Format Your Steemit Articles And Gain Steem Power!

Using some simple formatting rules and the free web tool StackEdit, you can create beautifully crafted Steemit Articles. This article is aimed at those who are new to Steemit and who have had little or no experience of coding or using a content management system

This article is aimed at those who are new to Steemit and who have had little or no experience of coding or using a content management system (CMS), or blogging in general. After reading this you will be able to add code manually or automatically and understand the importance of good formatting.

What you will learn:

Formatting and why it's important
How to format a Steemit article
Using Markdown To Format Steemit Articles
How To Use StackEdit To Implement Markdown
Formatting and Why It Is Important
When we talk about format in relation to computer documents, we usually mean one of two things. If asked what format a particular document is in; the answer will depend on the program it has been made in, so Word, Note, Adobe .pdf and so on.

When we talk about the formatting of a document, we are referring to the page arrangement of the various elements within the document.

If you want to become a successful writer on Steemit, then you are going to need a good writing style and to be reporting on a topic or topics of widely held interest. However if your wonderful 1500 word article on the merits of base jumping and parkour is badly formatted, then no one will read it, not even your friends.

Here's what I do if one of my friends sends me a link to a badly formatted article that they may or may not have written. I will skim the first 5 lines and then skim the article for a point of interest, read that line or lines and then reply to my friend quoting the point of interest, making it seem as if I had read it.

Here is what I do if one of my friends sends me a well formatted article; I read it.

As much as I'd love to think of myself as being unique and special, I'm not and I won't be the only person to have this kind of policy with badly formatted articles.

If you have joined Steem to become a contributor and you want to earn money as you write, you need as many upvotes per article as possible. The problem is, you are not going to get many votes, if nobody reads to the end of your articles.

You could end up bashing away for months, wondering why your articles aren't doing very well, when other people writing about the same subjects as you, seem to be making hundreds or even thousands of dollars per article.

How To Format A Steemit Article
Whether you're writing an article on Steemit or an email to your friend, you should always use proper formatting.

Always add a summary to your article: When you hit the submit a story button, you will see a space to add a summary, use it. Your summary will automatically be added to the very top of your post and will be visible to users when browsing.

You can still add a summary of the article in the actual posting, but make sure that it goes with what you have said in the original summary and put the new one in italics.

Use subheadings: It is important to use subheadings as they make it easier for your reader to browse your article. A reader might find your article via Google and only be interested in a particular paragraph or sentence you've written. Subheadings will help them find what they're looking for quickly and may tempt them to read the whole article, whereas not being able to find what they want will simply cause them to go elsewhere.

You can use them like I have here, bold text, followed by a colon and then the paragraph, or you can return the paragraph under the heading, both ways work.

Use Headers: Not to be confused with subheadings; headers are larger in text than normal, but smaller than the main title header.

Headers are a nice way of breaking up long articles into sections. Even if you didn't think of header names as you were writing the article, look back through it and see if you can break it up using a heade