As a writer I’ve found there’s a close similarity between compelling content writing and a compelling narrative. Good writing is easy on the brain. It doesn’t look like its turning out a circus performance- taking all its adjectives from the newest corporate thesaurus. The sentences should line up in a way that make sense. A tag line serves as a way to sum up your ideas- sometimes even your whole philosophy in a single sentence. It’s important that a tag line does this. If you can contain all that your company intends in a breath it becomes your pitch as well. You can state who you are and what your company stands for in the space of a moment, an elevator conversation, a chance meeting or the span of a glance your future customer gives you on the front page of your site. Good content writing can do that much.
And then there’s the structure. Linked to the way good content “reads” is the fact that it also “leads.” A story does the same thing. Carrying its readership along to each new event in the stream of the narrative. Good content is the same. Carrying the reader from one idea to the next. And having seen a few ideas reach fruition myself I can tell you with certainty they are often events. And this allegorical appropriation isn’t simply an exercise in critical thinking. A good site design is in many ways like a book. You open with a good strong visual front page- your cover if you will. The client might see the tagline of your site next- this is the spine of our “book.” You have pages linked from this opener, a menu describes these like a table of contents listing the chapters of your story. This is what the site becomes- your story. You are telling your story, the story of your ideas, the narrative you want your clients to participate in with you.
And that’s the most significant similarity between your site’s content and narratives- how the viewer considers what’s there. If you are the writer, they are the editor. Scrutinizing every word, every phrasing not for simple corrections, but to see if your ideas are in tune with theirs. To see if what you’ve written peaks their interest. And like any good editor assessing an idea they’re calling the shots word by word, line by line. If you lose them once you’ve lost them for good. So in a way, it’s not a mere similarity we’ve described here between content and narrative, it’s a need you have to consider when creating content.