A potential client or customer lands on your website and unless you grab their attention with effective content, chances are that they will be gone and probably forever.
Those first few lines of your opening paragraph should contain or point to the really important information that your visitor is seeking. If so, chances are they will stay and at least explore your website, products and services and that is after all what you want.
Visitors to web sites are impatient and unless they see something that captures their interest, they will be gone. This is one place where an interesting image and some good content will help retain your visitor but to get them there first, good content creation is essential.
When was the last time you read a newspaper or magazine article from beginning to the end? Chances are that you rarely do that and indeed most people don’t read various articles right through. Why people do that isn’t important and there is probably little you can do to get them to fully read your article particularly if it is a long one unless the story is relevant or of interest to them.
Think of how you read a newspaper. You will most likely scan the headings or titles of each story. If a story captures your interest, you will most likely read the first paragraph or two and depending on how interesting it is to you will depend on how much you read. The next person to read the same newspaper will most likely do the same to entirely different stories.
So what can you do to capture the interest of visitors to your website.
- First of all, the heading or title is critical, it must attract your visitor and this is where the search engines can help lead them there.
- Get to the point in the first sentence or so. Don’t bother with introductory sentences, nobody is interested.
- Don’t talk about yourself if the article is about conveying information, a service or product. Don’t start off with, ” I have had such a hard day or similar”. Again, nobody is interested. Think about the message or story you are trying to tell and stay on topic.
- Your content needs to be readable at a high school level preferably.
- Make your content compelling and interesting enough for visitors to want to stay and read on.
- Try and include who, what, when, why, where and how of whatever it is your writing about in your first sentence.
Writing for the web is similar to a newspaper, it has to grab your attention and be relevant otherwise people will just move on.
– Peter
