The headline is the most important part of your blog. It’s a promise to your readers. Its job is to clearly communicate the benefit you’ll deliver to them in exchange for their valuable time. A catchy title will grab the reader’s attention and drive traffic to your blog. Since eighty percent of visitors will read your headline and only twenty percent will read your entire blog, spend some time crafting an eye-catching title. Here are 10 titles that are proven to work. Numbered List: Any title that lists a number of tips, reasons or ways to do something work because they make a specific promise to your reader. 10 Ways to Increase Your Instagram Followers How-To: These articles and blog posts are some of the most sought-after, linked to and bookmarked content. People want useful information and will reward you by sharing it with others. How to Write the Perfect LinkedIn Profile Here’s a Method: This type of headline identifies your

target audience and the benefits you can provide. Here’s a Method to Grow Your Twitter Followers to 1,000 in One Week Lessons Learned: Share “insider” knowledge and translate it into a benefit for your reader. Top Ten Lessons Learned about Using Social Media Reasons Why: Beginning your title with “why” also focuses on the benefit of reading your post. Why Your Small Business Website Needs a Blog Provocative Questions: Asking a direct question involves your reader. Make sure, however, that it relates to the benefit of your product or service. Do You Make These Common Mistakes on Your Facebook Landing Page? Who Else Wants: This strategy infers an existing consensus. Who Else Wants to Be a Headline Writing Ninja? Bark a Command: This kind of headline is direct, provides a benefit and takes a commanding position. Become a Pinterest Expert in 30 Days Little Known Ways: This is a more intriguing (and less common) way of accomplishing the same…

Focus on your customer What you like is irrelevant. Customers want to know exactly what your product or service is and how much it costs. If visitors to your site can’t find the information within the first few seconds, they’ll move on to your competition. So don’t bore them with unnecessary information. What you like is irrelevant Customers want to know exactly what your product or service is and how much it costs. If visitors to your site can’t find the information within the first few seconds, they’ll move on to your competition. So don’t bore them with unnecessary information. Sell benefits, not features Potential customers don’t care how you

came up with your product or service or where you’re located. They want to know how buying it will make their lives easier and/or their business better. Have calls to action everywhere It’s always better to have one person visiting your website every month who makes a purchase, produces a sales lead or engages your services than people who don’t engage with you or your business. Make it personal Don’t get into the habit of writing content for your website in “corporatese.�? Nobody likes reading it. It’s impersonal, overloaded with jargon and doesn’t convey the right message.

1) Know your product well before sitting down to write on it. That way, you will write with conviction and authority. Quality writing will translate into quality traffic which largely means more sales. 2) Let the paragraphs be short. One paragraph should flow from the preceding one. 3) Use simple and direct language to inform and educate the prospect about the product's features, the tricks of the trade and the market scene. 4) Talk directly to the visitor. Herein lies the importance of knowing your target audience and the profile of the prospect online. 5) Humour could be used to liven up your writing, but not at the cost of your product's credibility. 6) Don't be averse to the idea of explaining things in points. The

idea is to maximize the clarity and minimize any ambiguities. 7) Don't forget to highlight the USP (Unique Selling Point) of the product as also its key benefits. 8) The following strategy would show you the way forward more often than not: place yourself in the prospect's shoes; try to think from his point of view as to what all he would like to know and want to be told. 9) Keep a friendly tone throughout. After all, you have the prospect's well-being in your mind. 10) Give examples. For instance, if you want to explain to the visitor the benefits accruing out of a particular money-making opportunity, you could illustrate to him your lifestyle before the opportunity stepped into your life vis-a-vis your routine now that the money-making system is a part of your life.

It's imperative that technical writers stick to the facts, and only the facts. All information published should be traceable back to original design or manufacturer's documentation. Wherever possible, technical documentation should be checked and approved by an appropriate engineering, design or technical body, usually someone of appropriate position within a design or development team for the product or application being written about. This process is generally referred to as 'technical verification' or sometimes 'technical validation'. This reduces the exposure of the technical author and ensures that what has been written about the system or product is deemed to be correct by both the writer and the designer and is technically underwritten by the technical specialists and design owners. Many technical authors feel that their professional technical knowledge or integrity is being offended by such an approach. This is not the case. Ensuring you have the appropriate technical governance to be able to confidently publish technical information does not bring your

skill or knowledge into question. In fact, it enhances your reputation as a specialist in your field. Such diligence ensures that in the event of future audit or scrutiny, the technical author can demonstrate the provenance of the information published back to the appropriate, authoritative technical source. In complex technical documentation production projects, large parts of the overall process deal solely with the supply and configuration of source information and with the technical verification of the information produced before any deliveries are made to customers. The configuration (or issue state, or version) and the type of source information being used is also a vital consideration for technical writers. Draft design or development information should never be used as a basis to produce and issue a technical document. In general, if the source design or product data is still in a draft state, the technical documentation must also be regarded as draft, and not fit for issue or use. Always ensure…

The second major difference is in the source material for the writing. Again looking at creative writing, the writer may have no particular source information upon which to base their work. As the term suggests, the author may create the work from their own minds. Whilst some of the details or facts that a creative writer may use will be factual and could be checked, in the main, it is an art form. Not so with technical writing, which should be regarded as a discipline. All of the facts and information contained within a technical writer's work should be traceable, and generally sourced from a piece of technical or design information for the product, system or process being described. All of the technical writer's source data needs to come from an authoritative source. For example, a writer has been tasked with producing a set of repair instructions for a washing machine. The first thing the writer will need is a

set of plans or drawings from the manufacturer for the machine. If these are not available, the writer will need a specification from the designers to tell him what the machine does and how it operates. This is the writer's source data upon which all of the work can be based to communicate the necessary information to the user. Sometimes, the writer may start with the product itself and figure out how it works and how it is built or maintained. This is still source data of sorts; the writing is still related back to the product with no creative input. A third major difference is in the liability that a writer can bring upon themselves or their company as a result of producing and publishing a piece of work. You may have been reading the previous paragraph wondering why you need to be so rigorous just for a washing machine. This is where you find out. Imagine the writer…

Do you know what plagiarism is? Have you ever been guilty of it? Did you know you were doing it at the time? Do you know what copyright is? The rise of writing as a hobby, especially internet blogging, has opened the door to plagiarism on an almost industrial scale. If you look 'plagiarize' up in the dictionary, the definition is "verb: take (the work or idea of someone else) and pass it off as one's own"*. * taken from the Oxford Compact English Dictionary. While the copying of a few sentences of a writer's work may not be illegal if the author is being quoted (or cited) and is credited as having written the text, the copying generally becomes plagiaristic when someone attempts to pass the material off as their own, or fails to credit the original author. Do you remember ever sitting in a school exam and trying to see your friend's answers so you could write them

down and get the marks? That's a form of plagiarism, albeit a minor example: or is it minor? It becomes more complicated when you look at the rise of plagiarism in universities and colleges. The internet gives unfettered access to information that students can use and abuse at will, with lecturers and teachers almost powerless to detect it. This downside of internet access does, though, have to be balanced with the advantages that access to such huge amounts of information can bring for the learning process. Banning access to the internet may hamper, more than improve, the standard of education in this respect. Nevertheless, plagiarism needs to be addressed and limited wherever possible. Many websites are now openly offering material that you can buy, pre-written, to pass off as your own for university and college essays and submissions. Despite the fact that legally speaking, you may not be infringing copyright as you will have agreed that you have full rights…

Verbs One of the most common writing pitfalls writers is the use of passive versus active verbs. When speaking, most people tend to use active verbs without thinking, but when writing, many revert to a passive approach. This is a more formal style, which although suitable for some types of writing, can be boring and lifeless to the reader. To keep your writing lively and interesting, you should look to use active verbs in the majority of your writing. Technical writing also favours the use of active verbs, sometimes called 'the active voice' as it removes ambiguity from the writing and assists with a reader's understanding of the content. You can generally spot a passive verb in a sentence by the other words used. The sentence will probably contain words like 'were', 'was', 'been' or 'being'. For example: Your letter has been filed. (passive) I have filed your letter. (active) The customer will be informed. (passive) We will inform the

customer. (active) Use your thesaurus mercilessly. Many verbs are overused or don't convey the subtlety of what you, as the writer, may be trying to get across. The English language is rich in vocabulary and you should exploit it. Most verbs will have alternatives that convey a subtly different shade of the action you are describing. For example: This is fine, but is relatively lifeless and uninteresting for the reader. Try: He mumbled... He shouted... He whispered... He boomed... He stuttered... He sobbed... In all of these variations, it is still clear that something was said, but the manner in which it was expressed is also now evident. Adjectives and Adverbs Many experienced writers believe that adjectives and adverbs are overused, especially by inexperienced writers. In general, you should monitor your use of adjectives and ensure that they are kept to a minimum. Use adjectives only where you believe they are necessary and where they add definite detail to your…

Press release are a great way to let the entire internet world about something big that just happened or something big that is about to happen. Maybe your organization has just won a major award for something. Or maybe you are about to launch a new product. Press releases get indexed by the search engines and help you to achieve your number one goal and that is to drive traffic to your site or sites. Personally I use press releases just before I am about to start another large article series. Many of my series are 10 to twenty articles long. Why Should You Write Them Writing press releases can be very beneficial to your business in so many ways. Many editors will look at your press release. If they feel it is going to get people interested then they will publish it into their ezines. By doing that you are ensuring yourself free traffic. It is also another link

to your website and most of us know what that means. The more positive links you have to your site the more times the search engines are going to pick it up thus moving it higher in the rankings. Finally I would like to think you are running an honest no scam business. By issuing press releases you can keep your business fresh. Your loyal customers will see the growth and remain loyal while knew customers will realize that this is possibly something they should be looking at. How Should I Write Them. Well practise does make perfect. The more you write the better you will get at it. The most important thing you have to remember is that a press release is not meant to be an advertisement. If you want to put it out that way chances are it will get rejected and even if it does get released publishers won’t be interested because they are looking for…

If you're involved in the running or design of a website these days, you will undoubtedly have wondered at some time how to increase the traffic to your pages. Bloggers all over the world are wondering every day how they can propel their blog pages to internet stardom by gaining huge amounts of visitor traffic. Although the art of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is still largely a black art to many amateur webmasters, there seems to be a growing consensus of opinion among those that specialise in SEO that content, and specifically high quality written content, is one of the main keys to gaining traffic today. Here's how it seems to work in broad terms. A web page needs to have a reason for being there. The big search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo prefer that reason to be the distribution of good quality, written informational content. When the search engines come across good quality content in large quantities,

they will rank the web page or site higher than others with lesser quantities or lesser quality content. This means that the higher ranked web page will appear higher up in the search engine result listings for web surfers searching on the relevant keywords; the ultimate goal being to arrive at the top of that list, and stay there. That isn't the only criteria though, the Google algorithm, for example, apparently also takes outgoing and incoming links into consideration. So what does this mean for the writer? In simple terms, this means that the role of the writer is of increasing importance in the production of web pages and specifically written web page textual content. Having lots of text and articles is no longer enough though. The content has to be well written, well researched and of a generally very high quality to compete in today's SEO stakes. This places the experienced writer in a prime position to gain work…