By Kenneth Middleton

Don’t Write What You Like Because You Feel Like It!

Web content is a specialized field, the days are long gone when you could write what you liked just because you felt like it and get away with it. There are specific ways of working this type of writing today; keyword searches need to take place and various other research done. Lists of keywords, meta-tags, long tail key phrases and other SEO tools are required to be and it is important to find as much as you can about what the customer cares about.

Once you have established what the customer cares about, remember there is so much information overload on the internet already that people don’t bother reading things they don’t care about. If you happen to be passionate about something, this is all well and good – but it doesn’t mean to say your customer shares the same passion. Find out what your customer cares about and write for them.

Compelling, Concise and Correct

Any web content you write, or any you outsource needs to be compelling, concise and correct. A writer has to be able to grab the attention of their target market and for this the content needs to be compelling. Just use word association “selling” – “compelling”! Compelling catch phrases are used all the time, while some are nice ideas, others are powerful; Fortune Magazine is a good example. “Retire Rich” is authoritative, whereas “Retire Early” is simply a nice idea. A good catch phrase is bait for your marketing message and is a brief, assurance of something dynamic.

The message you are sending out needs to be clear and it needs to be to the point – concise. Remember you are not writing a mystery novel, you are writing web content. Tell them who did it already – lead with the need and tell them this in the heading as well as the first paragraph. This is where the essence of the communication lies so don’t overwrite, simply get to the point, convey your message then stop. I can’t tell you how much repetition irks me, and I am not the only one.

It is simple to slap web content together in a cut and paste world; you may be completely in agreement with something you have heard on TV news, read in the newspaper and even read on the net. This does not mean you share this information if you are not completely certain it is correct. Checking facts is vital to success; it may be boring and time consuming, but it is worth taking trouble over. Never assume you are right because loose facts may come back to haunt you. Millions of people will be able to read what you write, and the WWW has a very long memory. It may appear to be a huge world out there, but it becomes very small when you are wrong.

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