Guidelines for Online Writing

Online Writing Jobs is a good venture to expose our hidden talent in writing an article and expressing our comments and suggestions about certain topics that will help us broaden our vocabularies and at the same time widen our knowledge about certain topics.

Here are a few guidelines that will come in handy when writing content for an online audience.

1. Have a clear goal

Before you start writing, you need to have a clear goal of what you want to achieve through your site. Do you want to share the latest industry news? Or do you want your site to focus on offering product reviews? You could also decide to build a site focused which simply offers tips related to your industry. Your goal will determine what content is required.

2. Write for scanners

Before purchasing a book, most people first go to the back cover to read the synopsis, author’s biography or testimonials. In the same way, when someone picks up a newspaper or magazine, they are likely to browse through the headlines first. The same principle is applicable to online content.

Therefore, make sure you provide clear entry points in your content such as headings, subheadings, captions or bulleted lists. Remember to keep your paragraphs as short and as comprehensive as possible.

Keep in mind that some people might never switch from scanning to reading. Therefore, make sure that your points of entry contain as much information as possible.

3. Customize your content

Your content should offer visual clues about intent and organization. Make sure the headlines are bigger than the subheadings. When writing a headline for a list of pros and cons, you could color ‘cons’ red and ‘pros’ green.

If you are writing about a sport like golf, use images of golf balls instead of dots in a bullet list. Or if you are writing about music, you could swap the dots for small musical notes. This will make your site appear more relevant and attractive.

4. Think like a journalist

In journalism, information is usually presented in form of an inverted pyramid, moving from the vital to the trivial from the bottom up. Your content should answer the 5 Ws; what, why, when, where and with whom. Share with your readers only what they need to know at the moment. Save the additional details and background information for later.

5. Use humor sparingly

If you are a fan of alliteration and punning, you need to be careful how you use your humor. Usually, simple and clear headlines rank well in search engines and attract readers easily. Headlines which involve some wordplay are not likely to rank well. It would therefore be advisable to spare your wit until your site becomes an authority in your niche.

6. Link as much as possible

When giving an example or presenting an argument, rather than restating something that is already published online, you could simply insert a link which will direct readers to the source.

About Author: Charles Mburugu has a passion for sharing information about web-based technologies and making money online. He blogs at TechBlogKe.com, where he also offers a freelance writing course for aspiring web entrepreneurs.

http://www.designwebkit.com/ Emily Williams

Swamykant, thank you for the useful data!
The Only thing I want to add is that you should start writing from the Title, then write some main point and you’ll finish your post really quicker than you expect :)
- http://www.yourdigitalspace.com/ Swamykant
  
  Hi Emily
  
  Thanks for the tips..
http://www.rsatechnologies.in rakesh kumar

In your post you mention “Write for the scanner” but in my personnel opinion we can do this using heading and sub-heading and between that this is one of the best method to attarct our reader and also give impresssion to crawlers and readers that our article has classified and categoriesed some information.
- http://www.yourdigitalspace.com/ Swamykant
  
  Thanks for the tips..