How to Get my Ad Noticed? | AussieHomeschool Blog

Writing your advertisement

All sellers want people to view their ads. Views tend to lead to sales. Right? Not always. You can turn people right off by having a visually unattractive or difficult-to-read advertisement. Our website tends to have standard fonts and standard font sizes. This is designed to be user friendly for all members – regardless of computer, browser or user preferences. If you style your ad using a large font size it may very well play havoc with another computer, causing the page to need horizontal scrolling. You’re likely to lose potential customers! If you use non standard colours that you find appealing, it may not look the same on another computer and you may in fact lose potential customers! What looks great on one computer may look hideous on another computer. The right styling will get your posts read and your message heard whereas incorrect styling will have readers hitting the back button very quickly. Remember, what you are selling: the font or the item.

Help the reader find things quickly

People know to look in border areas for navigation. They know that short, bold paragraphs on the side may be of interest, perhaps as summaries. Their eyes stop on bold words intermixed with normal.
Decide which things the reader must find, and use these techniques to help them find those things.

Subheads help skim readers or those who read quickly

Using short, bold subheads every few paragraphs helps the reader who is skimming through ads find the areas that are of interest, or to just get the main concepts.
The subheads act as “mileposts” along the way as the reader reads or skims. If you don’t put the subheads in when you first write (like an outline), it is worth adding them after you write the text. Sometimes adding them afterwards is actually better, since you can summarize what you actually wrote.

Reasonable font size

Body text should be between 10 and 12 point
Short paragraphs help skimming
By having only one main thought in each paragraph the reader can use a glance at the first line to skim. For those that want to get more information, you can back up the ideas in the rest of the paragraph, giving more detail.

Don’t overdo bold words

Use the bold words sparingly. Otherwise they get distracting and make reading hard. This is similar to many bright blue underlined links in the middle of lots of prose — it makes reading harder.
See how hard it is to read this sentence with all the bold words and other emphasis in it. Not only is the bold “crying wolf” (pretending that something is important when it really isn’t) but the hard change from bold to normal slows down the eye when reading or speeds it up by attracting it forward to the next bold word skipping the almost as important middle text. Also, the bold detracts from the value of bold on the sub-headings within this page.