By Mitch “Ain’t No Hemingway” Keeler

Having done my fair share of content writing for a number of years, I can say that I have seen what works and what does not work. If you want to master the written (or keyed in our case) word, follow these three simple rules.

1. Don’t be Afraid of Headlines

Tossing in a few headlines into the mix on an article, blog post or any web page filled with content is a good way to lead the eyes through your writing. We have all see the huge one paragraph web site that we groan at. Why do you groan? Your eyes have no direction to go. Think of it as driving cross country without a bathroom break. Your eyes might be able to hold up better than your bladder - but neither will be happy once you make it from coast to coast.

2. Break Your Text Up (or Paragraphs are your Friends)

This sort of goes into the same camp as the headlines rule. Break your writing up by paragraph so that any eyeballs viewing the page, post or article in question does not start to stray. In the world of instant gratification we all want our news short, quick and to the point. Attention spans are lacking and I’d rather quickly scan through a few paragraphs of text than one really big one.

3. Inform, then Define

Often people get in a hurry to tell you why, how or who will make your life better but they don’t tell you what this thing really is. You get a gitty as a school girl on her first date, only to find out by the time you get to the end of the post you really don’t know what it is they were talking about. When discussing something that many or most might not know about do your best to define it before you get into the details of how it will help. Give me a dictionary definition and then you can tell me a story about it. Without you are causing the vistor to get over excited about.. well, what was it about again?

Exactly.

Maybe you will not notice the difference right away, but if you modify your own writing to match at least these three rules I can almost promise you that you will see more page views, higher clickthroughs and more happy bloodshot eyeballs than a bad science fiction movie. Don’t give people a reason to turn away, because once they do it is awful hard to get them to look back.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 28th, 2008 at 5:41 am and is filed under Jabber, Mitch Keeler. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed . Both comments and pings are currently closed.