Blog: How to Write Website Content

Bass Ackwards is the best way to write content for your website.  No, really, I’m being completely serious.

So, basically, your website is an excellent example of persuasive writing.  If it isn’t, you and I both know that it should be, and that you’ve got some work to do.  Back in grade school, we’re all taught to follow the academic formula:

1. Start with a hypothesis
2. Support it with details
3. Express a compelling conclusion

That process probably works fine in school…you’ve got a captive audience, your teacher, who’s required to read your work and evaluate it.  In the real world, we’ve got lots more challenges.  We’re not dealing with a captive audience…its our responsibility to hold our readers’ attention and persuade them.

Since your website’s visitors have very little patience, we need reverse the order of the old academic model.  Therefore, we start with our conclusion.  Make your point quickly and succinctly.  If you’re website’s visitors are interested, they’ll continue reading or they’ll move to take action (become a lead or a customer).

Once you’ve made your point, then you can go on to support it with facts, data, tables, testimonials, and basically anything else you can think of.  In most cases, you’ll want to spread these supporting points out across multiple sub-pages of your website.  Trust me, pages like these are just waiting for you to optimize them for your target keywords.  By building your content from the top down, you’re ensuring that your visitors will see your main offering, and that they can selectively navigate through the further reading that’s available.

In the academic model, your hypothesis is a statement that conveys the point that you intend to prove.  At the end of each supporting page you create for your web content, you’ll want to reiterate your conclusion and provide your visitors with another opportunity to take action.

See how simple this is?  If you use this method, you’ll avoid the pitfalls of burying your most compelling content while still having the ability to build a very large, robust website.