Insanely Clever Marketing

Basics of Writing for the Internet

Posted by Penelope Herbert on September 29, 2017 · 1 Comment 

Basics of Writing for the Internet

The days of print writing aren’t quite dead, but they’re definitely in sharp decline. In the 21st Century, more people consume their media – including their articles – via the internet than in any other form.

That can be good news for you, as it means you’ve got fewer gatekeepers standing between you and your audience. Your marketing efforts can include a blog which goes out to (potentially) the whole world with every post.

The only issue is that writing for the internet is a specific skill. Here’s a look at some of the key basics of writing for the internet and how it should be done.

Basics of Writing for the Internet

Include your keywords in a natural way

Keywords are the search terms that you’ll want to rank highly for on Google. Things like “Scuba Diving Shop in (my town).” These should be researched carefully to make sure that they get the right number of searches per month and aren’t too competitive for you to gain ground on (Google has its own suite of tools for researching keywords). This is the cornerstone of what we call SEO.

Your keywords will need to be included in your writing, but there’s an art to how it’s done. The most important thing is to fit them into the text naturally. Google’s algorithm can punish you otherwise.

Above all, make it seem natural.

Try to use your full keyword once in a piece, and variations in other places. If the reader notices that you’re sandwiching keywords in where they don’t seem to fit, then you’ve done it wrong.

Get to the point early

Research has shown that people are more impatient when reading on the internet than when reading traditional print media. One of the ways this manifests is that they’ll more or less pay attention to the first paragraph, then skim through the rest while deciding whether the full thing is actually worth their time or not.

In other words, you’ve got to give the reader an overview of what your article is about as early as possible, and ideally, entice them to stick around and find out more.

If you spend your precious first paragraph getting lost in abstract wordplay and banter, don’t be surprised if your audience escapes.

Use subheadings

This ties into the previous point. As readers on the internet are more prone to “skim” through a piece, you’ve got to put visual cues in place to constantly hook them back in and remind them of where they are.

Almost no casual web surfer will take the time to read an enormous wall of text without clear subheadings. It’s just too much like work and concentration for the guy who likely has five other tabs open at the same time.

Subheadings serve as a map for your article, and they allow potential readers to digest what you’ve read in bitesize chunks. This, of course, means they’re more likely to stick around for the full thing.