How to write digital content that people will want to read
Increasingly, writing original content is seen by companies as a great way to cut through the noise of the internet and reach an audience.
But here’s the question: how do you write really good content — the kind that will make you stand out? If you’re not a professional writer, how can you be sure you’re doing it right.
The good news is that by following some basic principles, anyone can produce strong content. It’s not magic. It’s not a mystic art. There are rules to good writing, and anyone can learn them.
This piece is intended to be a guide to those rules.
I think that clear writing operates at three levels: purpose, structure and language. I’m going to talk about each of those in turn.
Then I want to talk a little bit about the wider context — what to do once you’ve written something, to make it as strong as possible.
The golden rule: writing has to have a purpose
Producing good content starts well before you write your first word. Before you start, it helps to know the purpose of the piece you’re going to write. This involves considering three things: what you want to talk about, who you want to talk to, and what you want to say. Or to put it another way: subject, audience, message.
Let’s look at each of them in turn.
Pick a strong subject
A piece of writing is only as good as its subject matter. If your subject matter is interesting, your piece will probably be interesting.
It doesn’t have to be interesting to everyone, of course. No subject is interesting to everyone. But it has to be interesting to someone.
If you’re writing content about your business, this decision will partly be made for you. If you sell golf clubs, you’d better write about golf. If you run a property business, you’d better write about the property market.
But that still leaves a huge amount of room to manoeuvre. Are you going to write about the best golf clubs, or the best stance, or the best golf courses? If you can get your subject absolutely right, you’re halfway there.
The absolutely key thing is to put yourself in the mind of your potential reader. You need a subject that a reader wants to know about. That involves understanding the knowledge, insight and information you have which is of value to your audience.
Which takes us on neatly to point number two.
Know your audience
If you know who you’re writing for, it’s much easier to communicate successfully. So you need to think about who the potential audience is for any piece of content. Who would want to hear about it? What would they gain from it? Why are they going to give up five minutes of their day to listen to what you have to say?
The good news is that people like learning things. Everyone has problems they need someone to solve. If you can offer those solutions, they will listen. Everyone has things they want to do better. If you can help them do those things better, they’ll listen.
The more you know about the audience you want to reach, and the problems they face in their work and their lives, the easier it will be for you to produce something they want to read.
The chances are, if you’re experienced in your field, and you run your own business, you already know the people you want to talk to.
So when you pick a potential subject, it’s worth having a conversation with them, in your head, and asking, “What is it you most want to know?”
During a brief stint when I worked on a construction magazine, I used to get told by the editor: “Picture a middle-aged man in a hard hat, a high-visibility jacket and a suit”. Construction and I weren’t natural bedfellows, and this advice was incredibly helpful. I had a picture in my head of my audience, now, and I could talk to him. What was he worried about? Late payment? New self-employment laws? Changes in the public finance initiative? Whatever it was, that was what I needed to find out about.
Another thing about audience is that it changes over time. If possible, be contemporaneous. If something is already in the news, and in people’s minds, that’s the time to write about it. That’s when the audience will be at its peak.
Perhaps the most important thing to remember, though, is that what you want to talk about may not be what people want to hear about. But you have to start out by talking to people about what they want to listen to. Once you’ve got their attention, maybe you can talk about something else.
Have a compelling message
Once you’ve got a subject and an audience, you need to have something interesting to say. You need a message.
This is the most common fault I see in a piece of writing. Not knowing what you want to say. Ask yourself this question:
How do I want to change my reader’s mind?
For your writing to be worthwhile, you have to have created some sort of change in your reader by the end. Nobody wants to waste their time reading something, and come away no wiser.
You have to either change your reader’s emotions, or their opinion, or their knowledge. Any one of these is fine. All three is ideal, but there’s no need to shoot for the moon.
Usually, if you’ve produced a good piece of writing, then by the time you’ve finished, you should be able to encapsulate your message in a single sentence. If you can’t, you may want to consider whether you really know what your piece is for.
I find it useful to try this exercise before I start writing. If I know what I want to say before I start, I find it goes much more easily. But it’s not compulsory. Sometimes you need to put the words down before you know your real message. Even professional writers vary hugely over whether to make a plan. Some people pile in, others map out everything. So my advice is to do whatever works for you. But you have to know your message by the time you’re finished. If you don’t, you haven’t finished.
How do you structure your piece?
Okay, so we’ve talked about what to do before you start writing. Now we need to talk about how to produce something readable. How do you get from the original idea to the execution?
Headline, headline, headline
If you’re writing digital content, the headline of your piece is more important than anything you say after it. In some cases, it’s more important than everything you say after it. If you get the headline right, everything else follows.
This goes together with the concept of message. If your message is clear, your headline may well write itself.
The main thing is to just be very, very clear what your piece is about, so a reader understands very clearly why they want to read the piece. In general, I don’t like to make jokes or puns in online headlines. They often sound good, but they don’t explain what the piece is about.
It’s good to have some mystery in a headline — enough to intrigue — but many jokey headlines are too mysterious.
There are many ways to go about writing a good headline, but all of them must drag your reader into the piece. My favourite tactics are:
• Ask a question that the reader feels they need to know the answer to — “How do you make more money from your rental property”
• Promise to list all the things they might need to know to do something — “Ten ways to improve your rental property”
• Challenge or refute a well-worn concept — “Why XXXX is a terrible place to buy a holiday home”
• Reinforce or advocate an idea that the reader already holds — “Why people who XXXX job are worth their weight in gold”
It’s worth pausing on that last one a bit. I said above that you need to know the change you want to create in your reader’s mind, but one change you can create is to strengthen or affirm something they already believe. This kind of writing is hugely effective. People love reading a piece of writing which explains why they’re right.
Your headline must be truthful. Don’t mislead or exaggerate or lie in order to get clickthroughs. That works for clickbait sites, because they don’t expect customers to trust them, but you are looking for loyalty, and that means you have to be trustworthy.
Introduce your ideas clearly
Once you’ve got a headline, you need an introduction.
Intro sections aren’t as important as headlines, but they’re still very important.
Introducing a piece of content is a tricky art. You don’t want to dive straight into the meat of your argument, but you do need to engage the reader immediately.
I talked about the fact that a good piece of writing produces a change in the reader’s mind. This change is easier if we establish a common base that both reader and writer starts from, and that’s what your intro is for.
A good intro needs to do three things.
• Establish your subject in the first paragraph. Explain what you’re going to be writing about, and why it’s worth reading.
• Give context. Set the scene. Give a sense of the wider environment, and any background information you’re going to rely on.
• Explain the message of your piece. Make it clear what change you want to produce.
Give yourself the space you need to do all these things. One of the most common errors I see is that writers dive straight into technical stuff without establishing who it’s for, what it will contribute, and how it fits into the wider context.
Take the reader on the journey
Any piece of writing is about taking the reader on a journey. Your intro sets out clearly where you’re starting from, and then the rest of the piece carries them through the journey.
Once you’ve established your message, the rest of the piece is about presenting the information you need to justify that message, in the most sensible order. Exactly what order that is will depend on the message you’re conveying. Some possible approaches include:
1. Chronological. First do this, then that. For when you’re telling a story or explaining a process. “Ten steps to a perfect birthday cake”
2. Pros and cons. For when you’re weighing up whether something should happen. “Should you buy a hybrid or an electric car?”
3. Problem and solution. Outlining why something is an issue and then explaining what needs to be done. “Why delapidations bills are a big problem for commercial tenants, and how to avoid them.”
4. Logical progression. For when you want to prove something, and each piece of evidence relies on the step before. “Why a universal basic income would grow the UK economy”
Any structure is fine, so long as it presents information in a sensible order. It’s all about understanding what the reader needs to know in paragraph three, in order to read paragraph four.
Don’t write more than you need to
Woodrow Wilson, the president of the USA during the First World War, once said: “If you want me to talk for five minutes I need a month to prepare. If you want me to talk for an hour I’ll need a week. If you want me to talk all day I’m ready right now.”
Shorter is harder, but also better. Ideally, you should trim off all the irrelevant stuff, and leave only the words you absolutely need to get across the point you are trying to make.
There’s nothing wrong with writing a short piece, and there’s nothing wrong with writing a long piece. But there is something wrong with writing a long piece when a short one would have done.
Use the right words
If your structure and your subject are good, you’re most of the way there. But still, there’s a lot to be said for getting your choice of language right.
Simple is best
Albert Einstein said: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
This is good advice. If readers have to work hard to get through your writing, for any reason, the chances are they won’t.
I usually try to use short sentences and simple words. Long and complicated words make your article hard to read.
The art of really good writing is to get an idea across so that everyone understands it. It’s not to show everyone how clever you are. If you’re actually clever, they’ll figure that out eventually.
There are a few tools to measure how easy your work is to read. One is called the Gunning Fog index. If you go online, you can find a Gunning Fog tester. Paste in your whole piece of writing and it measures how easy your work is to understand, and gives you a score. Generally, lower is better.
Of course, you can’t dumb down too much. You have to cut your coat to suit your cloth. If you’re writing about multi-employer defined benefit pension schemes, your article will probably be a bit tougher than if you’re writing about football. If you are dealing with a highly technical subject, the best way to make it easy to read about is to break it down into bite-sized chunks. Introduce only one new idea per sentence.
Rhetoric
A while ago, I tried to sit down and articulate the tricks and tools of sentence construction which you could use to be more persuasive, and draw attention to particular phrases and ideas. It turned out I was wasting my time, because the Ancient Greeks did it thousands of years ago, and they called it rhetoric. So far as I a can see, there are four underlying tools at use in most rhetoric, and while I’d advise avoiding most of the wilder flights of fancy, it’s worth knowing what’s happening. If only so you can avoid using them by accident. Let’s look at each.
Rhythm
The rhythm of your language is extremely important. The easiest thing is probably to think of music, or your heartbeat. If there isn’t a rhythm, that puts us off. If the rhythm is too monotonous or slow, we don’t like it.
If the rhythm’s fast — lots of short sentences — then we look around for something exciting to be happening. So slow down when you want people to pause and think and reflect, and then when you reach a point where you want to say something, and you want people to agree with it, write something short.
Repetition
People pay more attention to something if it’s repeated.
Let me say that again. People pay more attention to something if it’s repeated.
This happens with all speech, large or small. Repetition of any word, or phrase, or sound, will draw the reader’s focus. If you repeat the same word or phrase or sound when you’re making a new point, people will associate it with the last time they heard it. So the trick is to repeat yourself if you want people to pay particular attention. Look at Churchill’s “fight them on the beaches speech” if you want to see it at work in the hands of a master.
It’s equally important not to use the same word again if you don’t want to draw particular attention to something. People will start looking for the connection and if it’s not there, they won’t be listening to what you do want to say.
Comparison
Human beings love comparisons. All of us learn through stories, and simile and metaphor are just tiny stories about how two things are alike. If you can link something you want people to like, with something they already like, that’s good. Similarly, if you can find an original or engaging comparison, it can draw people’s attention. My all-time favourite metaphor is from PG Wodehouse, who described one character as “So crooked he could hide behind a spiral staircase”.
Contrast
This section is going to be totally different to the last three.
Just kidding. It’ll be mostly the same. But at least I got your attention.
Basically, people pay more attention if there is a contrast between two things. If you shift from black to white, or from billionaires to beggars, or from the sublime to the ridiculous, then it draws attention to how different those things are. It emphasises the unique characteristics of both things.
Let’s go back to the “fight them on the beaches” speech. Churchill uses basically the same phrase eight times: we shall fight them, we shall fight them, we shall fight them. Then, at the end, he changes. “We shall never surrender.”
Listeners were expecting the same formulation again, for the ninth time, and he changed it, and it came up and hit them right between the eyes because the contrast made a big surprise. Brilliant writing.
Tone of voice
Every word has a set of connotations attached to it — a collection of other words it makes us think of. Two words with similar meanings can have very different connotations. Think of slim and thin and slender and skinny. Or stubborn, determined and tenacious. In each case, they all mean the same thing, but the feeling we get from them is different.
Let’s take one example of why this is: the origin of the word. Our language is unusual in that it’s an amalgam of three parent tongues: Saxon, French and Latin. The languages of commoners, the nobility, and the church.
To this day, English people see Anglo-Saxon words as tougher and stronger, French words as more elegant, Latin words as more intelligent. It’s very different if we cease, or desist, than if we cut it out, or stop.
To see this in action, we can go back yet again to the “fight them on the beaches” speech, because it contains a great example of this, too. Every single word in that speech is Anglo-Saxon in origin, except for the last one — “surrender”. The tough Saxon words contrast beautifully with the effete French to make “surrender” sound that much more unpalatable.
Then there’s the fact that we associate certain sounds with certain feelings. “Uh” sounds are tough and ugly. “Sh” sounds are soothing and soft.
Or there’s the use of verbs like “make up” and “put down”. These are called phrasal verbs, and they only exist in a handful of languages. If we choose to use these words, we’re telling people we’re casual, informal, relaxed.
All of this feeds into the tone and mood of your writing — the tone of voice, also called register. The register you should use for each audience is different. Should it be jokey and informal? Simple and to the point? Intricate and technical? The important thing is to think about the effect you’re looking for, and make sure your choice of words reflects it.
Are words the answer at all?
I’m a big fan of words, but they aren’t the only things which matter. Far from it. There are many other tools which can communicate information more effectively — pictures, graphs, tables, infographics. It’s really important to consider whether these are an effective alternative to writing.
The design around the piece is important, too. The quality and style of the presentation is all important — white space, fonts and headings all contribute to the ease of reading. The success of a piece of writing can be summed up as strength of message x quality of writing x reach x design. If you neglect any of those four, your piece will suffer.
Getting the most out of your content
So there we are. That’s the basics of how to produce good content which will appeal to audiences. Know what you want to say. Structure is sensibly. Write clearly.
A couple of final tips. First, rewrite.
The first thing I do once I’ve written something is to stand up and walk away and do something different. Make a cup of coffee. Check out the news. Do the crossword. Then, once I’ve cleared my mind, I read the piece again, and start making changes. As Ernest Hemingway said, “the only kind of writing is rewriting”.
How much rewriting you need to do will probably relate to how much planning you did. Some people love to chuck all their ideas down on paper and make a bit of a mess, and then hack it into shape. Others need to get it right at every stage before moving on. But all of us will benefit from some degree of revision.
Unfortunately, good writing can often involve cutting out the good bits, too. Often the good bits aren’t necessary and slow the piece down.
And once it’s ready, and you’ve published it, don’t stop there. There’s a lot of feedback available to writers online. Analytics, comments, social media. See how it lands, and try to incorporate that learning into future pieces. Everything you’ll ever write could have been written better. Try and work out how.
Finally, don’t do it alone. Always have someone else read your work. Ideally, if you can, make that someone a professional editor. Editors can give you feedback on your ideas, on your structure, and on your language. They’ll spot any typos and find the places where you’re not being clear. I’ve written several thousand pieces of online content in my career, and I think there can scarcely be one which has not been improved by the work of an editor.
And don’t worry about getting it right first time. This is the start of the process. Writing improves with practice, so make sure you keep learning.
Good luck.
