Content Rich: Writing Your Way to Wealth on the Web

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Many copywriters are excited about trying their hand at writing for the Internet. It is important, however, to realize there are key distinctions between the offline print audience and writing for the Internet. Keep these three ideas in mind and you will achieve success with your Internet writing.

There are three crucial differences between traditional publishing and writing for the Internet:

Audience

Format

Lifespan

You must take each of these differences into consideration when writing for the Internet.

Audience

Any writer must consider their audience. But audience consideration is even more important when writing for the Internet. The basics won’t change (like identifying who your primary target audience will be, for example), but there are some huge differences in other areas.

The first consideration is that in an offline publication, such as a newspaper or magazine, it is almost a given that you have a captive audience. Once a person has spent the money, they are most likely at least going to give the entire publication a quick once-over before tossing it aside. You have no such luxury on the Internet. The only thing keeping your reader from moving on is one click of the mouse. You must not waste time. Stay focused and stay on target. This does not mean, however, that as a writer you must go after the ‘lowest common denominator’. Please do not consider your audience stupid. What it does mean is you need to know your audience inside out and know exactly how to deliver what they want and need.

Format

Something else to think about when writing on the Internet is to consider the “skimmers”; readers who breeze through your copy without reading the whole thing. So what you have to do is be very clear in your writing. For example, headlines that pack a punch, carefully worded subheadings, and introductions and conclusions that are solid and full of good content.

Trying to mimic traditional magazine articles or offline printed documents is a common mistake that I see in new writers. Actually there are some big differences. Because a reader will read the Internet differently from ‘physical pages’, like say in a book, writing for the Internet requires some different techniques. The entry point is one of the most important. Did you know that a search engine might send readers to a point somewhere in the middle or end of your document? Now, if you wrote concise and accurate content, readers could very well go back to the beginning of your article to read it properly. There is a way to avoid this altogether though, that will keep the ‘skimmers’ skimming. Try breaking longer pieces of text into a few stand-alone sections that fit together as a whole document or even separate documents if looked at in the same manner. (This article, broken into individual stand-alone segments, serves as an example.)

Lifespan

The last major difference between writing for the Internet and more ‘traditional’ publications is what I refer to as lifespan. Because the Internet operates with a very rapid nature, people often make the mistake of thinking the lifespan of online content is limited. Nothing could be further from the truth. The ‘magic’ of the Internet is that content may last for years – potentially forever – which is why many offline publications now archive their material online. But you must be careful. While your writing should always be current, you want to be wary of being too topical. This is a good way to date your material. This is not good. Your readers may be reading your words a long time off in the future and you want it to be as “fresh” as the day you wrote it.

Keep these three key points — audience, format, and lifespan — in mind when writing for the Internet and I promise you will achieve greater writing success.