Instead of <br />, you can use two spaces to force a newline.

Markdown:

Hello world.  (<-- 2 spaces)
Bye world.

Output:

Hello world.
Bye world.

Quite often, we find ourselves inlining links in Markdown like so:

This is a [link](https://www.example.com). I really like links like
[this](https://www.example.com).

Actually, we can use reference-style links to reduce the clutter effectively. This is when we define all our links at the bottom:

This is a [link][1]. I really like links like [this][1].

[1]: https://www.example.com

Note the usage of [] instead of ().