When it comes to web content, irrespective of whether it’s sales copy, informative writing or random thoughts and musings on a blog, it should be easy reading! Reading online shouldn’t be made a tedious task and for most of us, perusing websites and blogs is a leisurely activity.

Words can be to much of a good thing..

Personally, if an article (no matter how interesting its title) starts like a rocket science manual, I’m out of there! By all means, vary your vocabulary – by the same token I hate to read posts where a blogger evidently doesn’t know another word for ‘good.’ But stretching out a word count by fluffing up the content is annoying. Concise content makes for quick reading, ideal for the busy workaholic society we live in.
Now, I’m exaggerating with the title of this post, in complaining about ten words where one will do. More often than not, my peeve comes where writers use two words in place of one. Of course, sometimes there’s a need for this and child like sentences devoid of adjectives, for example, would make for bland writing. There’s a fine line between ‘concise’ and ‘bland’ content.
So, examples?

Unnecessary adverbs and adjectives

"A Sentence with to many adjectives is like Coffee with to much sugar."

There’s a time and a place for adjectives and sometimes they just sound out of place and long winded when read out loud. Take the sentence, “He was an incredibly intelligent fellow, but had an extreme lack of common sense.” When read out loud is lacks punch and crispness. A revision to, “He was an intelligent fellow, though lacked common sense,” is easier reading. That’s a 14 word sentence versus a nine word one.

Unimportant Information

If you’re writing an article on Barack Obama’s proposed health reforms, you would want to let your readers know what the changes are, how they would be affected by the changes and the obstacles the President faces. While it’s easy to wander off on a tangent at times, writing about Obama’s educational background or going into too much depth over the history of health in the US fluffs the article up and takes away from its point. After writing, read out loud and be critical. Ask yourself what the point of each sentence is and if you can’t find a purpose of a sentence, delete!

Repeated Information

Sometimes we repeat ourselves without even realizing we’ve done it. Even if you’ve worded it differently, the same point or fact made twice (even at opposite ends of an article) is just more words than necessary!

Squeeze Out More Words

Look for opportunities to crush and squeeze your verbiage. - Photo by Tomf

Once you’ve cleared out everything you think you can, read through again (preferably out loud). Look for opportunities to tighten up your sentences in ways not described above. An example could be changing:
“Whenever the Jones family got news pets, the neighbour’s children always tended to take to them quicker than the Jones boys,” to
“The next door neighbour’s children always took to the Jones’ new pets quicker than the Jones boys did.”

I know I’ve barked on about concise content here, but this should never come at the expense of meaning. The idea of concise content is saying what you need to say as tightly as possible – not about cutting points out in order to shorten a piece. Think punchy, crisp and natural sounding content and you’re well on your way to great copy.

Content creation is one of the most dreaded aspects of existing online for majority of the internet business owners.  High quality content plays a crucial role in creating a successful internet business.   Poorly written content results in poor readership, and thereby, fewer sales.

Here are 3 wickedly effective techniques to create content in a way that instantly establishes the connection between you and the reader:

Start off with what your readers already knows.

Start with the familiar

Expand from there on to what they don’t know.   Milton Erickson, founding president of American society of clinical hypnosis, often lead his patients from what they know to what they didn’t know. This approach of presenting information increases your readers’ receptivity to your information and establishes a sub-conscious rapport between you and your readers.

Draw Out Your Readers

Well written content educates the reader by drawing the information out of readers mind.   Education originated from the Latin word “educare”, which means “drawing out from within”.  A story or a metaphor is perfect medium to let your readers “draws out” the information from their subconscious mind.  When you start telling the story or present a metaphor, the mind lets its defenses down and opens up.

Create “Aha” Moments

Valuable content is the content that creates “aha” moments.  It restructures and interconnects the existing beliefs and concepts.  When these concepts and beliefs integrate with an experience, it creates understanding.  Taking your readers to this point of understanding should be the ultimate goal of content-creation.  If you just leave your readers with insightful ideas, but don’t offer them any examples, their “aha!” moments never fully converge into an understanding.

Frame Your Content Effectively

Frame your Content

When content is presented with a well-designed frame, it becomes potent.   What the content is framed with decides the “stickiness” of the concepts presented in that content.  When you create content based on factors described above, your content draws your readers inside their mind and helps them absorb the information more effectively.

About the Author
Amy  C. is a consultant for a Phoenix Internet Marketing firm, Niche Solutions, LLC.  She is a full time business student as well as an entrepreneur in the niche of Tabletop fountains.  Amy invites you to browse her most recently launched collection of decorative solar fountains

Biggest Take Away

It seemed the best advice of the meeting was actually scheduling a specific time and place to dedicate yourself to the project. Since our meetup was all small business owners, the challenge was placing a website and online work in priority with the rest of the business. it’s important to remember that there are tons of resources for small businesses and opportunities in Local Search that you have to have a physical location to take advantage of online.

Where Do I Put Content First?

Photo by WordRidden

Your online presence should be like an octopus, that reaches out from the most likely place of conversion to draw people in and make them into customers. The most logical place of conversion for most businesses is going to be your “static” website. What I mean by static, is that even if it is built on a WordPress platform in a blog style, it has a large number of pages that remain the same, with the same intent that doesn’t change over time.

You should make sure that you have this central location created and optimized for both search engines and for converting visitors to users. Be sure that you’ve got your contact information easily available, and are using “calls to action” that highlight what action you’d like your users to take.

Your Site Should be a Trusted Source, not an Encyclopedia

Photo by Stewart

You should have information that relates closely to your industry. If you’re a Realtor then you should have information about your communities, and the home market. However, your pages shouldn’t be simple reams of information, (or for that matter copied and pasted from the city website or wikipedia). Yes, writing content takes time!

Variety is the spice of life!

Nobody wants to sit and read through 28 paragraphs of stale dull content. Even if your subject is interesting, it’s difficult to engage users online with large chunks of content. So make the content interesting! Be sure to spice up your huge paragraphs of text with things to keep people interested in your writing. Use interesting pictures that line up with concepts or ideas from each paragraph. Perhaps use bullet points to recap if you’ve touched on a number of topics. You can also use quotes to augment your content with authority sources or humor.

Video is Content Too

Don’t forget that if you take the time to create a video for your business, to make sure that it will return the best value to you. For example, if you were making video testimonials, make sure that you’ve got a custom Youtube channel setup. When you create your video listing, be sure to use your full URL in the description, and if you can be sure to edit it into the video itself as well in case it’s syndicated.

Thanks again for all of you who made it out today!

If you’re starting a static website(Vs. a blog), do you think it’s best to wait until you can start with a full compliment of pages, or to launch sooner and then build up over time?

I’m a firm believer that you should launch as soon as possible. The worst thing that can happen is that your site will be the worst site to ever exist. It might/probably will/most assuredly will be. But there are a million things you might have to do before it stops sucking. We learn more from failure than success, so get the failing/sucking over quickly. I mean, come on, you’re not the type to pull a band-aid off slowly, in other words, a total baby? Of course not! So start early, be humble, learn, grow, get feedback and develop from there.

My site is not even 6 months old, but I’ve had the best progress from commenting on others’ sites who I admire, building up relationships and learning from them. The key is that these communications need to be genuine, and then already established individuals are happy to help you out. I also found interesting/helpful content on www.problogger.com, www.menwithpens.com and www.becomeablogger.com, the last one which has video tutorials.

It would be good to look into where your niche goes. I heard Sphinn is a good place for bloggers, Digg and StumbleUpon is very wide and general. I participate on facebook, Twitter, and am branching out to develop my LinkedIn profile, as well as StumbleUpon (:)based on your recommendation). At first I found social platforms a little overwhelming and scary, but I’m finding a terrific crowd on Twitter. It’s really simple, good for a lot of info and some laughs.

Be hilarious. Or just not stuffy. The web is an impersonal medium, so letting personality shine through like the glorious rays of the sun parting the clouds is good. Letting your humorous anecdotes split forth into the internet like the Earth does in The Land Before Time. Let all readers bow in gratitude and good spirits, like gracious dinosaurs on the ridge of the paradise that is your site.

Update: Found a really great related post about new bloggers driving traffic to their site.