How to Write for an Online Audience

No matter how superb you believe the writing skills that you have developed to be, when you write for an online audience, you need to be prepared to make some adjustments. The online audience is a bit different than traditional audience of a written piece of material. As a website visitor, you can likely understand the reaction of a reader when they encounter an article or other informational piece online – it has to really catch your eye (quickly) in order to draw you in long enough to read it.

Impatient Online Readers – You Are One, Too!

Online readers are very, very impatient; there's so much to do and see on the web that they want to do as much and see (and read) as much as they can before moving on the next exciting thing. Because of this, people who are surfing the web don't read content that they find line by line – but rather skim the content, scanning for things that stick out to them, often looking at headings and subheadings to catch their attention. If you want your ideas to be read, it is crucial that you understand where your audience is coming from and what they are looking for.

Content Presentation Is Important

If you are seeing a great number of visitors to your website, but these visitors abandon the site quickly without taking any action, like placing an order or filling out a form, your written content presentation may be the problem – even if you have good, solid, engaging content on your website. If the content of your website is less than appealing or too busy, or the navigational structure is too hard to understand, you will lose a great deal of traffic. Let's look at how to write content and present content to appeal to your visitors in their rush to see what you have to offer and then move on.

• Keep it brief. Keep your written content simple and to the point. Assume the visitor is in a hurry. Put everything you want to say in the least number of words. Be concise.
• Don't write filler content. If your content is not relevant, engaging, entertaining, or useful in some way, don't bother to publish it.
• Break the content up into logical paragraphs. Don't intimidate the visitor with huge blocks of text that are not broken up at all. Divide your text into clean, paragraphs that are easily scanned.
• Make any point that you have to make early – and highlight the most important information that you have to convey. Use the last paragraphs to draw your conclusion.
• Use headlines, subheadings and bold tags to grab the visitor's attention. Using some bold content phrases is good – but don't go all out with bold. Bold only the important "stuff".
• Add a script on the page (very simple) that enables the visitor to print your information if they choose to do so.
• Make certain that each page on your website is attractive and that it links back to the home page.
• Bullet lists (like this one) are logical for lists of tips, supplies, etc.

Once your site's written content is optimized, you will see the big payoff: enhanced visitor satisfaction. People will stick around to read what you have written, and will gain some value from it.

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