Bloggers constantly work together to promote events and giveaways and that usually means shared HTML for everyone to post and adapt to their own particular blog. Have you ever received an HTML post from another blogger that took forever for you to clean up or had additional formatting that just did not “play nice” with your particular blog layout? We are going to show you how to format shared HTML that any blogger on any platform will be able to post with minimal revisions.
The Wrong Way to Share HTML
Everyone has a different blog theme or layout that they use. Factor in plugins and other items that we use to personalize our blogs and there really are no two that are alike. So you cannot expect your personalized HTML to work on everyone else’s blog layout without some issue. So how do you avoid this problem? You prepare your shared HTML in bare bones mode before you add your own embellishments.
KISS – Keep It Silly Simple
One of the major golden rules that you can apply to any aspect of your life is less is more. (Sound familiar? My mom used to tell me this all the time!) When sharing HTML with others, this is vitally important. When you receive a guest post or a sponsored post for publication on your blog, how is it formatted? The bare minimum, correct? And how easy is it for you to publish that post? Super silly simple! You need to get in the habit of doing the same for your fellow bloggers.
The easiest way to prepare your shared HTML is to open a new post and just type. Do not add paragraph formatting, font sizing, etc. Type as though you are typing a letter not a blog post. You can add your header formats, bold and underline text, insert your text links. That’s all, do not add anything else to your post.
This post was prepared doing just that and I am sharing a screenshot of the HTML version of this post below so you can see what the formatting looks like:
See how simple and easy that is to read? To add to your blog and tweak the formatting that fits with your blog theme and your blog style?
[clickToTweet tweet=”To prevent issues with shared HTML, remember to KISS – Keep It Silly Simple!” quote=”When you work with other bloggers using different themes and blog styles, you have to remember the golden rule – K.I.S.S.” theme=”style6″]
Quite a few bloggers that I work with use a smaller font for their text, so their H1 and H2 tags are about the same size as my H3 and H4 tags. So when I get a giveaway post with a lot of H1 or H2 tags – they look obscenely large on my page and it just throws the whole “feel” off. I also use an excerpt plugin that pulls the first paragraph to create my excerpt to be displayed on the blog. If there are a ton of header tags in the first paragraph – it just looks wrong.
So to avoid this issue for your fellow bloggers, do a description about the product, the giveaway, etc. on a giveaway post BEFORE you add in the huge header tags with the sponsor name, the host and co-host blogs, etc. and your fellow bloggers will thank you for it.
What are your pet peeves when it comes to receiving HTML posts from others? Let us know in the comments below and we will try and address those as well.
