Yesterday I posted about Joel Comm and his video about content writing. Well this morning I was reading a great article post about content writing and not to just write content for the sake of it but to write content that will attract audiences and have a sense of style to it.
A very important starting point when writing for a website is to know who your audience is, and then write in a style which will appeal to them. Tone, structure, choice of language and even punctuation will be affected by your audience.
Your reader wants to understand easily what you are saying, without becoming frustrated and confused by a haphazard structure. Plan your writing logically before you begin, and employ that old rule from your schooldays: it needs a beginning, middle and end.
Nowhere is it more important to simplify your writing than on a website. Web copy writing should be short and to the point. No long sentences, no long paragraphs, and not too much text on each page. If you need to convey a lot of information, break it down into more pages. You will lose your reader’s interest if their eyes are overloaded with a mass of weighty text, or if they have to scroll down and down to reach the bottom of your page.
There’s no surer way of losing your reader’s attention than embarking on a rambling detour off the subject. By all means add interest to your writing using examples, opinions and anecdotes, but ensure they are relevant.
To go more in depth, I was reading someone else blog, and John from Pick the Brain wrote a great entry about attracting your audience with 'style writing'. John states:
Somebody, somewhere, is sharing the same knowledge you are, and odds are they’ve been doing it longer and have more authority.
Which is true, there is always someone out there that is doing what you are doing at a better pace. That person is more knowledgeable and has more experience than you, even if that person has an extra day on you.
Getting your articles from other places as Joel has stated is a good idea, but you need to abide by specific rules. For example you copy an article from an article directory, you need to keep the article in tact. This can lead to copyright issues with both you a blogger and the writer.
Steve Pavlina wrote a great topic on legality and copyright issues. Him being a writer and a software programmer there are people out there that will take ideas and make it their own. As in content writing, a person will just take that content and make it their own, with out consulting with the author themselves. Though Steve's post go in depth about this issue, we will stick to the topic of creating unique stylish writing.
Since I write almost on a day to day basis I am improving my own writing and my skills as a blogger. As you may have notice, my English or grammar is poor. But that doesn't stop me from making my own content. Since my writing is I guess 'ok' you can say this is style writing. It is my own form of writing which I am willing to improve on and become better at.
Writing needs to be come a passion and you need to show your interest in it. Write about topics you like and enjoy so you never run out of ideas. As Joel Comm, stated yesterday on his video, we need to write it ourselves, we need to become writers. Our imagination is our only limit when it comes to writing and creating great content.
