If you are just getting started, you might be wondering what’s different about writing online compared to the offline world. First of all, the most important thing to realize is that the main goal for writing an article online is usually not the same as when you write one for print in newspapers or magazines. The most basic difference is that the article in the magazine or newspaper is used to entertain and inform the reader so that they stick with the magazine, where the advertising is. With online writing, you’re goal is typically to get your readers to leave the article and link to another area or website in order to see your advertising (affiliate promotion).

In this case, the resource box at the end of your article is just as crucial as the article body itself. Often, you will see a poorly written article with a great call to action in the resource box get way more traffic than a perfectly written article with a bad resource box.

An important point to remember is that the attention span of an online reader is much shorter than those offline. You need to hook your reader in fewer words to get them to stay.

For the same reason, online articles are also usually much shorter than the average print article. Online articles range somewhere between 350-700 words on average.

Online writing is usually based on keywords. What this means is that the article is based on keyword phrases that are searched often in the search engines. So, unlike print articles, there are techniques and guidelines to follow in order to have your article picked up and ranked highly in Google and other search engines. For instance, a keyword phrase is to be used in the title, as well as approximately 2-5% of the time throughout the article to maximize your search engine ranking results.

Another important difference in online writing, and one you’ll love, is that it your articles can produce residual income. Writing one article on the right topic and keywords can often pick up enough traffic to generate a small amount monthly income. If  you write articles daily, you can quickly build up a passive income that keeps coming in for a long time to come.