It's important to write an article that will be engaging and at the same time educative, interactive and compelling to keep your online readership. Some people will read your articles if they find the topics interesting enough, but it might take more than an interesting topic to keep your readers' attention long enough to read the entire article on a computer screen.
Some useful tips will help you write excellent articles for your online audience. These tips will be helpful to use for different kinds of online readership, for example, a blog, website content or if you are guest posting for a friend.
Let us discuss some of these tips:
1. Write to create curiosity
The term "scanners" is used to refer to those readers who quickly look through the headlines to see if there is any article worth their time to read. Many people fall into this category for an obvious reason: it's quite difficult to hold peoples' attention for long.
It's important that you write your articles with web attention spans in mind. This means you must strive to make your headlines, subheadings, bullet lists and captions as compelling as you can with clear and direct sentences. Your ability to do this will determine how often your articles are read.
2. Know your audiences
It's important that you have a good understanding of your audience's needs before you start writing your articles. If you know your audience, you can cater your writing to their needs in a fulfilling way. You will be successful if your audience can get what they were looking for when they first saw your article headline and decided to click on it for further reading. There was a curiosity, and it must be satisfied if you want that reader to come back for more.
Let's briefly discuss the renowned Stephen King. He's a clear storyteller writer that knows his audience very well.
We can confidently describe Stephen King as one of the most successful and popular authors in contemporary literature. You will find it interesting to know that Stephen King favors using a simple waterman fountain pen for his works than a computer. He has been quoted to have addressed the waterman pen as "the world's finest processor," in that it gives him the chance to think and steadily process his stories while writing.
3. Be creative with your content
You should be creative with various tools to make your article look appealing and easy to read. There are many ways you can do this. Your headlines should be written with bigger fonts than the sub-headlines, and you can highlight any areas where you need to write pros and cons with green for pros and red for cons.
You should strive to discover what works best for you. We can list many different writers who have developed their own distinctive style of writing. This uniqueness gave them an edge to make a name for themselves. For example, Neil Gaiman, a wonderfully creative writer.
Neil Gaiman writes fiction, but his genre is mostly horror fiction with a bit of fantasy. He works with a computer because he believes it helps him write faster. He is known to withdraw to a solitary place when wants to write. Using a computer is also helping him to deliver the words on time, just as they should be.
Neil uses color pens to track his daily progress, and believes that "a good [writing] day is defined by anything more than 1,500 words of comfortable, easy writing that I figure I'm probably going to use most of in the end."
4. Think like a journalist
You should use some journalistic strategies to make your articles even more engaging. Journalists have been expertly trained to write pieces that will keep their readers' attention throughout an article. Journalists are also versatile in their writing style as they write for the general public but choose to direct their articles to appeal to particular groups of people that make up the public.
You will also do well to communicate information to your readers in a way that they will easily understand. This can be done by including some basic information at the beginning of your article and then ending it with more useful and related information that your readers will be happy to get.
5. Republishing print content
Republishing print content is also a great approach in case you don't have any new ideas to write about. Choose a print content that you have the permission to republish, and then repurpose it for the Internet, including shorter sentences, shorter paragraphs, and enticing introductions. Take these points into consideration if you need to use a hard copy of an article online.
You will be able to relate this with George R.R. Martin — he has done well in the world of writing. He is also quite versatile having written for television, hardcopy books and online content.
George R.R. Martin is one of the most reputable fiction and fantasy writers. He is the author of the very popular series: "A Song of Ice and Fire." His writing career started in the '60s by writing for television productions. In those days, he used a typewriter or pen and paper for his works. The epic nature and volume of his later works required him to use a word processor. George R.R. Martin books are epically long and elaborate, and surely require the content management of a modern word processor, right? George R.R. Martin opted to use the first ever created processor, the WordStar 4.0. This processor runs on a DOS.
He revealed his experience working with the computer in an interview with Conan O'Brien where he said that he prefers the old version of the word processor as it gives him his words exactly as he keys them in. He compared this with later versions of word processors that have actually been confusing for him to use.
6. Be witty sparingly
This point should be applied especially at the beginning of your article. It should be direct and straight to the point. Readers will quickly overlook any kind of fun, and many will not bother to read further.
7. Use hyperlinks and images
You can easily provide more information about any topic or attribute to sources you're using by including the link that will direct your readers to that web page. Trust me! Your readers will appreciate this.
You can also use hyperlinks to link to other articles on the same domain you're writing for via relevant keywords. For example, if you were writing a story about online shopping and you reference the Target data breach from 2013, it's good user experience to link back to the story recounting the data breach, if one does exist on the site you're writing for.
Also, adding a few images into an online article will make it more attractive. Readers often tend to choose online articles with embedded images and videos rather than a post with just sentences.
Conclusion
To write a good article for online audiences, you have to prepare the topics, write out the outline with short sentences. Reading an article in the paper is something entirely different than read an article on a computer's screen. Readers may feel boring when reading an online article faster than reading a book. That's the reason why we must focus on what audiences want, create curiosity, and use hyperlinks and images to make the article looks better.