How to Write Bullet Points People Actually Want to Read - Copyblogger

The essence of a great bullet is brevity + promise.

• Brevity has been a hallmark of good writing since writing began, but everyone currently possesses an acute awareness of just how important brevity is right now. Long, complex bullet points would defeat the purpose of writing bullets at all — to keep your reader moving through your copy.
• Promise is the element that hooks your reader like a fish. You’re making a plain and legitimate claim that your product/idea/service will give them what they’ve been looking for.

Bullets encourage the scanning reader to go back into the real meat of your content or go forward with your call to action.

They are your mini-headlines.

• Keep your bullet points symmetrical if possible. Meaning, one line each, two lines each, etc.
• Avoid bullet clutter at all costs. Do not get into a detailed outline jumble of subtitles, bullets, and sub-bullets.
• Practice parallelism. Keep your bullet groups thematically related, begin each bullet with the same part of speech, and maintain the same grammatical form.
• Bullets (like headlines) are not sentences. If you want to write complete sentences, stick with a paragraph or a numbered list.

Since the text that comes after a bullet point shouldn’t look like a paragraph, you might be wondering about how to handle punctuation in bulleted lists.

It depends on the type of bullets that you write, but the key is to keep your punctuation consistent. Your bullet points should more or less be the same style and length.

You can capitalize the first word that follows a bullet point in your content. However, if each of your bullet points is only one word, you could keep the letters all lowercase.

Again, whichever style you choose, just make sure you’re consistent throughout your text.

If your bullet points end up being short sentences, you’ll want to add periods after each one. In this case, you see why you’d capitalize the first word after a bullet point.

If the bullet points are just short phrases or incomplete sentences, they don’t need periods.

These types of fascinating bullet points are usually found in sales copy.

They create curiosity and work like headlines to prompt a purchase or other action.

Internal fascinations are pretty much identical to external, except they’re designed to persuade people to continue reading the post they’re already reading.

Extracting bullets out of compound sentences helps you drive home a point while also increasing the usability of your content.

Authority bullets are used to recite the data and proof that support your argument.

As with all persuasive writing, turn dry factual information into interesting reading any time you can.

Cliffhanger bullets tease and foreshadow what’s coming up next or in the near future.

You can also use cliffhanger bullets to lay the groundwork for an upcoming promotion, launch, or special content event.

These are sort of like the lady who hands out cheese cubes at the grocery store.

She gives people a little “taste” of food that keeps them alert and shopping — and many times they end up with the thing they tasted in the shopping cart.

These bullets break up the “sameness” of the page (when you have several pages of bullets), and they add more tease, demonstration, and curiosity.

Plus, they give a nice little “loop” effect to your ad that keeps sucking the reader back in.

Basically, this is where you say something that is almost unbelievable.

Something 100% true, but that is so wacky and “out there” it makes you say, “How in the heck can you do that?”

Craft each bullet as if it were to serve as your headline. You won’t achieve perfection with each and every bullet you write, but if you stick to this principle generally, writing them gets much easier over time.

And, more importantly, those beautiful little bulleted lines will keep your readers running down your page like water on a slide.