You have more time to get your point across with printed material.

The practice of creating offline materials as marketing tools has been honed over decades. Readers of offline printed materials spend more time reading, have a longer attention span and are more engaged than their counterparts online.

Often, printed materials are given to a potential client or customer following an interaction with them, which puts the printed materials in context. Those same materials placed online are incomplete because the critical factor of prior human interaction is no longer there.

Simply put, offline materials cannot be inserted into a website and be effective.

User’s expectations are vastly different when reading online materials.

Online, information must be presented the way the user wants it or they will leave. Write your online materials from their perspective, not yours. Speak their language by giving them the information they’re looking for, quickly, succinctly, without fluff, and in a visually engaging layout.

Write it the way users will read it.

• Online material should be written in short, manageable sentences, or “chunked,” as it is referred to online.
  
  
• Users will scan right over long meandering prose in long multi-sentenced paragraphs. You will not get your point across since they’ve skipped over most of what you’ve written.
  
  
• Credibility is important, so information should be factually accurate and presented without hyperbole.
  
  
• When possible, use pictures or other visual elements that provide a visual representation that complements your text.
  
  
• Make lists, use bullets and fragments. It’s perfectly acceptable online.

Write to meet the user’s expectation and reap the rewards.

Giving the user the information and experience they want is a major factor in online success.

Engaging text that fulfills the user’s needs sells your business offerings without making the user feel like their being “sold to.” After all, they came looking for a product or information and your site met their expectations and fulfilled their needs. This builds trust and credibility. And building trust is a key to selling online.

As an added benefit, engaging content will increase your SEO by decreasing your bounce rate. When the user spends time moving through your site, it’s good for your ranking.

Content written correctly for the web is critical for a successful web presence, and should be invested in appropriately.

Investing time and effort in your content is as important as the investments made in creating your site. Whether you write your own content or hire professionals, it has to be “written for the web” and not print publications. Hiring print writers will fill your online pages, but it likely won’t engage your users or increase your conversion rates.