How do you write for the web?
You have to be more conversational with blogging. When writing for a newspaper or magazine you want to tell the story. PUll them in right away. Personalize it. Get your voice in there. Differentiate your voice and the voice of the industry.
There is a web tool that can score the readability of your website.
Who is your audience? What level of readability do they want? Where are you reaching them in the process? Are they getting your from a search page? Or is it because someone told them about your site so they are visiting.
1. Readers
2. Presentation
3. Word choice
4. Conversations
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Different mindset
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5. Headlines
6. Attribution
7. Link blogging
8. Essay blogging
9. Question and answer
10. Reviews and how-to's
Media Slaves
Is writing for the web an art or science?
1. Readers
How effective a writer are you? Some of your audience know. So ask.
* Own it
* Ask for feedback
* Listen
* Does feedback match behavior?
* Feedback in perspective
* Evolve
* Learn
2. Presentation
* Even the best prose can be lost on the internets. That's wy presentation or "layout" or "user interface" is essential to good writing.
* Navigation
* Headlines and subheadlines
3. Word Choice
* clarity
* professionalism
* voice
* punctuation
* ...
See copyblogger
4. Comments
Don't open comments if you are not looking for a conversation.
4. Headlines
* clarity
* professionalism
* voice
Search algorithms
- they look at h1, h2, etc. then body text; headline is generally in an 'hX'
- have your title's match the url, you'll get better results
Elise Bower is an expert on this topic from the technical side. See her blog.
You don't just want traffic, you want the right traffic.
Often bloggers are disregarded because they do not attribute their sources. Check out Electronic Frontier Foundation because they have lots of info on this topic.
A link by itself it not interesting. Often your commentary on the quote is what peaks someone's interest.
Danah Boyd will be at the conference tomorrow.
Mommybloggers has a great example of a Q&A strategy to bring authentic voice to a blog.
Technorati: BlogHer 2006
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1 comment:
hey, lynne d johnson here. during the presentation i mentioned an online tool to find out the readability score of your site --- here is the url: http://www.readability.info/. and here is another source http://juicystudio.com/services/readability.php.
Here's another article that might be useful that we didn't mention in the presentation Why Blog Post Frequency Does Not Matter Anymore.
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