When I read through a magazine, I usually skim through it. I take a glance at this and that, read the bolder font here and there. When I find something catchy, then I’ll delve into the article. But even then, a lot of articles are skimmed over.

“In a recent survey, 3 out of 4 men answered that they feel vaguely uncomfortable when eating a banana in public.”

I would honestly say that there isn’t a single person in this world who reads every single article in their magazines (unless he/she was a magazine editor/inspector for content and errors). I recently realized it is the same way with blogs. I skim through blogs. I rarely read the entire article word by word because it simply takes too much time. Sometimes, on Netscape.com, I only read the brief description of the article and simply absorb the news. “US Military General says military action will not bring peace to Iraq.” and under it it explaines that the General told the press that a long-term political approach is the right way to establish peace in Iraq, and that’s all I need to know (and I gave that article a quick vote). I like to eat sushi. I’ll explain the reason why I tossed that in later. That’s pretty much how I read my magazines and newspapers – it’s only a few stories that I actually read into, and even then, I either skim through or read the first paragraph and move on.

So. How do we grab the attention? Well, I decided to toss in some elements to my blog that would make it resemble a magazine article a lot more. First of all, the title has to be catchy. Secondly, an image or two helps a lot to make the article a lot more approacheable (dense text all over the page is something that intimidates people). And thirdly, I started putting in those large quotes that magazines do.

“Want to learn how to do this stuff? Read this article.”

Whatever bit of the text that is really attention grabbing (a shocking/controversial statement, or statistics, or something vague yet strong enough to instigate curiousity in readers), I put it into that format and toss it in between the paragraphs.

In case you want the code on how to do that, here it is :

CSS Addition :

p.largequotes
{
padding: 30px;
font-family: Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;
font-size: 2em;
line-height: 28pt;
color: #990909
}

When you write a post :

<p class=”largequotes”>

Content here

</p>

Try that out on your blogs to pull the eyes towards your articles.

Now, in that article somewhere I randomly tossed in the fact that I like sushi. Tell me honestly, how many of you caught that? I’ll bet a lot of you were skimming through, and didn’t read that sentence.