The Art and Business of Online Writing: How to Beat the Game of Capturing and Keeping Attention

The whole idea here is to do nothing but emphasize the structure you’re using to your readers. So much of online writing is about signaling—signaling this piece is easy to read, signaling you know what you’re doing, signaling it’s fun and there’s a voice and rhythm here worth paying attention to (see how even in this sentence, I’ve repeated the wor

Creating a unique, memorable, and “different” writing style is nothing more than a deliberate choice to sit somewhere unexpected on this Writing Spectrum. The more unexpected the style, in the context of your category, the more likely you are to stand out. On the other hand, the more expected the style, in the context of your category, the more lik

Other signals of Implied Credibility are: Profile picture: Right out the gate, if your profile picture is blurry and half-hearted, what you’re really telling readers is that you’re not “playing the game” seriously—so then why should they take you seriously? Bio: “I like cats, coffee, and watching Netflix,” is not an effective bio. Instead of trying

How many people consume your content:

The moment you have even one signal of Earned Credibility, you should start leveraging it. If one of your articles gets 10,000 views, you should have a link in your bio saying, “Read my most-popular article with more than 10,000 views.” If something you write gets Tweeted by a prominent person in your industry, use that to your advantage: “Mark Cub

All of my best-performing lists used this technique where each subhead was a sentence/thought in itself, so that if all a reader did was skim the subheads, they’d get the gist of the entire article.) “Better”

Practicing In Public is what separates aspiring writers from professional writers. In life, a lot of people talk about doing the thing they want to do. They talk and they imagine and they brainstorm and they keep their work hidden and all the while, they convince themselves what they’re doing is brilliant.

Credibility And finally, there are things on the internet that get read simply because they’re “the most credible.”

Data is the single greatest indicator of what’s working (and what isn’t working) about your writing.