Web Words That Work: Writing Online Copy That Sells

4. Keeping It Short and Simple

One of the key things about writing online copy, of any type, is that the shorter it is, the better. People today have fairly short attention spans, and it’s even more so online; we’re talking a generation that’s grown used to short text messages in lieu of more considered longer-form communications, such as letters or even emails. To readers today, anything longer than a pamphlet qualifies as a novel; anything longer than 140-characters is too long to scroll through. There’s little tolerance for lengthy discussions, let alone learned digressions. Everything has to be seen at a glance, not read and contemplated over time.

You see what I just did there? I wrote a very long paragraph with very long sentences and ...