Formatting long posts in Google+

It’s time for another great post from Ahmed Zeeshan, this time on the subject of how to format long posts.  Many of his posts are quite lengthy, and he’s developed some nice tips on how to format them.  None of the basic tips in here are new (bold, italic, etc), but it’s a great overview with a lot of nice formatting ideas.

Check out his original post, or read below:

[Plus Tip]

How to structure and format your lengthy posts

One of the appealing features of google+ is the ability to write lengthy posts. Combine that with the excellent commenting system and we get ourselves a very functional blogging platform.

There is also one very under-used or mis-used feature which if used properly could do wonders for the bloggers/writers among us: rich text formatting!

Often times I see very long posts that are a giant block of text with no formatting or structure applied to them. They might contain top quality content but since they are not presented in an appealing way, mosts users do not bother to read them. Hence, they just +1 the post and leave it at that. The author of the original post then wonders why do their posts not get the recognition they deserve.

This is also true with posts from some of the power users. A good example would be +Tom Anderson‘s following post: bit.ly/mZ9IQT. I love reading Tom’s posts. He genuinely understands social media and writes very thoughtful posts about it. However, I noticed that he does not format them properly. If you would look at his articles you’d see they get hundreds of +1s, re-shares and comments. That might seem like a lot but it isn’t compared to the thousands of people that follow him. With that many circlers, Tom deserves more recognition for his posts.

Google+ offers us the chance to get rid of the ridiculous TL;DR (too long; didn’t read) culture on the internet. But that will only happen if you make your posts easier and simpler to read. Your readers should be able to take one look at your post and see exactly what it is about.

In order to make content publishing more effective, I’ve created a sample template of a formatted post on g+. There are many ways to structure your g+ posts but I’ll just share the one that has proven to be most effective for me.

Before I present the sample template to you, lets quickly recap the three different formatting options that are available to you in google+:

Bold: Any text between two asterisks (*) becomes bold when you post

Italic: To make a piece of text italic, put it between two underscores (_).

Strikethrough: Text between two hyphens (-) gets the strikethrough effect.

Now that we know what types of formatting we can apply to our text, lets look at the template that I use for my lengthy posts.

____________________________________________________

[Category/Title of Post]

Additional Title

Intro paragraph #1 ….

Intro paragraph #2 ….

My post will be dividied into the following sections (this is like a table of contents):

Section 1 | Section 2 | Section 3 | …

****************************************
1. Section 1
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Praesent lacus magna, rutrum vel posuere et, sodales in orci. Nulla vel est ipsum, quis pharetra metus. Etiam interdum purus in sapien porttitor quis porttitor ipsum suscipit. Cras fringilla, felis a pharetra fermentum, diam est feugiat turpis, sit amet convallis quam lorem eget dui:
- bullet 1
– bullet 2

2. Section 2
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Praesent lacus magna, rutrum vel posuere et, sodales in orci. Nulla vel est ipsum, quis pharetra metus. Etiam interdum purus in sapien porttitor quis porttitor ipsum suscipit. Cras fringilla, felis a pharetra fermentum, diam est feugiat turpis, sit amet convallis quam lorem eget dui.

3. Section 3
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Praesent lacus magna, rutrum vel posuere et, sodales in orci. Nulla vel est ipsum, quis pharetra metus. Etiam interdum purus in sapien porttitor quis porttitor ipsum suscipit. Cras fringilla, felis a pharetra fermentum, diam est feugiat turpis, sit amet convallis quam lorem eget dui.

Conclusions (brief summary of what was said, thank yous for reading and requests for feedback)

Cheers,
Your Name
****************************************
Permanlink to post: (use a URL shortner like bit.ly)

____________________________________________________

I’ve set up a RAW template file on Google Doc with text that you can paste directly into your Share box to format your posts exactly like above: bit.ly/gp_template_doc

To see what a proper long post based on this template can look like, please visit the following link: bit.ly/gp_early

The idea behind the template is simple: make your posts attractive and more readable for your circlers. A well-formatted post stands out. This is why I almost always use a [Title] for my posts. If the articles are lengthy, I divide them into Sections and list the section headings at the beginning of the post so that users know exactly what’s to come.

A good Conclusion is always necessary in any form of writing so that the readers can recap what they’ve read. In the end, thank your circlers for reading your post and request them for feedback.

Finally, after publishing your post, use a URL shortner to add a Permalink to your posts in the signature. This way when it gets re-shared, users can click on the permalink toget to your post directly instead of having to go to your profile first and then looking for it manually.

 

With that I conclude the article. Thank you for reading through. I hope the template will help users achieve effective and quality content publishing.

Cheers,
Ahmed Zeeshan