad first to *fix* in the breaks, before you copy and paste the text to either your email program or your online message posting box for your ezine distribution.

Saving adds necessary, but invisible to you, code for the hard line breaks. If you do not save your work first, it will look right to you in TextPad, but will not be right when it is sent by email.

Happy Formatting!

There is also an online formatting facility:
FormatIt: http://www.jbmckee.com/formatit/index.html

For a great online tutorial on formatting, which also has screenshots on how to use TextPad:
http://www.marketing-seek.com/hop/format.shtml

Copyright 2003 Pamela Heywood
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Cascading Style Sheets (CSS); Formatting Lists

Will Bontrager — Tue, 08 Jul 2003 22:29:17 +0000

This article will show you how you can change the style of individual lists, all lists on your page, and all lists on your entire web site by changing just a few things on your style sheet.

By changing one word in your global style sheet, for example, you can change all your web site’s ordered lists style type from lower-case roman numeral to upper-case alphabet.

If you’re unfamiliar with CSS, please read the “Cascading Style Sheets (CSS); Getting Started” and “…Learning More” articles, both linked from the archives index page at http://willmaster.com/possibilities/archives/

Some CSS styles render differently according to the browser. When you use CSS, test your pages with the major browsers to become familiar with what most of your users will see.

To work with this article, use a web page like this:

One,
two,
or three.

Four,
five,
or six.

Seven,
eight,
or nine.

The breaks within the list item lines demonstrate how line wraps will appear, without having to use long lines to see the effect.

Notice the two style properties for the ordered list tag OL. Later, we’ll introduce a third, one to use an image as item bullets.

The example could also be a UL tag; both OL and UL can be styled the same ways.

list-style-type: square;

The first property is “list-style-type”. The example specifies “decimal,” but other values are available. Here is a list:

decimal
Causes the list to be numbered with decimal numbers; 1., 2., 3., etc. This is most browser’s default for ordered lists.
lower-roman
Causes the list to be numbered with lower-case roman numerals; i., ii., iii., etc.
upper-roman
Causes the list to be numbered with upper-case roman numerals; I., II., III., etc.
lower-alpha
Causes the list to be labeled with lower-case alphabet characters; a., b., c., etc.
upper-alpha
Causes the list to be labeled with upper-case alphabet characters; A., B., C., etc.
disc (not “disk”)
Causes the list to be bulleted with a disc character, a filled circle. This is most browser’s default for unordered lists in the first level.
circle
Causes the list to be bulleted with a circle character, an outlined circle.
square
Causes the list to be bulleted with a square character, whether outlined or filled depends on the browser. This is most browser’s default for unordered lists in second and subsequent levels.
none
Causes the list to have no label or bullet. The effect is like a left paragraph indent.

Some of the above can be specified without the use of CSS, as an attribute in the UL or OL tag. The UL tag can have a style=”disc” attribute, for example, and the OL tag can have a style=”i” attribute for lower-case roman numerals.

The advantage of using CSS is that all lists on a page or on an entire web site can be changed by changing only one style sheet. And, with CSS, an ordered list can be made to use bullets and an unordered list can be made to sport labels.

list-style-position: outside;

The second property in the example, “list-style-position”, has an “outside” value. “outside” is the default. One other value is available, “inside”.

“outside” causes the hanging indent you see with most lists on web pages. The label or bullet extends left of the content block and, if the lines wrap, second and subsequent lines hang to the right and below the label or bullet.

A value of “inside” causes the label or bullet to shift toward the right and to be the first character of the first line of the content block. The content block is still indented left, like it would be with “outside”.

list-style-image: url(image.jpg);

The “list-style-image” property is not in the example above, because it replaces the “list-style-type” property. To try it, replace

list-style-type: decimal;

with

list-style-image: url(image.jpg);

Replace the image URL between the parenthesis with your own. The URL can be a relative URL or an absolute http://… URL. If you have reason to believe the location of the image file will change relative to your page, or if your page is used as a template by a CGI script, an absolute http://… URL is preferred. With relative URLs, if the relativity changes, then the URL link is broken.

The “list-style-image” property lets you use your own image as the bullet of a list.

Of the browsers I’ve tested (Windows platform only), all align the bottom of the image where the bottom of the bullet character would have been. The image extends upward from there.

One browser I tested (IE 5), displayed the entire image when the image was wider than the space the bullet character would have used. The beginning of the text on the first line is shifted toward the right to accommodate the image.

Opera 6 and Netscape 6.2 and 7.0, displayed only the left portion of the image when the image was wider than the space the bullet character would have used.

Opera 5 and Netscape 4.7 don’t recognize the “list-style-image” property, instead reverting to the list’s default label or bullet.

Because the differences in handling of images as bullets, I recommend that the images be no wider than the space the bullet character would have used.

Those are some of the things you can do with list labels and bullets. For methods of implementing color and images as backgrounds for your lists, see the two “Cascading Style Sheets (CSS); Backgrounds…” articles linked from http://willmaster.com/possibilities/archives/

Will Bontrager

“WillMaster Possibilities” ezine

http://willmaster.com/possibilities/

mailto:possibilities@willmaster.com

Your E-zine 13 A Formatting Checklist

Alexandria K. Brown — Thu, 26 Jun 2003 13:36:11 +0000

While sending out a text e-zine may seem like a piece of cake, there’s more to it than you may think. *Good formatting* is the name of the game. Here’s a handy checklist I use to make sure each of my issues is in great shape BEFORE I send it out. Please be my guest and use it for yourself!

1. Are all lines 65 characters or less?

More than that and your missive may come through looking messy to many subscribers. End each line with a hard return by pressing the “enter” key.

2. Have you made sure there’s no auto-formatting, such as bolding, italics, or underlining?

These features don’t translate well in e-mail and can come out looking mighty strange on the other end. Instead, emphasize words or phrases with *asterisks,* “quotation marks,” or ALL CAPS … sparingly.

3. Are all sections neatly separated?

Use underscores (_____), asterisks (******), another nifty symbol ($$$$$, %%%%, @@@@), or a combination thereof (<<==>>) to help define each area and help your readers skim your issue more easily.

4. Do all Web links include ‘http://’ before them?

Some e-mail programs won’t automatically hyperlink a URL in your text without this prefix. So don’t take a chance – make it easy for your readers to click and link, especially to YOUR site!

5. Do all e-mail links include “mailto:” before them?

Same idea here: Some e-mail programs won’t automatically hyperlink an e-mail address in your text without it. Be sure to leave no space between the colon and the first character of the address.

6. Is your masthead at the very top?

The masthead, or “nameplate,” typically features your e-zine name, your name, your e-mail address, your Web address, and the correct date, volume number, and issue number. Make it the FIRST thing your readers see.

7. Have you reminded your readers right away that this is a *subscription* publication?

Don’t let them forget that they *asked* to receive this! Something like this right under your masthead will do: “You’ve received this e-zine because you subscribed to it! If you wish to unsubscribe, please scroll to the end for more information.”

8. If you have a table of contents (TOC), do its listings match this issue’s articles and features?

For example, if your TOC says your second feature in this issue is an article on Web site marketing, make sure it’s right!

9. Have you included a copyright notice?

At the end of your content, before your contact info, post ‘(c)’ immediately followed by the year and your name or your company’s name. You should know that a copyright notice does not protect your ideas – instead, it protects the way you express them.

10. Are the correct advertisements in place?

Keep track of all your ad swaps and purchases in one main document to make this easy to look up each time. I use an Excel spreadsheet, which works great for me.

11. Do you give clear subscribe and unsubscribe instructions at the bottom?

Include subscribe instructions, because your e-zine will likely get passed on to others who’d like to sign up. The unsubscribe instructions are just BECAUSE – it’s plain courtesy, and the law of the land. : )

12. Does your subject line include both the name of your e-zine and the issue topic?

By seeing your e-zine title, your recipients will know the e-mail is not spam. And by seeing the issue topic, they will know what’s in store for this issue. Example: “Sara’s Cash Flow Tips: Increase Your Income Today!”

13. Have you sent a test of the issue to yourself or an associate?

Make sure it comes through reading well and looking great! (Check for any strange symbols that magically appear, odd breaks in the copy, inactive links, etc.) And this is a GREAT time to give it a final proofread.

Alexandria K. Brown, “The E-zine Queen,” is author of the award-winning manual, “Boost Business With Your Own E-zine” and the publisher of the e-zine, “Publish for Profits.” To learn more about her book and FREE tips, teleclasses, and resources, visit http://www.EzineQueen.com.