What’s the most overused and misunderstood formatting style (or glyph) in the copy world?

Sean D’Souza of Psychotactics once wrote on Copyblogger that a single bullet point sold him on a $12,000 workshop. A single powerful bullet point. In the midst of all sorts of text.

Just imagine what your business would be like if you took those endless lists of bullet points on your site… and made them amazing.

Or imagine if you broke up your huge chunks of text with short, meaningful bullet points that actually sell your visitors on signing up for your solution or just plain buying. No matter the price.

When we’re formatting copy, we jump straight into creating bullet lists. Often without thinking.

But did you know that we call them “bullet” lists because they’re supposed to look like bullets… and, in turn, act like them? The thing about a bullet is that, if it’s going to do its job, it usually has to lodge in the thing it’s trying to affect.

Do your bullets hit powerfully?

Or do you just shoot ’em out of a machine gun and hope for the best?

Improving your bullet lists so that they’re more than just a ‘copy formatting trick’ is easy – if you know the secret. Do you want to know the secret? I’m willing to share it will you… but only if you really want to know and you really plan on using it starting today.

Ready?

Here it is…

Stop shooting randomly. Bullets that don’t know where they’re going or what they’re meant to do are wasted bullets. You need to start hitting your target by learning to format copy using a kick-butt bullet list.

An Infographic that shows you the fundamentals to writing and formatting bullet lists

But let’s walk before we run. Let’s learn the essentials of formatting bullet lists first. Then you can read this article on the 5 ways to write a better bulleted list.

The following printable poster helps clarify the most important points to consider when formatting using bullets. And, in upcoming posts, I’ll talk about how to make your newly well-formatted bullets do the hard work of converting more visitors. Here is the results of our A/B test to find the best way to design a bulleted list.