5 Rules All Great Writers Follow When Writing for Websites

For writers, nothing is more intimidating than a blank, white page staring right at you. What do you fill it with? And how do you organize your thoughts so that it makes sense to your readers? Often, writing websites poses a whole new set of challenges. With a world of information right at their fingertips, readers can quickly tap the back button when they lose interest in your piece.

So, what does it take into writing an online piece people would actually want to read? Here’s a list of rules I’ve learned over the years, some of them the hard way.  

1. Keep a Reader Avatar in Mind

The first thing you need to know when writing websites is, who will read your piece? When will they read it, and what will be their frame of mind as they browse through your article?

One way to pin down this info is to combine research with analytics and use it to create a reader avatar. Say you’re writing a baking blog. And based on your research, you find out that most of your readers are:

• Female
• Aged 22 to 35 years old
• Living alone
• Bakes for fun
• Busy with work and only has time to bake on the weekends 

This basic info would guide you through posting recipes that can be made by home bakers who don’t have professional training. Because your readers are busy, you’d want to keep the ingredients list as short as possible and use ingredients regularly in the pantry. 

Some agencies even go as far as giving the avatar a name and identifying their psychographics and consumer behavior. By having a clear picture of who will read your blog, you can tailor-fit your content and language to suit their needs.

2. Keep it Simple

There are a thousand ways to express an idea. And in writing websites, your job is to find the simplest one and stick to it. If you want to know how to be a blogger and a successful one at that, this could be one of the most crucial things you need to learn. 

According to a study by the American Press Institute, the fewer the words in a sentence, the easier it is to understand. The research showed that:

• Readers absorbed 100 percent of the story when the average sentence length in a piece was eight words-long.
• They comprehended 90 percent of the info with 14-word sentences.
• Subjects only comprehended 10 percent of the story with 43-word sentences.

Based on the data above, the shorter the sentence, the better. 

You can also use online tools that measure what’s called the Flesch-Kincaid reading ease. It’s a scale that ranks an article based on word and sentence length. Aim for a score between 60 and 70.

3. Be Active

Use active voice as much as possible when writing websites. Not only will it put more energy into your piece, but it can also be simpler to read.

Here are a few other benefits of using active voice: 

• It allows you to use fewer words
• The sentence sounds more concise
• It makes the narrative faster-moving
• Active voice can help prevent grammar mistakes

For instance, “The baby licked the spoon” sounds better than “The spoon was licked by the baby.”

However, passive voice is also acceptable depending on use and context, especially if you’re creating content for story writing websites or fiction writing websites.  

4. Avoid Long Paragraphs

When you read blogs, do you ever find yourself scanning it first before committing to reading the whole thing? This only shows how crucial it is to keep your thoughts organized and your paragraphs concise.

If there’s one thing book authors can do that web content writers can’t, it’s writing huge chunks of text. In general, there are varying points of view as to the proper length of paragraphs. In composition writing, some teachers would say that it shouldn’t be more than six sentences.

When writing for websites, however, keeping paragraphs short is of utmost importance. The number of words or sentences don’t count as much as the number of ideas does. And as I’ve been saying since Rule #2, it’s a must to keep your concepts concise and simple.

But what if you’re discussing a pretty complex topic? In that case, you must organize your ideas in bite-sized chunks using headers and bullets. That way, you’re making the info easier to absorb. It also makes the piece “scannable,” should your reader be looking for a particular piece of info. 

5. Proofread

Would you ever trust a website if it’s peppered with typos and grammatical errors? Probably not. You might think that these harmless mistakes are trivial, but they can make the piece look careless and amateur. 

In fact, one survey says 54 percent of recruiters had a negative reaction to spelling and grammatical errors in job applicants’ Facebook posts or tweets.

Here are a few tips to keep in mind when proofreading your work:

• Take a break between writing and proofreading. This way, you’ll get a fresh set of eyes when you review your work.
• Begin at the end – start proofreading from the last paragraph and work your way up.
• Read aloud. Some mistakes are more obvious when it literally doesn’t sound right.

If you can’t commit to producing error-free copies for your website, you might as well find a copywriter to do the job.

The Lowdown

If you find it challenging to apply the rules above, there are three simple solutions you can start with: read, read, and read.

As Stephen King once said, “If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.” 

By reading high-quality materials online, you expose yourself to the right way of doing it. 

Another way to gain more confidence is to learn how the professionals do it. For instance, you can hire a blogger to do a post for you and review how they translated your article request into an interesting piece that keeps readers’ eyes glued to the screen.

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