Top tips for penning a winning business technology byline (Part 2)

Last week, I outlined three of my top tips for writing a great byline that gets your spokespeople out there voicing your core messages in an engaging way. Here, I’ll outline three more to help you navigate the golden rules and ensure your article gets the publicity it deserves.

Make it factual

What really helps to bring a byline to life is where you can include facts and figures from third-parties to support your point. If a cloud vendor says ‘everyone’s moving to the cloud’ a cynical reader would rightfully ask the question ‘according to who?’ Find a stat from an industry analyst like Gartner or IDC that makes the same point with hard stats to support it, and you’re onto a winner. It also helps if you can link to topical news stories and recent happenings within the industry that build on your points even further, adding evidence to support them. Just be careful not to link to any articles published on competitor websites for your target publication, as that won’t go down well with the editor!

Get to the point

Generally speaking, outside of a scientific journal, you’ll struggle to keep anyone’s attention beyond a thousand words these days, but shorter articles work the best. As such, you don’t want to beat around the bush and go off on random tangents; you need to get straight to the point and have a clear story in mind for what you want to say. As you write, it’s important to check back through your piece and think about whether it’s all strictly necessary, whether it flows naturally and if there’s anything that you could cut to make it snappier. If you aren’t sure about what you want to tell the reader before you start writing, chances are the finished article will just end up being an ungodly mess; so get your story straight before you start writing.

Make it punchy

If you’re writing for a professional audience, of course, you’ll want to keep your article fairly formal and direct; but it makes a huge different if you make it more readable by packing in some punch. A great place to start is by giving it a catchy headline and breaking it up with subheads to make it more digestible. Using metaphors, humour, real-world scenarios and more colourful language can also really help to make an article more engaging for the reader; as long as it’s got something interesting to say at its heart. Of course, no amount of jazzing it up will make a dull article shine, so there needs to be substance behind the style.

As I said at the start, there tends to be a lot of variation in bylined articles when it comes to length and style, but following these basic tips can really help to distinguish a dull article from a shining one.  Ultimately, that’s what makes all the difference between an opinion piece being published rather than ending up on the cutting room floor!