Write Powerful Content: Blogs, Ebooks and More
Writing content for the web has its challenges, but if done correctly can bring positive results to your business. You may feel that you’re ready to write your first articles, but without these fundamentals in place, your writing may not return the expected results.
These fundamentals of writing engaging content should help you create high-performing, web-friendly content:
• Write with an Objective in Mind
Successful content isn’t written willy-nilly, it’s written with a particular purpose in mind. Writers should be asking themselves: “What is the point of this article?” You need to know what action (if any) you want to motivate and write the article with that goal in mind.
Do you want to sell something? Are you trying to educate the audience on your value proposition? Trying to highlight a pain point that you can alleviate? Do you just want to provide your audience with information that may have value for them?
When writing for the web, you should know what your objective is and how your writing can help you meet that goal.
Writing with an objective in mind allows the author to focus on grabbing the reader’s attention and conveying the essential information. Focusing on one goal when writing brings a level of focus to your articles and will draw the attention of those with interest in the subject.
• Write with the Audience in Mind
Every business has an ideal customer. You should direct your writing towards that person.
What type of content will peak their interest? What level of knowledge does the audience have? How will your writing influence their perception of your brand? Is the subject you want to write about related to the rest of your blog? What messages do you want to address? What topics generate interest from your audience?
By having an answer to all these questions, you can create content that will draw higher audience engagement and keep them coming back to your blog. To get the best results, you should aim to prominently feature the most relevant, valuable information throughout your article or blog post.
• Share the Content
Good writing gets shared across the web. Why waste time writing compelling, engaging content with an objective and an audience in mind if there is no chance anyone can find it? Share your content via every channel you employ, including social media, search engines, and email newsletters. You can even distribute high-quality content through traditional media publishers through sponsored articles (or earned media).
Regardless of which channels used, the goal of writing for the web is to communicate relevant information to as many members of your intended audience as possible. For that to happen, you will want to adopt a strategy of communication, building a relationship with your audience, and encouraging them to share the content with their network.
To ensure your content gets in front of those interested in your subject matter, you also need to optimize your content for search.
• Feature Important Information Prominently
One of the most important aspects of writing for the web involves prominently featuring essential information in your article. Most people do not read blog posts on the internet the same way they would read a novel. Readers often skim blog posts for keywords and other important information. In fact, studies have found that only 20% of the text on a web page is read. The rest is either ignored or skimmed.
Another reason you should prominently feature relevant information in a blog post is to increase your visibility in search engines. Web crawlers (robots created to index the web) look for the most relevant information as well. We have written several articles about SEO such as:
Beginner’s Guide to Improving Your Website’s Local SEO, and
Advisors: Why The New SEO Is Actually All About Content Marketing.
Those articles explain how SEO works, and what you can do to create high performing content.
So, how can you ensure that your articles are informative and provide value to the audience, knowing that the content will not be fully read?
Feature keywords and other essential information in:
• Headers
• Tags (title, meta description, alt tags, image tags)
• First paragraph of text (to ensure those reading it understands the article)
