Blogging is an enjoyable way to express yourself, share your knowledge, and strengthen your writing skills in between classes. Two thirds of people’s main reason for blogging is to generate income, while 31% of bloggers successfully earn money from their content. Unlike writing an essay, however, writing for an online audience requires a different set of skills and considerations. By taking the time to hone your writing skills to suit the digital sphere, you’ll get your content in front of a bigger audience and become an all-round stronger writer.
Write engaging content
Web content typically needs to be more lively and engaging than the formal academic work you’re used to writing. Whereas the average human attention span was found to be twelve seconds in the year 2000, it’s now a mere eight seconds long — that’s one second less than the attention span of a goldfish. You therefore need to ensure your web articles do everything they can to hook readers and keep their attention. In particular, infographics are a great way to provide readers with a visual representation of your content and increase both article visibility and engagement. They’re especially useful for breaking up, summarizing, and clarifying long-form, complex, and data-driven content. Fortunately, infographics aren’t complicated to put together. You just need to first create an outline which includes the key driving facts, statements or numbers in your article. Free online design tools like (Venngage or Piktochart) can then be used to create and finalize your infographic.
Pay attention to composition
Only 16% of online readers read content word-for-word. 79% of readers admit to just scanning blog posts rather than reading the entire piece. So, when writing for an online audience, it’s important to use these statistics to your advantage and implement key web-specific composition strategies. Unlike with academic writing, you don’t want to bore the reader with long and solid blocks of text. For example, headings and subheadings can help organize the page into digestible sections and help readers find specific information. Ideally, they should be short (between four and eight words) and include keywords from the associated paragraphs. Additionally, use bullet points to make your content more user-friendly. Bullet points are great for breaking up long paragraphs and capturing the attention of scanners and turning them into readers.
Use SEO
Including SEO (search engine optimization) keywords in your content means your articles will rank higher in the search engine results, and therefore be more easily found by readers searching for that information. While it’s beneficial to incorporate relevant keywords naturally into your content, it’s just as important not to overdo it. Primarily focus on crafting engaging, unique and informative content. Search engines (and readers) reward strong writing above all, whereas overusing keywords can injure search engine rankings and decrease visibility.
Writing for the web can be an enjoyable hobby that eventually becomes financially rewarding. By taking care to tailor your articles to suit the web, you’ll attract a wider audience and strengthen your overall writing skills
