While you want your content to be informational, you don’t want to imitate a text book or something that will bore people. There are many ways in which you can provide valuable information that people need and are looking for without sounding ‘clinical’ or ‘academic’. You can pretend you are writing to a friend, for one thing and that will take away much of the stiltedness (unnatural formality) that seems to be prevalent in a lot of business writing.
There are some who believe that if you don’t catch someone’s attention in the first few seconds you will lose them. So you want to use strong, exciting words, especially in your subject or title to grab the reader’s attention. If you apply this concept in tandem with search engine optimization where you should use your keywords* in the title or subject this should work together nicely. *(and use keywords sparingly in the article, 1-3 times max – if you overdo it you will have the opposite effect that you intend on every level). Don’t be a keyword spammer.
So you want to attract the reader and then hold their attention until you get your point across. This is done via the title and through something that is sometimes referred to as ’emotional writing’. Emotional writing can also be seen as dramatic or compelling.
In advertising and sales, there are many ways in which this works, for some examples: Using time constraints, ‘last chance’, ‘don’t miss it’; Scarcity, ‘last 5’ the ‘next 8 callers only’; Compelling words – ‘must have’, ‘secret tips’, ‘top of the line’, ‘unbeatable’, ‘latest discovery’; and words that mean totally great, the best, fantastic, wonderful, amazing (and words we all know and over-use (so don’t) like ‘awesome’ and ‘absolutely’). 🙂
Some other things to keep in mind are giving proof of what you say is fact. For example if you can quote a study or survey that has been done to back up your claim, or income testimonials. Include their URL link and/or address. Quoting statistics is not really very effective unless you provide the source of your statistics or claims. At any rate they can help you to create an interesting article, either way.
None of this is to say at all that you should focus your writing on selling unless you are specifically creating a sales page. For the purposes of ‘content’ you always want to keep it purely informational, conversational and interesting — for example to describe some condition or substance factually, and then discreetly at the end you might add a paragraph describing how your product or service fits the bill and include your link.
An example here would be an article about some human condition, and then you provide the remedy or solution. This can apply to home business opportunities, for example the condition being ‘paycheck doesn’t go far enough anymore’ or ‘hate your job?’; bottom line is starting a home business can be the solution to either one or both conditions!
