If you’re thinking about getting into Internet marketing, one concern you may have is the fact that you don’t consider yourself a writer. Actually, from talking with a few people, this seems to be the number one concern for anyone considering starting a website.

In my honest opinion, I think this is the last thing that should prevent you from pushing forward and making a few dollars on the web. As long as you can organize your thoughts and write them down in a cohesive manner, you’ve got it made. Many of the word processing programs will pick up spelling mistakes and some of the worst grammar mistakes.

It doesn’t even matter if you were terrible at English throughout school and you always scored low on your essays – this is the Internet, and writing for the Web is completely different than the structured writing that you did in school. You are now writing to keep people’s attention – and most often that means writing in a very non-formal and conversational/folksy kind of style. Your old English essay from high school wouldn’t cut it for two seconds online.

It all comes down to style. Style is your fingerprint that will identify your writing and make you unique. If you can adopt a style of writing that keeps the reader’s interest and makes them hungry for more, it doesn’t matter if your writing is, technically, less than perfect.

Some of the most successful marketers online are very poor when it comes to grammatically perfect content. However, once you start reading their stuff, it’s hard to take your eyes off the screen. You simply want to devour every word and when you get to the end you feel a little depressed that you have to wait until the next entry to read more. Obviously, these individuals are gifted communicators, albeit not textbook perfect writers.

One technique that I’ve always used and continue to try and expand upon is writing exactly the way I speak. Once I start an article, I tend to write until the very end – and I don’t stop to correct mistakes as I go. Once the piece is complete, I’ll read through very quickly and check that it makes sense – I’ll then read it over once more to check for obvious spelling and grammar mistakes. I use Microsoft Word, so it picks up anything obvious right away.

The final result, is an article that reads easily. It’s not full of big words and complicated sentences that, while grammatically correct, would put most of us to sleep.

People (your readers) are looking for a good read. A 2000 word essay written in stuffy English will never suffice.

So there’s a few questions you need to ask: Do you want your readers coming back? Do you want them to read the entire article and maybe click on your ad at the end? Or do you want them to read the first few sentences and hit the back button, never to be seen again?

The bottom line is that anyone can write for the Web. It’s much more important to come off in an entertaining style than it is to craft a technically perfect essay. Look at it this way: there is a reason that most of the major newspapers in the world are written at a grade 8 level. The masses don’t want to struggle – they want to read and be entertained – and they want to do it quickly and easily.

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