Many copywriters are excited about trying their hand at writing for the Internet. It is important, however, to realize there are key distinctions between the offline print audience and writing for the Internet. Keep these three ideas in mind and you will achieve success with your Internet writing.
There are three crucial differences between traditional publishing and writing for the Internet:
Audience
Format
Lifespan
These differences are important and must be taken into consideration writing for the internet.
Audience
Any writer must consider their audience. But audience consideration is even more important when writing for the Internet. The basics won’t change (like identifying who your primary target audience will be, for example), but there are some huge differences in other areas.
First, in traditional publications your audience is somewhat a given. Once they have actually picked up or purchased a newspaper or magazine they are likely to at least give it a few pages before setting it aside. However, remember when writing for the Internet your audience can move on from your words with one click of the mouse. You need to be highly focused and on target all the time. You can’t take much time for introductions, slow buildup or indirect discussions. If you, the writer, do not seem to be delivering the goods then the reader will simply move on and fast. This does not mean you need to cater to the lowest denominator ” please do not treat your readers as stupid ” but it does mean that you need to know your audience well and how to respond to that audience’s needs and desires.
Format
Something else to think about when writing on the Internet is to consider the “skimmers”; readers who breeze through your copy without reading the whole thing. So what you have to do is be very clear in your writing. For example, headlines that pack a punch, carefully worded subheadings, and introductions and conclusions that are solid and full of good content.
An error that new writers might make, is trying to make their articles look like text in a magazine article or a book. However, writing on the Internet has big differences. A reader will actually read the Internet differently from ‘physical pages’, so different techniques are needed. ‘Point of entry’ is one of the most important. A search engine can send a reader to the middle or even the end of your document. If you have written accurate and concise content however, a reader and yes, even the ’skimmers’ could likely go back to the beginning of your article to read it entirely. There is a way to skip this step though, and that is by splitting up your text into several stand-alone pieces that will fit together as a complete article, or separate documents if looked at the same way. (A good example of this? Did you see how I broke this article into individual stand-alone segments?)
Lifespan
Finally, an important difference between traditional publications and writing for the Internet is lifespan. While the apparent lifespan of many electronic documents appears to be short-lived, this is simply not true. In fact, I would argue the exact opposite is more the reality. Newspaper and magazine articles in print are only current for a day, week or the month of their publication, but then are archived on the Internet where they may frequently reside for years. So while it is important as a writer to be fresh and current, also keep in mind that your reader may access your words at some undetermined point in the future. (In other words, try not to be too topical. You may severely date your article in the process.)
Keep these three key points — audience, format, and lifespan — in mind when writing for the Internet and I promise you will achieve greater writing success.