The Differences Between Online And Offline Writing

If you’re thinking of hiring someone to write for your website, you’ll be looking at people who fall somewhere within this range:

It’s often tempting to hire the people at the lefthand side of that: their portfolios can look very impressive, they’ve often been established for many years, they’ve got a client list full of names you recognise. But it’s worth taking a few minutes to think about the skillset required online & a few of the key differences…

Online - Your Reader’s Attention Span Is Lower

People are on the internet for a few things: to read, to communicate, to look, to buy. There are a hundred million pages/sites out there offering each of those. The only barriers preventing your reader from leaving your site & jumping onto another are:

a) the mental/physical energy needed to click any link on the page (including the back button / history navigation / bookmarks)
b) the energy needed to type another URL in the address bar & hit return

ie. the range of opportunities competing for your readers attention is far, far greater online & the bar to switching across is far, far lower

They’re Already Interested in What You’re Trying to Say

If they’ve hit your page, opened your email, clicked through from your feed, it’s fairly safe to assume they’re already interested in what you have to say. They’re there because they’ve been there before; or because they’ve come in via a search engine; or you’ve been recommended by someone else (word of mouth or a link).

Offline, of course, it’s tough to know why your reader is reading - your article might be on the kitchen table at a friend’s house while they’re trying to kill time; it might be an advert in a magazine, in which case you’re living in hope that it catches their attention; perhaps it’s a letter in a newspaper & your reader is scanning through the random letter topics to see if there’s anything of interest. The point is - offline you get incidental readers & people who have not specifically sought out your content or even your subject area. Online they usually have.

Everything is Trackable Online

This is probably the biggest difference & is probably the key thing to think about if you’re hiring someone to write for you online. (slightly off-topic - it’s also one of the reasons that ‘direct sales’ writers seem to succeed online). The central point of it is that ’success’ means very different things to online & offline writers, and this is largely due to the lack of trackability offline.
Speak to an offline journalist & they will have little idea what their reader thinks of their writing, what the readership of their last article was, which have been their most successful articles, whether one article has been any better than another. There are very few objective measures.

An offline journalist’s barometer of success is their editor, their own opinion & their peers. Each of those count in terms of their career, but they don’t translate directly to ’success’ online. An online journalist’s barometer of success is their editor, their own opinion, their peers, and their audience. And all of this is totally measurable: sales, time on page, inbound links, email feedback, votes, friends referred, visits, et cetera. The reason this matters is because it allows online writers to stay in line with what the audience wants; not just in line with what their editor wants.

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