Does this happen to you?

You’re sitting with your fingers poised above the keyboard, however a blank screen is staring right back at you.

You just can’t come up with a topic to write about, especially a theme that’s going to be relevant and of interest to your ideal client?

Yes? You’re not alone.

Source/Read More: Annemarie Cross

Bad writing frustrates me. Lately, while watching movies especially, my inner monologue goes something like, “Man, I could’ve written something so much better than this.” Do you ever have that thought? Chances are, you can distinguish good dialogue from bad dialogue. That’s why some television shows make it and some don’t. Now, take that dialogue tool and apply it to business. Can you tell good business writing from horrendous business writing?

Source/REad More: getbusymedia.com

These 12 different types of online content will give you a variety of ways to get information to your readers, making your site more interesting in the long run not only for them, but also for you, the writer.

The How-To

The how-to is a great article format to use in that 1) how-to’s are generally eagerly sought out, and 2) they are often linked to at a higher rate than other content types. The how-to is an instructional piece that walks the reader through a process or system for doing something. It involves easy, clear steps, to the point of often using numbered or bulleted steps. Clarity is the key to writing a successful how to article.

Guides and Tutorials

Similar to the how-to, the guide or tutorial tends to be lengthier and beefier than its how-to cousin. Where how-to’s cover a slice, guides and tutorials can cram in several slices, if not the whole pie. These are good for longer, multiple-page articles.

The Tip Article

The tip article moves the how-to in the exact opposite direction, concentrating on very short ideas that quickly present a problem and then promptly solve it. These are often something simple that you want to share with your readers, such as a news story or video. They can also do double duty by providing quick, compelling content for newsletters.

The News Article

Everyone loves to be kept abreast of the latest, be it general interest, political, sports-related, a regional story, industry/organization happening… if it’s “breaking”, it will fit in a news article and pull in readers. You get to employ your reporter skills here, making sure you concentrate on the who, what, where, when, and why of the story.

The Review Article

The review article is not only popular with readers, but also a good way to monetize your site. You can either do a round-up of products, say three, and offer advantages/disadvantages, pros/cons for each, or concentrate on reviewing a single book, web app, video, breakfast cereal… the list of thing you can review is nearly endless. The goal here is to try and offer an objective assessment of the product’s features and strengths/weaknesses to help readers make up their own minds.

The List Article

What you’re reading here is a list article. Essentially you select a group of related things that are the best of their category (or the worst, most popular, etc.), and then present them with brief descriptions of each. These are easy to pull together, very informative, and many times actually have a number (ex. 12 Types of Online Content You Can Write) within the title. Bottom line: people love their lists.

The Round-Up Article

The round-up article is similar to the list article. In the round-up, you select one topic and then go out and grab everything you can on it — news, opinion, stats and other data, advice, forecasts, etc. You’re basically giving the reader a broad pallet of information from various sources on the topic, so they don’t have to go out and find it themselves.

The Interview Article

Interviews are great in that the subject does most of the heavy lifting for you. Start with three to ten questions (depending on how lengthy you expect the answers to be), and the interviewee will provide the rest. You can do these face to face or via email, and if you’re interested in dabbling with audio or video for your site, this is a great content format to do that.

The Trivia Article

Another popular form that is easy to research, the trivia article pulls together a variety of facts, many times quirky, on a particular topic.

The History Piece

Everything has a history, a tale or trail that got it to where it is today, be it products, places or people (the latter we call biography). Interesting facts about where something (or someone) came from or how it got to be where it is today always make for interesting copy.

The Inspirational Piece

These are usually in essay form, often using a first-person narrative, that provides hope or encouragement to readers. The inspirational article builds off the fact that we all face very similar things as we make our way through life. Leaning how someone else has overcome difficulties we’re now facing (or will face) can be a great source of comfort and strength. Many times the inspirational piece will end with links to additional coping resources.

The Assessment Article

More to do list than article, the assessment piece comes largely in the form of a checklist that people can download and print out, or just print from the webpage itself. The assessment article lets people more easily evaluate some aspect of their lives and gives tips for improving the same.

In this article we’ll look at some of the ways you should be writing to best appeal to your human visitors. To learn how to best write for search engines, click here.

Concise Writing is Best

You can be breezy in your diary, artful and eloquent in your novel, but when you’re writing for the Internet, shoot for short. Stick to one topic per page, and keep the pages themselves a lean 500 words or less. If a page is running longer than that, think about breaking it into two pages. Keep all titles and headers short and descriptive as well.

Think of every piece you write for the Internet as being the answer to a specific question or problem your visitor has. By all means make it interesting and fun, but don’t lose track of the fact that people are reading you to learn something.

Titles Are Important

Don’t scrimp on the time you spend crafting the perfect title for your online article. Titles appeal to both search engines through the use of keywords, and your visitors by being descriptive enough that they are drawn in to read more. Remember that your page title in most cases will be listed among other results in a search engine query. You should make every effort to help yours stand out.

Titles should be 50-75 characters long (including spaces). Forget the whimsy and concentrate on very specific wording, using whatever keywords you’ve assigned to the article (see Writing For Search Engines). If your article runs more than a page, use a unique title for each page.

Page Headings Are Important

Think of headings as sort of sub-titles; less important than the page’s title, but still carrying a fair amount of weight. They should stand out from the article text, catching both human and search bot eyes. Place relevant keywords in all headings, and use H1, H2, etc. coding appropriately. Main headings should be coded H1, allowing them to stand out more than subheadings further down the page.

Writing the First Paragraph (And More)

Make your article’s main point early on, and repeat it throughout the article. Be clear what you’re going to be discussing in the first paragraph, and people will be drawn in to read the rest of your article. You should write in a more relaxed style (as opposed to a literary, or scientific journal, style), with a “bullet point” approach in mind. Use short paragraphs to make your points, and then…

Ending The Article

To sum up the article, return to the beginning and restate the main point. This is just a good way to wrap up any informative article, and helps to cement your point in the mind of the reader.

A few stray thoughts on writing for the Internet, human edition:

· Use good grammar and correct spelling. Nothing turns off a reader as much as sloppy sentence structure and horendus speling. Don’t put all your trust in a spell checker, though. Re-read all articles you write for errors before posting them online.
· Write often. Content truly is king, both for your human visitors and the search engine spiders. Post fresh content regularly and you’ll make them both happy.
· Crosslink. One of the main benefits of the Internet is the ability to direct your readers instantly to additional information, either on other sites, or your own. For example, if you’d like an idea of the many different kinds of articles you can write for your site, check out our article 12 Types of Online Content You Can Write. Part II of this article series, Writing for Search Engines, is also a must read.

We covered writing content for visitors to your site in the first part of this series (see here). In this segment, we look at writing specifically for search engines.

Search Engines Love Keywords

Your goal in writing for search engines is to place at or near the top of search engine results, and one of the primary ways to do this is to concentrate on keywords and keyphrases. Think of keywords/phrases as your article trimmed down to its bare bones. Keywords/phrases are the essence of what you’re writing on (and what your visitors have been searching for), and you will want to rely on them heavily when composing your articles.

How To Use Keywords

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a constantly shifting field, but there are some general rules that you should adhere to in terms of using one element of SEO, keywords:

• Decide what your keywords are. Whether you’re using one keyword/phrase or more, decide early on what they are and stick with them. Each article you write should focus on a limited amount of keywords that are scattered throughout the article.
• Use keywords often, but not too often. In terms of keyword density (covered more in Using Keyword Tools To Improve Search Engine Placement), or the amount of times a given keyword appears in your article, most sources say you should aim for your keywords/phrases making up about 3-5% of the overall text of your article. Don’t go beyond this, or you may be seen as spamming the search engine by keyword stuffing.
• Use keywords early. Put them in your title, in headings, and definitely early in your article. You should also scatter them throughout your article, but not more than would be considered natural.

Optimizing Keywords

Our section on keyword tools gives you additional information on how to optimize keywords for maximum effectiveness, but we will cover a few general rules and tips here.

Consider what people are searching for, and how they are wording their searches. Use real words and the way people talk/type to structure your keywords. Use different tenses of words, plurals of words, and different spellings of words, if there are ambiguities about the spelling (ex. workplace, work place). Just make sure in any one given piece that you pick one spelling and stick with it for consistency’s sake.

Use locality when creating keyword phrases, particularly if you’re writing about a place or business. For example, “our office” is fine, but “our Cleveland office” is going to pull in a lot more relevant visitors. This type of descriptive writing should be utilized throughout your article whenever possible to make full use of keywords. For example, when discussing a motel, which phrase do you think is going to get your page seen more by the right kind of visitor:

“This small motel offers stunning views of the mountain.”

“This Rutland motel offers stunning views of Killington mountain.”

Additional Keyword Tips

• Use alt tags on images. If you’re using images with your text, be sure to fill the alt tags with keyword-rich descriptions. Alt tags are used not only by the visually-impaired and text-only browsers, but also by search bots to figure out what’s on a page. Think of these as free keyword-display areas.
• Spend some time with keyword tools. With the right keyword tools, you can find variations on keywords that are currently being searched on and learn if you are using them enough in your own articles. You can find examples of both these kind of tools in our article Using Keyword Tools To Improve Search Engine Placement, as mentioned previously.
• Keywords make up only one part of search engine optimization. We’ll be covering more aspects of this important area in the near future.

Finding Keywords

So, say you sell baskets and you’re looking to get those interested in your products to your Website. Obviously “basket” and “baskets” are great keywords, but what else would also be?

Tools like the Google Adwords Keyword Tool let you take a peek behind the curtains at the Adwords network to see what people are searching for. In addition to “baskets”, you’ll also find “basket weaving”, “gift basket”, “woven basket”, and any number of other keywords and keyphrases that you can sift through and pick from.

You can enter keywords/phrases (or the URLs of your competitors) to get keyword ideas, and the search results will tell you how popular each word or phrase is and how much advertiser competition there is for each. These can give you a good idea of what is doing well on the Google network (and as goes Google…). You can also filter out words, so that undesirable hits like “basket case” or “basket ball” don’t show up in the results. The tool will also give you a list of related word and phrase ideas (ex. wicker, hamper).

Additional tools such as Wordtracker and Wordstream also provide a similar service, although the free versions of these tools are less robust than what Google offers for free.

Keyword Density Tools

Once you’ve found your keywords, how often should you use them on your pages? How often are the search leaders in your niche using the same words on their pages? Search algorithms are constantly in flux, so while its hard to say for sure, 3-5% density (leaning towards the low end of that range) seems to be the most popular estimate to shoot for. That said, don’t discount a different percentage if your top competitor is having a ton of success with it.

How do you calculate your keyword density? While you could count up each instance of a keyword and compare it to the complete word count of your page, using a keyword density tool is a much easier way to go. SEOBench.com offers a great (and free) tool in their Keyword Density Analyzer. Just feed the tool a URL and it’ll spit out your top-ranking words, showing how often they appear and what the overall density of each word is. Not only that, but it will also show you how any two and three word phrases it finds amongst your text fair.

SEO Chat offers a similar tool, with the addition of a “keyword cloud” feature. If you’re a fan of word clouds, check it out.

You can find more information on working with keywords in our article, Writing Content for the Internet, Part II: Writing for search Engines.

According to Sonia Simone, it’s all about the pain:

If you want to write effective copy, you must learn to engage readers emotionally. And if you want to study emotional writing, try reading a few highly successful romance novels. Get over being embarrassed–if you can buy Cosmo or The Enquirer to study headlines, you can buy Laura Kinsale to learn what writing skillfully about pain looks like.

Clear, vivid expression of pain is a great way to build empathy with your reader. We’ve all been miserable. We’ve all been heartbroken. (And we’re all, secretly, a little melodramatic about our own woes.) If you can describe a painful, difficult problem in strong language, you’ll start to create an emotional bond.

Check out the entire article at Copyblogger.