Pro Article

Whether you’re a blogger looking to monetize your writing efforts, an advertising copywriter or an affiliate marketer looking to drive more traffic to your website, you are writing for profit. While there are different approaches which can be taken towards the craft of writing with a profit motive, there is one element common to any writing which is meant to generate sales, drive traffic or even just provide your readers with useful information: be compelling, whatever sort of writing you may be doing.

Especially if you’re writing for the web (which is what we’ll be focusing on here), you need to remember on very important thing every time you sit down to write. People have short attention spans when it comes to reading; it’s not that they’re unwilling to read, but rather that they have a nearly unlimited number of choices online, so they’re picky about what they will take the time to read. You need to get your reader’s attention and quickly or they will become someone else’s readers.

This brings us to something very important when doing any sort of commercially oriented writing: your title. This is the first thing the reader usually sees, so you need to make it count. Write an engaging, compelling title or headline which gets across the idea of the piece – or one which gets their attention. Making readers sit up and take notice on the web is notoriously challenging, so one thing which is well worth your time is to have a look at some successful websites which are in the vein of the type of writing you would like to do and study how they use their titles, headlines or the first sentence of their work to draw the reader in. If you can get the reader’s attention, they’re yours to lose.

You have to keep them reading once you get them started and there are a few important points to be made here. Not all of these will be equally applicable to what you’re writing; as a very wise man once said, your mileage may vary. The most important thing is to keep the reader moving down the page. You can accomplish this in a few different ways. One is to use formatting – short paragraphs and subheadings are one way to keep the eye scanning down the page. You can also write your pieces in a way which gets the most important points out of the way first, which is a standard technique used both in print journalism and in long form advertising copy.

The last but definitely not unimportant part of writing for profit is that you need to give yourself a knowledgeable, trustworthy “voice” through your writing. Write what you know, as the saying goes – but make sure that you sound like you know what you’re talking about. While injecting a little of your own persona into your writing, even commercial writing, can help make your writing engaging to the reader, remember that everyone would rather give their money to an expert. Write knowledgeably, grab your reader’s attention quickly and remember that brevity is the soul of both wit and of writing for profit; but above all, be compelling.