You can be a great wordsmith. You can have the ultimate vocabulary. You can even be writing a lot of useful articles, but guess what? It all comes to nothing if no one wants to read what you write. If you were in the class room and happened to be the teacher, a role that I have performed, you can compel the captive audience to give your book a read. Sure they will say the words aloud and maybe some of them may even think its interesting, but 90% of the class is going to pay no attention till you tell them its coming in the exams!

There are no exams

And online even if you are a teacher with great lessons in your book, there are no exams for your readers. So no matter how great your article, if you are boring, you will not get that reader to stick through to gain anything useful from the article. That is where writing online differs from writing for books or magazines or even the good old text book in school.

Compel your reader, keep it short and simple

To finish the article, is what you want the reader to do. So how do you write to make them read? You pique their interest. You write shorter posts. The computer screen is not as friendly to the eyes as the printed book. So people have shorter attention spans here. Take that into consideration before you start a thesis of 10 thousand words in a single blog post.

You need to start with a good headline

Never underestimate the importance of an article title. I’ll give you a small example. I did a lot of persona development workshops about five years ago. So it was natural that I did a fair bit of coaching for Spoken English. I wrote 3 articles on the topic in ezines article directory and guess what? One of those articles is touching 60,000 views while the other two are in a couple of thousand views each.

Why does this happen

Why? The headline of the successful article is “Tips to Improve your Spoken English“, and the other one which has better material incidentally, is titled “Improving Conversation Skills for Non-native Speakers“. The first headline has a keyword phrase hidden in it “improve spoken English”. While the second one does offer tips on the same thing, but has never been searched for by anyone in Google. (If you do try and get one result, that would be the time I was checking if it featured anywhere!)

A lot of the traffic that the second and third articles got were generated from my profile, so people first read the successful article and then went on to see what more I could offer. So another lesson here is that you need to offer quality content as well, or there will be no viewers at all!