Getting yourself noticed on the internet is a slow process, if there was a quick one, everybody would be doing it. This slow process involves getting word out and talking about yourselves, as we have been doing the past few weeks. Writing lots about what we do, to show our audience that we know what we’re talking about and are trustworthy. So here’s 5 tips we’ve picked up in writing good articles for building our audience.
Who is your Audience?
There are a number of things which are worthwhile in determining your audience, from the tone you’ll be expected to take, whether conversational, to more jokey, but also the technical knowledge of your audience. Are you going to use acronyms without explaining them since your audience are technically minded, or are you going to break everything down for beginners. Without knowing your audience, you may write at the wrong level and lose them simply on basic communication.
Be Human?
The web is a friendly place, mainly used for entertainment, so a more human style of writing to entertain your audience is generally better. The dry recitation of facts will usually bore your reader (unless that’s your audience as you determined above), and you’ll lose them, so try to find a more interesting way of presenting facts and figures.
Read it back!
Read your article back to yourself. Out loud. There’s something about this act, that slows you down and allows you to catch errors that just reading over silently lets you miss. You may feel a little silly, but it’s worth doing, it’ll help your style as well, making it sound more like you.
Don’t rush.
Although you might have a deadline, racing to meet it will make you cut corners and make mistakes. So give yourself plenty of time, ask for extra if you’re working to an external deadline. Just getting words down on the page to meet a deadline will produce a far inferior article compared to taking your time, researching your subject and getting it done to your own satisfaction.
Have a checklist.
Before you start writing, lay down your headers on the page, get the points that you want to cover listed. Because sure as fate once you start getting into details on item two of the list, item four and five will disappear from your mind. If you’ve got a list, you can check everything off as you go through, rather than realising 5 minutes after you hit send that you actually forgot to make one of the most important points you meant to write about, because you were lost in the details of a far less significant point.
Hope this helps a little, it’s just some pointers we’ve picked up.
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Hi there! Quick question that’s entirely off topic.
Do you know how to make your site mobile friendly? My blog looks weird when browsing from my iphone.
I’m trying to find a template or plugin that might be able to
fix this problem. If you have any suggestions, please share.
Appreciate it!
Hi,
Thanks for stopping by.
That very much depends on what back end you’re using? WordPress and the like make it easy, just look through the templates for ones that are “Responsive”. Drupal and other CMS systems should have similar, although I’m not that familiar with them.
If your site is hand coded then you’ll need to change a lot of the CSS to make it responsive, it’s pretty complex if you’re not that familiar with Cascading Style Sheets, a good guide is http://creativeandcode.com/tips-for-writing-responsive-css/
Hope that’s of some help, let me know if I can be of any other help.
Fred@ScruffyDug.com
Thank you so much for sharing your fantastic internet site