What do people want to read online?
It’s a really important question. Do you know the answer? If you don’t, you could be adding content to your website that nobody is reading or is interested in, which could be the kiss of death if your customers are coming from your website.
Research shows most web users read informative and instructional blogs, articles, editorial content, news and opinions. They’re not reading your carefully crafted product or sales copy; they’re skipping over it. Jakob Nielsen on ‘writing for the web’ reckons users spend 4.4 seconds for every 100 words on page. That’s a very short attention span!
The conclusion? You should be having conversations online with visitors, prospects and customers. And the best way to achieve it is with blogs and articles. Interesting and informative articles, not thinly-veiled promotional copy. Find some popular and successful blogs in your market and copy their writing style, but make sure you inject your own personality and opinion too. Or add a blog to your website.
So, do you know what your web site visitors like reading? If you don’t, it’s not difficult to find out. Google analytics will tell you which pages are popular and which are not. Or you can ask them. Survey monkey is a web-based service and a simple way to create surveys to ask your visitors what they want.
The layout of your web copy is important too. Studies from eye-tracking research show most people scan web copy, rarely reading everything. So, using headlines, subheads and bullet points will engage your readers far more effectively. Eyetracking heatmaps show how users scan a webpage. Using this kind of intelligence will help your designer create better layouts for pages that get read.
Online reading is very different from the printed page and writing great webcopy is about conversational writing. Watch this week’s featured video to learn more.
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