071 The Oldest Writing Trick in The Book

Demian Farnworth on July 13, 2015

Web readers are people on a mission. Cramped for attention. Bent on skimming rather than diving deep. They don’t go to the web to window shop.

They go there to drive 60 miles per hour—and look at billboards. That’s the unbreakable rule of the web.

So what can you do as a web writer to not only catch their attention, but give them what they want in less time than it takes to finish reading this sentence …

Easy. Just use The inverted pyramid … it’s an age-old journalistic trick. And the web writers best friend.

Some think it’s worthless. Others alter it. Yet, anyone who writes online — including you — will find it’s the most effective formula in your arsenal.

But what is the inverted pyramid?

In this 6-minute episode you’ll discover:

  • The important task of your first paragraph
  • How the inverted pyramid can improve your SEO
  • How the inverted pyramid trains you to write for readers (and why that’s a good thing)

The Show Notes

The Oldest Writing Trick in the Book

Voiceover: This is Rainmaker.FM, the digital marketing podcast network. It’s built on the Rainmaker Platform, which empowers you to build your own digital marketing and sales platform. Start your free 14-day trial at Rainmaker.FM/Platform.

Demian Farnworth: Hi, and welcome to Rough Draft, your daily dose of essential web writing advice. I am Demian Farnworth, your host, your muse, your digital recluse, and the Chief Content Writer for Copyblogger Media.

And thank you for sharing the next few minutes of your life with me.

I’ve said this countless times in the past. And I’ll say it countless times in the future: web readers are people on a mission.

Cramped for attention. Bent on skimming rather than diving deep. They don’t go to the web to window shop.

They go there to drive 60 miles per hour—and look at billboards. That’s the unbreakable rule of the web.

So what can you do as a web writer to not only catch their attention but give them what they want in less time than it takes to finish reading this sentence …

Easy. Just use the inverted pyramid … it’s an age-old journalistic trick. And the web writers best friend.

Some think it’s worthless. Others alter it. Yet, anyone who writes online–including you–will find it’s the most effective formula in your arsenal.

But what is the inverted pyramid?

Essentially, the inverted pyramid style means that you give the most important or interesting details first, and then continue to dribble less important information throughout the body of the content.

The Important Task of Your First Paragraph

The first sentence should answer the four most important questions about the subject of your content: Who, What, Where and When.

The Who is who your page is about–be it a person, a resource or a place—and the What is what happened to that person, business or place. The “where” is the location and “when” equals the date.

Here’s a great example from a recent CNN article:

“Wow, pulled back the wrong side throttle.”

These are the words of the captain of TransAsia Airways Flight GE235, eight seconds before the plane clipped a bridge and plunged into a Taiwanese river mere minutes after takeoff, killing 43 people on board.

The latest report by Taiwan’s Aviation Safety Council into the February crash confirms that the captain of the ATR 72-600 turboprop aircraft mistakenly switched off the plane’s working engine after the other lost power.

See how that works? It helps the reader scoop up what he wants to know in one quick sweep.

Here’s another one from SBNation:

On a Saturday morning in May, 2015, a group of law enforcement agents, the FBI among them, knocked on the front door of the Montgomery Homestead Inn in Damascus, Virginia. The proprietor, a retired kindergarten teacher who lives across East Laurel Ave. from the inn, happened to be there at the time. She does not know for sure how many agents were on the inn’s porch. She guesses three or four, though her husband told her later another man was positioned at the back door.

“There were just a lot of men out there,” Susie Montgomery said.

See how those works?

How the Inverted Pyramid Can Improve Your SEO

But there’s another reason the inverted pyramid is useful to you. The inverted pyramid can help your SEO copywriting endeavor in two ways:

  1. The most important information is mentioned at the very start, thereby helping the readers understand the summary of our webpage.
  2. Your most important keywords (which will necessarily correlate with the most important information) get displayed at the top. Thereby increasing the chances that the search engines take notice of your web page.

How the Inverted Pyramid Trains You to Write for Readers (and Why that’s a Good Thing

Optimizing your website for both search engines and people needn’t be a trade-off.

In fact, using the inverted pyramid method to write your posts will naturally train you to give the reader what he wants. And when your reader is happy, the search engines are happy.

How’s that for a happy ending? Until next time, take care.