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071 The Oldest Writing Trick in The Book

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Previous Episode:070 Eight Things Every Writer Should Know about Landing Pages More Episodes Next Episode:072 Six Ways to Becoming a Completely Original Writer

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096 Why These Famous Time-Management Techniques Are Ruining Your Productivity

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094 How to Avoid Obscurity by Misusing Language

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093 A Creative Email Trick for Becoming a Plain Spoken Writer

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092 Let This Stupid Machine Read Your Copy Out Loud

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091 This Free App Will Help You Write Bold and Clear Copy

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090 Four Writing Lessons I Learned from This Depressing Music Project

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089 The Clear-Copy Rule of Writing for the Web

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088 Three Ways Writers Must Adjust in a World Dominated by Social Media

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086 An Elegant Story on Outsmarting Career Obsolescence

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085 Raise the Stakes! 13 Writing Ideas That Really Work

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084 The Two Things That Make a Dull Product Irresistible

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083 Proof That Stories Can Increase the Value of Even ‘Worthless’ Items

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082 Could Podcasting Make You a Better Writer?

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081 When Do You Abandon the Editing Process?

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080 Four Ways to Get Attention by Rocking the Boat

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079 A Brief Introduction to the Art of Catching Hell

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078 Six Storytelling Lessons from a Famous Urban Legend

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077 Vexed by Your Bankrupt Vocabulary? Listen to This

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076 Why Writers Need to Develop a Sense of Humor

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075 Listener Challenge: Could You Read 100 Books in a Year?

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074 How to Get Massive Attention with a ‘High-Concept Pitch’

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073 A Lesson in Swagger from a Wooden-Legged Civil War Soldier

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072 Six Ways to Becoming a Completely Original Writer

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071 The Oldest Writing Trick in The Book

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070 Eight Things Every Writer Should Know about Landing Pages

July 8, 2015

069 The Fascinating Truth about Boring Topics

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068 How to Craft an About Page That People Actually Read and Share

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067 The Psychology Behind Winning Email Subject Lines

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066 All Great Writing Boils Down to These Four Emotional Appeals

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065 A Mildly Spooky Illustration of “Reason Why” Copy

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064 A Mild Warning for All Headline Writers

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063 How Every Creative Must Think about Marketing and Advertising

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062 Do Millennials (Really) Hate Long Copy?

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061 These 4 Sales Principles Can Improve Anyone’s Writing

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060 How to Use the 5 Stages of Audience Awareness to Dominate Online

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059 Why The Most Hated Headline Structures Work So Well

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057 The Doomsday Cult School of Specificity

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056 How to Sweep Away Skepticism with a Dramatic Demonstration

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055 Meet the Tragic Poster Boy for the Emotional Brain

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052 Three New Ways to Write a Headline (and When to Use Each)

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050 The Curious Secret to Building Trust and Credibility

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049 My Second Most Favorite Copywriting Formula in the World!

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047 My Favorite Copywriting Formula … Ever!

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046 How to (Rapidly) Build an Audience with Content Syndication

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044 The Profanity Princess on Finding Your Voice

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043 The Oddest Story About Overcoming Obscurity You’ll Ever Hear

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042 10 Odd Books That Will Improve Your Writing

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041 How to Read a Book in 2 Hours

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040 The Shocking Way to Master Any Book

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039 Nine Copywriting Books for Web Writers

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038 The 8 Rules of Ruthless Editing from David Mamet

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037 Revealed: The Perfect Blog Post Length

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036 The Aggressive Work Ethic of Highly Creative People

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035 The 10 Rules of Rough Drafts

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033 6 Simple Rules For Writing Effective Dialogue

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032 Use Internal Cliffhangers So People Never Stop Reading

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031 226 Transitional Words and Phrases Every Writer Should Know

April 30, 2015

030 The Great Paragraph Hoax

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029 5 Ways to Write a Seductive Sentence

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028 How to Be Smart in a World of Dumb Verbs

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027 How the Perfect Article Is Framed by White Space

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026 The Best Articles Always Have This (and a Great Headline)

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025 The Anatomy of a Hyperlink That Woos Readers

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024 The Beginner’s Guide to Writing Bullet Points That Work

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023 How to Create Exquisite Subheadlines

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022 Four Safe Ways to Find Your Writing Voice (and One Dangerous One)

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021 The Two Kinds of Knowledge Every Writer Needs

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020 The Crazy Thing Writers Do to Become Exceptional

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019 How to Answer the Most Important Question About Becoming an Exceptional Writer

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018 Four Things That Can Make Writers Famous

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017 A Small Gift for Your Dark Days as an Obscure Writer

April 7, 2015

016 Steal This Episode

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015 David Sedaris’ Guide to Writing Brilliant First Sentences

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014 Six Proven Ways to Open an Article With a Bang

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013 How I’ll Make You Read Every Single Line of This Article

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012 The Ugly Truth About How People Read Online

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011 The 3 Pillars of Great Web Writing

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010 How to Use RSS to Write Better Headlines

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009 How to Write Headlines that Get Results

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008 Where Headlines Have Gone Horribly Wrong

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007 A 12-Minute Crash Course on Link Building (Ugh)

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006 An Idiot-Proof Guide to Writing Blog Posts That Google Loves

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005 Keywords: Your Love Affair With the Language Your Audience Uses

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004 How Search Engines Work, Part Two

March 16, 2015

003 How Search Engines Work, Part One

March 3, 2015

002 The Unbreakable Law of the Web

March 2, 2015

001 Two Challenges All Digital Content Must Conquer

July 13, 2015

071 The Oldest Writing Trick in The Book

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.

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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)

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071 The Oldest Writing Trick in The BookDemian Farnworth
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The Show Notes

  • Why the Captain of TransAsia Flight 235 shut off a working engine after the had other failed
  • A Long Walk’s End

The Transcript

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.

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