Forget what you learned in English class. Well, remember the spelling and grammar part but nothing else. Web content writing is a whole other world with different demands. When people surf websites, they scan the content instead of reading it word-for-word. Your goal is to pull in and hold the attention of people with little patience.
The best piece of advice on writing great content I can give is this: Spend as much time reading great content as writing it for yourself.
Get set up with an RSS reader (I recommend Bloglines) to make it easier for you to find good articles. Check out my Resources page for a good list of blogs to subscribe to.
The most important piece of a page or blog post is the title. An enticing and descriptive title is the most influential element determining whether or not someone reads your content.
It doesn’t matter how interesting or helpful your content is if the title lacked enough pizazz to attract a reader. Popular blogs succeed in using great titles. You can also see good title writing on the big social bookmarking websites such as Digg and del.icio.us.
Attaching an appealing title is a major determinant in whether or not a story makes it to the front page of these major social sites.
Writing great titles has an added benefit of making the article more worthy of link bait. Link baiting involves writing a good article with an enticing title with the purpose of drawing in traffic from outside sources.
If you’re planning to create an article to be used as link bait (which is a good idea, but don’t do it too often), here are some techniques:
- Write something controversial or in disagreement to an established idea in your niche
- Give away a tool or helpful information for free
- Write “pillar articles”, which are longer How To articles that aren’t time sensitive
- Be creative
The most successful internet marketers often turn to professional copywriters to help them draft a salesletter. This is a great strategy and can be relatively inexpensive. Try finding a freelance copywriters from a website like Elance or RentACoder.
Whether it is through a professional copywriter or by yourself, your content needs to be interesting and entertaining. Don’t shy away from being amusing, clever or different with your writing. In this day of the “casual web”, people are attracted to content that speaks to them on a basic level.
Tell a story and get personal. Use first person language and include examples in your real life. The main goal with this is to use a tone that is more conversational. Pretend you are talking to a friend when you type instead of attempting to sound overly professional.
If you need, talk to a tape recorder and simply transcribe what you said. This sounds corny, but many people record a conversation, type it up and sell it. And they make good money off it.
Use effective formatting techniques to ensure you keep a reader’s attention. You don’t want someone to read part of one article and leave. You want them to read an entire article and even click around to some other postings.
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