Three Golden Keys to Writing for the Internet

A lot of beginning copywriters start out by applying their skills to writing for the Internet. You must keep in mind, however, that there are some key differences between writing for the Internet and how one would work with an offline audience. Keep these ‘golden rules’ in mind while you write and you will achieve great success in 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.

First of all, your audience is somewhat guaranteed in a traditional publication. Most people, once they have bought a magazine or newspaper are likely to at least give each page a cursory read before setting the item aside. Not so online. When writing for the Internet you must always keep in mind your reader can leave as easily as a click of the mouse. People don’t have a lot of time to waste so you must remain on target and highly focused at all times. As the writer, if you do not appear to be delivering good content the reader will simply go elsewhere… fast. Please do not take this to mean you must cater to the lowest common denominator; you don’t. Your audience is not stupid. But you do need to know your targeted audience and how to deliver for their wants and desires.

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.

An error that new writers might make, is trying to make their articles look like text in a magazine article or a book. However, writing on the Internet has big differences. A reader will actually read the Internet differently from ‘physical pages’, so different techniques are needed. ‘Point of entry’ is one of the most important. A search engine can send a reader to the middle or even the end of your document. If you have written accurate and concise content however, a reader and yes, even the ’skimmers’ could likely go back to the beginning of your article to read it entirely. There is a way to skip this step though, and that is by splitting up your text into several stand-alone pieces that will fit together as a complete article, or separate documents if looked at the same way. (A good example of this? Did you see how I broke this article into individual stand-alone segments?)

Lifespan

Finally, an important difference between traditional publications and writing for the Internet is lifespan. While the apparent lifespan of many electronic documents appears to be short-lived, this is simply not true. In fact, I would argue the exact opposite is more the reality. Newspaper and magazine articles in print are only current for a day, week or the month of their publication, but then are archived on the Internet where they may frequently reside for years. So while it is important as a writer to be fresh and current, also keep in mind that your reader may access your words at some undetermined point in the future. (In other words, try not to be too topical. You may severely date your article in the process.)

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.

Tagged with: advice • article • edit • help • market • Marketing • profit • publish • tip • write • writing • writing for the Internet • writing for the web

Filed under: Marketing

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