The Secret to Choosing a Writing Style

The way you write will determine if you’re going to make your website a success or not. It doesn’t matter if you’re writing about celebrities or world peace, your style of writing is everything. Which type are you?

• Story Teller

Whether it be drawing on personal experiences or making up potential situations to illustrate a point, story writers are often very popular with information sites, such as this. Story tellers can often reach the entire market place if they are clever about it. By writing a story in which people can relate to and backs up the point you’re trying to make, your readers will understand the message without feeling it has been rammed home. Point to remember about this style of writing though is to remember what your point is! Don’t ramble on off topic.

• Factual

Plain and simple facts, how to and F.A.Q’s is the place to go when you need to know something. This works great with almost any type of market place, IT, gaming, home cinema, D.I.Y the list is almost endless. Great return rate for this type site and easy to monetize if that’s the route you want to take. A slight chance of becoming a little impersonal and difficult to maintain, but all in all a great style of writing.

• Aggressive

Very popular with fitness orientated sites, and celebrity gossip style blogs. You are appealing to a type of audience that finds an aggressive nature funny and acceptable. There is nothing wrong with this style of writing, I sometimes slip into this mode now and again, and it works great for me. I would struggle to keep in this style for long for two reasons; It would start to get me down being aggressive at everything all the time, and secondly I think it would turn return visitors away eventually. Doesn’t work for every type of site, but in the correct market it’s exactly the right way to write.

• Controversial

There is no such thing as bad publicity. By picking controversial topics to write about you’re going to come up against opposition and people who disagree, but as long as they disagree on your site, and others disagree with them, you’re golden. It’s the exact reason why you’re writing about such taboo subjects, to get people so wound up they have to talk about it, good or bad, it will drive traffic to your site guaranteed. Points to note, don’t go to extreme or it could potentially backfire, but you will only know how far to go by pushing the boundaries.

• Suggestive

Let your readers guide the topic, write leading questions into the topic, talk about how one expert claims this, but counter it with another theory that will compel your readers into posting a comment and sending the link to their friends so they can do the same. This is a great way to make sites extremely popular in a short space of time. Of course you have to be writing about something that is interesting to a large amount of people, but probably one of the best ways to make a viral site.

• Professional

Suit and tie, up early and your brief case in hand, professional sites are all about business. Photography, S.E.O, stocks and shares anything that people are uber serious about. Often these sites are a hybrid of factual and story teller type sites talking about what worked for them in a situation recently but backed up with cold hard facts. Often inspiring and easy to monetize. Just be aware that if you go down this route you need to be 100% on the money 100% of the time, people who visit this style of site demand the very best.

• Odd ball

Off the wall, quirky sites can often be a huge success, whether it be a site featuring cats singing Beyonce or videos about Lego Star Wars you’re playing to the softer side of people, the side of people who want to forget about the world for 5 minutes. Often these style of sites go one way or the other, sometimes readers flock to read what you’re writing because it’s so wacky and the site rockets in the rankings. Other sites struggle to get their point across and always remain in the dungeons of the internet screaming to others how they need to be listened too. Often difficult to monetize but easy to keep updated if you really are an odd ball!

I’m being a smart arse by calling this post a secret, but I felt it necessary to unveil the myth that most website owners struggle with. Don’t pigeon hole yourself into one style feel free to mix it up, and you can always refer to this if you do get in a rut.

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