Great content writing must be powerful and effective to captivate your audience.
But accomplishing that with your content writing isn’t an easy task. Whether you craft words for B2B or B2C audiences, the challenges can be many.
To help, I’ve compiled web writing examples, tips, tools, and resources. The goal is to give you some insights and new tools to help address or minimize the creation stumbling blocks web and content writers face.
When you write something that’s unexpected, your audience will likely stop scrolling and take a moment to learn more. In the worst cases, this approach to content writing falls under the nefarious clickbait category. But in the best cases, it can delight and engage the viewer.
Nike is always a go-to source for the best content examples. The summer of 2024 didn’t disappoint with its Winning Isn’t for Everyone campaign.
With a debut in time for the global games, Nike featured the world’s greatest athletes (well, all the great Nike-sponsored athletes) talking about they are motivated by victory and that there’s nothing wrong with wanting to win. Writing those four words — winning isn’t for everyone — fosters a strong reaction. After all, there are far more people who don’t win than do. But audiences are also likely to watch more of the videos to learn what Nike is really talking about.
As you watch the video, note the repetition of the same question (“Am I a bad person?”) followed by short, staccato-paced statements. This approach creates a lyrical story. And it paid off, earning over 2.2 million views in two weeks.
Size up headlines with the Advanced Marketing Institute’s Headline Analyzer, which reveals an emotional marketing value score.
This headline example — 14 Ways Marketing Automation Helps B2B Companies Succeed — earns an emotional marketing value (EMV) of 37.5%. Most professional copywriters’ headlines typically have a 30% to 40% EMV score.
The same headline in a similar tool, CoSchedule Blog Post Headline Analyzer, earns a score of 77 out of 100. This analysis looks at word balance, headline type, sentiment, reading grade level, clarity, and skimmability. It also identifies areas for improvement, such as the use of uncommon, emotional, and power words.
Speed your formatting tasks with TitleCase. The tool converts your title into various circumstances — all caps, hyphen, etc., so you don’t have to rekey or reformat.
BuzzSumo research consistently identifies “how-to” or guidance-focused headlines that resonate far better with audiences than any other type.
It makes sense. Audiences are seeking information that will help them in their lives, and they have a lot of content from which to choose. By writing phrases like “how to” in a headline, you tell them clearly what they’re going to get.
Explaining your product or service can get cumbersome, but it shouldn’t if you want the audience to quickly understand how your company can help solve their pain points.
In this example, Zendesk succinctly highlights three results gained by the enterprise clients of its customer service platform:
The three- and four-word headlines are followed by short explanations (two sentences) and a link to the product’s relevant features for that category.
Some suggestions include:
This ad for the Content Marketing Institute newsletter works well as a sample of website content writing. It illustrates how to motivate the audience to see that the content is relevant for them. Its headline “Looking for Fresh Content Inspiration?” speaks directly to the reader. Its follow-up sentence explains in detail what the reader will get — expert advice, standout examples, and creative ideas.
Sometimes, it’s a simple word or phrase that prompts someone to take the next step. Buffer offers a list of more than 150 words. These 19 words and phrases are examples of how to gain the audience’s trust:
In this web page example, OptinMonster opts for one of those words in its headline — How To Create a Fail-Proof Digital Marketing Plan in 5 Steps.
Given your audience reads on screens, your web writing usually appears in a small space. Yet, it still must reflect a strong message.
For example, this American Express Business web copy uses five words to indicate that it gets the reader’s problem — “Don’t stress over seasonal surges.” Then, it uses another five words to indicate that it has a solution — “Help you keep your business thriving.” On the right, it shows the product name that will do all that (American Express business line of credit.)
Choosing a single word to convey the perfect sentiment makes the most of your available content space. To help, Jon Morrow of Smart Blogger offers a collection of words that can make a difference in your writing: 801+ Power Words That Make You Sound Smart. Here are 15 of them:
In this headline — Firefox Hacks for Everyone: From Cozy Gamers to Minimalists and Beyond — the Mozilla blog opted for one of the power words, “hack.”
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I’ll issue a caveat on this option: Power words can quickly become overused. “Hack” is coming close to saturation.
I like to know content length rules and preferences. They give me guideposts for my web writing.
Google makes 30 characters available in its ad headlines, and it’s hard to go shorter than that. This simple sample — Best Enterprise CRM Platform — is 28 characters.
On social media, though, the character parameters are greater, and you could improve engagement by falling short of the upper limits.
Instagram is a perfect example of where writing content short of the 2,200-character maximum caption is a better decision. In fact, experts say the ideal length is 125 characters, which takes up the space visible before the viewer must click to read more.
Still, sometimes writing fewer than 125 characters can work well and draw attention in a crowded feed, as this sample from Grammarly shows. Its caption — “Learn actionable strategies for leveraging Gen AI to elevate your team’s productivity.” — totals just 88 characters.
Of course, exceptions exist. If your content’s primary goal is search engine optimization, longer content is almost always best. As a website ages, it may be able to get by with shorter pieces because it’s already established authority and has more pages, inbound links, etc. However, extended content often helps generate high rankings for targeted keyword phrases and similar words.
You don’t need to use a lot of words to get your point across. Short ones can work in your favor. Consider these common examples of better choices:
Meet your word count goals and improve your word choice with the WordCounter tool. It also helps identify keywords and their appropriate frequency of use.
Grammar Girl, created by Mignon Fogarty, founder of Quick and Dirty Tips, outlines some common mistakes, such as this example on the use of that vs. which in writing.
“The simple rule is to use ‘that’ with a restrictive element and ‘which’ with a non-restrictive element … The cupcakes that have sprinkles are still in the fridge. The words “that have sprinkles” restrict the kind of cupcake we’re talking about. Without those words, the meaning of the sentence would change. Without them, we’d be saying that all the cupcakes are still in the fridge, not just the ones with sprinkles.”
Parallel construction organizes the text and relieves your readers of expending mental energy to piece together the thoughts.
The list is parallel because every sentence starts the same way – with a verb.
Avoid splitting infinitives. However, sometimes you might need to bypass grammatically correct in favor of unawkward content.
Pro Writing Aid explains that split infinitives are nothing new — their use dates back to the 1300s. However, there is a time and place for them, as shown in this example from Northern Illinois University’s Effective Writing Practices Tutorial:
A conversational approach typically works best when you’re creating web content. Writing in the first or second person can accomplish this.
Embracing inclusivity also fosters a conversational atmosphere.
When you’re using pronouns, make sure it’s clear to what the pronoun refers. Given some people use they/them pronouns, ensuring pronoun clarity is especially important.
In those cases where the reader may be confused, explain the person’s use of the plural non-gendered pronoun in the text, for example, “Alex Alumino, who uses they/them pronouns …” Even better, just repeat their name in the sentence so there’s no need to explain and no misunderstanding.
Redundancy bores. To figure out if you’re committing this sin, paste your text into the Word It Out tool. The word cloud reveals those used most often in your text.
We input a recent CMI article about user stories to create a word cloud for that content sample. It is no surprise that “user” shows up front and center, but it’s also an indicator for us to review the article to see if “user” is overused. “Katie” also shows up prominently in the word cloud as it’s the first name of the source for the article, and CMI uses first, instead of last names, on second and subsequent references. A review of the article could reveal it unnecessarily references the source too many times.
Similarly, WordCounter detects whether you’re using the same words too often. Use Thesaurus.com to find alternatives.
You need to speak your audience’s language, but that doesn’t mean you need to adopt the industry’s jargon. De-Jargonizer is designed to help analyze the jargon in scholarly articles, but the tool works just as well with your content writing.
In this example from a CMI article about building a social media plan, De-Jargonizer identifies four “rare” words — ebbs, inhospitable, clarifies, and actionable.
You can upload a file or paste your text to discover those rare words, aka potential jargon, in your content writing. Then, you can find more reader-friendly replacements.
Even if readers can understand the jargon and complex sentences, they still don’t want to work hard to understand your content. To help understand if your writing is on the easier side, use a tool like Web FX’s Readability Test. It scores your content’s average reading ease and targeted readership age.
In this example, it evaluates the Fedex.com website and concludes it has a reading ease of 27.8 out of 100 and is targeted at 14- and 15-year-olds.
You can scroll down to see other readability scores, including Flesch Kincaid reading ease, Flesch Kincaid grade level, Gunning Fog, Smog Index, Coleman Liau, and Automated Readability Index.
The bottom of the evaluation includes the statistics about the evaluated text, including:
Adjust your writing to meet the preferred readership level of your audience.
Want more help to write content that’s easy to read? Consider tools like the Hemingway app, which provides immediate and detailed feedback on content structure, including sentence formatting. With the website version, you can replace the default text with your own.
The Hemingway app identifies potentially unnecessary adverbs, warns about passive voice, and triggers alerts to dull, complicated words.
In this web writing example from its home page, Hemingway App highlights one of the 13 sentences as very hard to read, one as hard to read, two weakener phrases, and one word with a simpler alternative.
Proper grammar is a necessity; you want to get everything correct to satisfy readers (and bosses). Try Grammarly.
Improve your writing with this cloud-based, AI editor. Grammarly automates grammar, spelling, and punctuation checks, often giving better, cleaner content options. The tool also alerts writers to passive voice, suggests opportunities to be concise, and assesses overall tone.
You also can save time and energy with ProWritingAid. It eliminates the need to reread to polish your content. This AI editing software offers more than grammar checks. It checks for vague wording, sentence length variation, and overuse of adverbs and passive voice. The tool also identifies complicated or run-on sentences. (“Content Writing Examples, Tips, and Resources”)
Here’s some sad news for content writers: Readers won’t consume every word in your content. They skip and scan a lot to see if the content is a good fit for them, and then they hope they can glean the relevant information without having to consume all the content.
As you write, think about how the text will look visually. Make it easy for readers to scan your content by including:
If your content doesn’t flow as you speak it, it may not work for the reader. Pay attention to when you take too many pauses or pause in places where no comma exists. Adjust your text — add a comma or break the sentence into two.
Microsoft Word offers a read-aloud feature through its immersive reader tools, while Google Docs can use a Chrome extension to give a voice to the content.
In recent years, advancements in artificial intelligence have prompted growth in automated plagiarism checkers. Microsoft Word embeds the feature option in its software as does Grammarly. You also can use tools dedicated to ensuring that the content writing isn’t a copycat (or being copycatted), including:
Of course, no plagiarism checker is 100% accurate, so before you accuse a content writer of plagiarism, triple-check the results (and add a human touch whenever appropriate).
HubSpot’s Ideas Generator works well to get your creative content writing juices flowing. Just fill in the fields with three nouns to get some ideas.
For example, if you input the words car, truck, and SUV, HubSpot delivers these ideas along with the targeted keywords for the topic:
HubSpot’s topic generator also allows users to pick a title and have an outline created for that article.
You also could perform a similar exercise by writing the prompts in other generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT and Gemini.
NOTE: Always review the titles and accompanying data to ensure accuracy. In the HubSpot sample, the generator included a headline — Discover the Best SUVs for Families in 2021. Yet, it’s 2024.
Sometimes writers create content with multiple purposes. They have the burden of blending SEO into the content. I frame it as a burden because it’s one more variable to deal with. If you have a knack for SEO and goals you can measure, it’s not a burden.
Unfortunately, you sometimes don’t know what realistic keywords to pursue. Aim too low and you use rarely searched keywords. Aspire for something too competitive, and the content won’t rank.
How are you evaluating keywords? Learn how to find your sweet spot with keyword selection (and how to appear on the first page of Google). Identify potential keywords by using tools like:
With Feedly, you can stay informed about what matters most and avoid information overload. This AI assistant learns your preferences, then culls and curates content from the internet that you want and need.
What content creation and copywriting productivity tools do you favor? What do you do each day to make your writing tasks just a little easier? Please tag CMI on social media using #CMWorld.
All tools mentioned in this article were suggested by the author. If you’d like to suggest a tool, share the article on social media with a comment.
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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
