Four tips for making your online writing successful

4 components of professional online writing

By Wayne Hahne, writing intern

Several aspects go into making a blog successful, from developing the idea to sharing of the final product. Each part of the process must be thoroughly planned out to the letter. However, arguably the most important of a successful blog is the writing.

Professional writing is an ability that not only will make or break your blog but can go as far to make or break your professional career in most cases. This is because writing often reflects who you are as professional. With that in mind, here are some tips to help you with your writing.

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Always double check grammar and spelling

You might have hated teachers when turning in papers, but trust me when I say that all of those pen marks on wrong punctuation and spelling were for a reason.

People who read articles online will often never notice good writing, allowing them to focus more on the content. However, if your article or blog contains grammar and spelling mistakes, potential readers will be too distracted by those mistakes to pay attention to the content.

Writing error free also pertains to every style of writing, be it online or in print. Resumes, official documentation or anything that one would use officially will be tossed in the trash if a potential client or job position will see that you didn’t take the time to write professionally.

SEO is your best friend

Say you want more people to check out your online article or blog, but Google just will not bring up an article where you want. Instead of getting frustrated, look back at your articles and see if they utilize SEO.

What is SEO you ask? SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization and is the key to readers finding your content. All aspects of an online article affect SEO making success seem more difficult but ultimately online writing is easier than formal writing.

Here are three key components of online writing that can improve your SEO:

  • Format is important to anything written online. Breaking up an article into subheads and bolding words will help in SEO by making the document ultimately easier for the reader to read and understand.
  • Links are an easy way to draw attention to your other articles while at the same time allowing yourself to save time on explanations by repeating information from another article.
  • Keywords can be your best friend or your worst enemy with Google. Keywords are the words or phrases individuals use to research a topic. Try and add in keywords to make an article stand out, but do not make them repetitive.

Readers like short and sweet

Ask yourself if you can read the recently written article without skimming. Most individuals passing over your article will not spend much time reading and are more likely to skim over the material. Use that to your advantage.

Instead of bogging down the reader, make the article easier to skim through by putting the message directly into the subhead and adding the details into the information.

Understand that if an article has bad writing or the information is false, the reader is unlikely to come back and there will be less traffic flowing towards your writing. Less traffic flowing towards your writing means less attention and ultimately less business for your company.

Be as direct as possible and avoid slang or crutch words such as “Anyways” and “So” to separate the article from that of social media. Not only will this make writing more professional, but it will also help to cut out the unnecessary language that adds the bad kind of length to your writing.

Call to action

It is highly recommended that you use a call to action at the end of your writing. A call to action is a message to the reader about the information you have presented.

A call to action come in different forms but it always asks the reader to react to what they just read. Be enthusiastic when calling your readers to check out other articles or to hire you for a service.

With the knowledge you have now, what is stopping you from writing? Go and spread your passion and information. Write for you and for others to spread new information across the web.

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