Writing for the Web – 5 Rules to Abide By

Writing for the Web, like any media has its own "best practice" for both the audience and the technical medium. Before you commence writing for your website or for online marketing purposes, be sure you're writing for the right audience in the right space.

Copywriting
Web Copywriting is not the same as content writing for the web. Copywriting is writing that sets out to achieve a direct commercial result. It's sales writing and as such, should abide by the rules of sales writing. It should be all about the customer and their needs (not about you). It should use the right level of persuasion for your brand (eg. hard sell for price driven purchases) and should create a "sales filter" that forces the reader towards an action.

Writing for Your Website
Be it your blog or someone else's, writing for content marketing purposes is quite different to writing for sales purposes. Content marketing is all about entertaining, engaging, informing or inspiring readers, the first whiff of sales information and they're usually gone (reviews being the exception). When writing for a blog, keep the sales pitch away until the author line. Don't assume your audience is stupid by making a blog entry a loosely veiled ad; content marketing is all about providing value to readers.

Writing for Humans
Humans use the internet differently to any other medium. The long copy you dive right into in your favorite magazine will only be skimmed briefly online. You have 8 seconds to grab their attention and to keep it. Use plenty of headings and sub headings, use bullet points, diagrams, images and infographics. Make every heading a short summary of the paragraph below so they can decide whether to read in full or skip on in a split second.

Writing for Bots
Unlike humans, search engine bots (aka crawlers, spiders etc) like nice, long, in depth content with plenty of adjectives, related words and synonyms. Luckily, they also like plenty of headings and subheadings so it's vital to use that format for everyone's sake!

Writing for your audience
What do they want to read? Social Media has opened up a new level of understanding of the needs and wants of your customers. Just because you sell oranges, doesn't mean they're not interested in talking about apples, or even Dr Who for that matter. Understand what interests them; understand how they spend their day (even when not using your product), understand what level of interest they have in your industry, understand what questions are on their mind when they're ready to buy.

Understand your customer and use social media to do it! Whatever you write about, just be sure to add plenty of value to their day!