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Written on 2/1/2012 at 12:03 am by Guest Blogger

Develop Irresistible Content with this 4-Point Formula

Filed Under: Writing Content 23 Comments

This guest post is by Neil Patel of KISSmetrics.

If you want to create blog posts, white papers, and even ebooks that clearly communicate your idea and compel your readers to do whatever you ask, you need to use this little formula.

It deals with the four different learning abilities people have, but it’s also based in a rock-solid copywriting technique I’ll tell you about in a minute.

Let’s take a look.

Learning styles and decision-making

There are basically four learning styles:

Analytic: These learners like facts and will evaluate how your information compares to other facts and competing claims. About 20% of people are analytic.
Commonsense: These learners are practical and want to know how things work. About 20% of people are commonsense learners.
Dynamic: These learners look for interesting information, but are more gut learners and teachers. They want this information for themselves and for others. Approximately 25% of people are dynamic learners.
Innovative: These learners demand reasons why they should learn something. They look for the personal benefit in content. Innovative learners make up the most of people at 35%.

This analysis may seem a little too scientific for writing blog content, but it’s not. It’s really relevant to another common formula known as AIDA, which says that each of us moves through four stages in the decision-making process: attention, interest, desire, and action.

As I’ll show here, you’ll gain attention when you approach the beginning of a post with the innovative learner in mind. You’ll stoke interest as you make the analytic learner happy. When you give the commonsense learner what she wants, you’ll build desire. And finally, as you create your call to action, you’ll get the dynamic learner involved, too.

Let’s see what this approach to writing looks like.

Grabbing the attention of the innovative learner

Every good writer knows that it’s the headline that attracts attention, and explains why you should read the article. It gives a compelling reason, something the innovative learner demands.

Great headlines have four qualities. They are:

Unique: A unique headline is one that nobody else can use because of its unique selling proposition. If 40 other blog posts could use it, then it is too general.
Useful: The reason why “how-to” guides are popular is because you get answers to your problems, which, as you can imagine, the innovative learner loves.
Ultra-specific: My post, 10 SEO Trends You Can’t Ignore If You Want High Rankings is a good example of ultra-specific since I used both a number and isolated this post to SEOs.
Urgent: By putting a deadline into your headline you create urgency. For example, “30 Days until the Price Doubles” or “Last Chance: Registration Closes at Midnight” are urgent headlines.

After you’ve grabbed the attention of readers with your headline, hook them by writing a great opening paragraph, which starts with a great first sentence. Here are some examples from Huffington Post:

“It was a pleasure to burn.” Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.” I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
“We were just outside of Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.” Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

Asking questions and using statistics and quotes are also great ways to attract the attention of the innovate learner in the first sentence. So does making a crazy statement that simply can’t be true, but then promising to show your reader that it is.

Building interest for the analytic learner

Your next step in writing irresistible content is to build interest through the presentation of cold, hard facts—something the analytic learner needs. In other words, you provide proof of your claims.

Here’s an example of proof gone wrong from the copywriter Robert Bly:

A motivational speaker just sent me a free review copy of his new book, published earlier this month.

A banner on the front cover proclaims the book is an “international best-seller.”

Yet when I check it online, the book is ranked #292,514 on Amazon.

Surely, if this just-published book were in fact an international bestseller, it would be at least in the top 100,000 on Amazon right now, no?

Does the author realize how silly, or at least unbelievable, his claim to bestsellerdom looks to the intelligent reader who bothers to check?

Or is his assumption that people today are so naive they will believe anything correct?

My experience, by the way, is the opposite: people are more skeptical than ever today, and their B.S. detectors have never been more accurate.

The moral of the story is if you’re going to make a claim, back it up. Link to your sources, provide graphs and statistics. Most people are not going to believe what you say unless you have proof. So give it to them.

By the way, don’t make a claim and then search for data to back it up. The analytic will see right through that. Instead, you should start with the data and then your insight or idea will develop from it.

For example, you can tell the author behind this Social Media Examiner article started with the data first, writing a very insightful article from his findings.

Show the analytic that you’re an authority

Further proof for the analytic learner is authority. You need to prove any claims you make and then you need to show why they should believe you.

One way I show that I have the authority to speak on the subject of writing popular blog posts is by mentioning my blog that was named among the Technorati Top 100. It shows that someone else with lots of credibility recognized me as an expert.

You’ll see blogs with “As Seen In” sections with the logos of important companies and media sources, like the Wall Street Journal, underneath. This is an endorsement and it’s another way of showing you have authority.

Here’s what WordStream’s footer looks like:

If sources like Entrepreneur and CNN back you, then people feel they can trust you.

Testimonials from readers and clients are also a form of authority, so don’t forget to include one or two when appropriate.

Teasing the commonsense learner with desire

The next step in writing irresistible content is to develop desire for your claims. You’ve attracted readers’ attention, built their interest … now you please the commonsense learner who wants to know how something works.

How do you do this?

Simple. Explain what it is that your offer will do for them. Maybe you’ll show them how to pick stocks, lose weight, or grow an organic garden.

But don’t give away the farm. What do I mean by that? Here are some examples I’ve seen where writers give away the farm:

a blog post that explains explicitly what a guy needs to do to pick up hot women
a sales letter that unpacks the secret to save money for your child’s college education right in the letter
a video sleeve copy that demonstrates the best ways to run a marathon
a movie trailer that spills all the funniest jokes and the most exciting plot twists.

Don’t get me wrong: I appreciated the information. The problem is I didn’t buy any of the products or act on any of the advice. Why should I? Everything I needed to know is right in there. No wonder their conversion rate stinks.

Don’t over-educate. Tease the commonsense reader into action like this:

Does your audience want to overcome depression? Then tell them you have a five-step program that will transform them into a happy and productive person … but don’t give away the steps free.
Does your audience want to retire at 21? Then tell them how you’ve helped hundreds of people build wealth using an ebook marketing strategy … a strategy they can get their hands on once they go through a rigorous application process.
Does your audience want to lose weight? Then tell them you’ve figured out how exactly to do just that with the right combination of exercise, food, and vitamins. But don’t tell them what that combination is. Just tell them how these will make them live healthier and longer.

See how that works?

It tells the commonsense learner what something can do for them, but not how. It doesn’t give away the specifics.

Sometimes you can let them peek behind the curtains, like giving them just one of the steps in a six-part process, but not so much that the commonsense learner has everything she needs. Leave something juicy off, dangle it in front of their faces, and promise you will give it to them when they act.

Pushing the dynamic learner to act

Now that you’ve attracted attention, built interest and developed desire, your audience, namely your dynamic learners, should be primed to pounce on your offer. So, tell them what to do.

There are five characteristics to a good call to action:

Specific: Tell your reader exactly what you want them to do. “Please enter your name and email address to download a free copy of the ebook,” for example.
Meaningful: Readers are more likely to act if you tell them the reason why you want them to act. “Register for the event now. We only have ten seats left.”
Repetitive: A good call to action is repeated at least three times in your copy. Each time should be slightly different, but it should always be clear what you want the reader to do. And it should be the same thing each time.
Smooth: A good call to action is natural to what you are writing. It feels like it ties all your copy together neatly. And it should never scream or be full of hype.
Polite: It always works bests to ask your reader to do something rather than command them. For example, “Why not subscribe right now before the offer ends at midnight?” works much better than “Subscribe right now before the offer ends at midnight.”

Conclusion

Once you’ve worked your way through the AIDA formula in your copy, you’ve naturally given each learning style what they want, and in the meantime, written some pretty compelling content a large audience can’t resist.

Furthermore, the great thing about this approach is that you could break a topic up into four different posts for each learning style. Or you could do a longer post, including the above approach for all of them. Either way, you’ll create content that people find irresistible.

What other formulas do you use to create irresistible content?

Neil Patel is the co-founder of KISSmetrics and blogs at Quick Sprout.

Written on 1/31/2012 at 6:06 am by Darren Rowse

Frustrated by Blogger’s Block? Try this Exercise!

Filed Under: Writing Content 17 Comments

Feeling frustrated today about a lack of ideas to write about on your blog? If so, you’re not alone. Here’s another technique that I use to overcome it.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post here on ProBlogger that gave a tip for fighting blogger’s block. It asked you to identify a problem that you had three years ago and to write a post that solved that problem for your readers.

Another variation on that technique for overcoming blogger’s block is to write a post that taps into a “feeling” that your readers might typically have.

There are probably thousands of bloggers in your niche writing content to solve the problems of your readers, but I bet that in most niches, most of them don’t look after the feelings of their readers.

Acknowledge and work with those feelings, and you’ll be blogging with empathy—not only solving problems, but making emotional connections with your readers. You’ll also be connecting with different personality types than if you just write a dry how-to type post.

Which feelings should you concentrate on? While negative feelings might be the obvious choice I think there’s a case for writing about the whole gamut of feelings:

Feeling lost? Here’s a way forward.
Feeling paralyzed? Here’s how to get moving.
Feeling excited? Here’s how to capture that excitement and use it for good.
Feeling lonely? Here’s a place to connect with others.
Feeling overwhelmed? Here’s how to navigate that.
Feeling fearful? Here’s how to overcome your fear.

You’ll notice in the above examples I’ve taken each of the feelings and then written a how-to response, but there are other ways to tap into the feelings of your readers, too.

One great way to do it is to tell a story.

Feeling Lost? Here’s a time I felt that, and here’s what happened.

Another way to tap into feelings is to start a discussion.

What do you do when you’re feeling overwhelmed with your work.

So sit down today and think about what kinds of feelings and emotions your readers might have.

You might get some hints in the comments section of your blog. You may also want to think about your own feelings and emotions (past and present) as they pertain to your topic.

Once you’ve identified a feeling, write a post that starts with that feeling. Acknowledge it up front, then write something that helps your readers to move forward from that place.

I’d love to see links below to the posts you write after doing this exercise! Please do share them.

Written on 1/30/2012 at 12:03 am by Guest Blogger

The Gong Fu of Blogging

Filed Under: Writing Content 28 Comments

This guest post is by Michael de Waal-Montgomery of The Monty Mike Times.

The word Kung Fu comes from the Chinese word “Gong Fu,” which means “hard work.” Anyone who’s studied Kung Fu knows this name is well deserved. It’s tough going, no matter how good you get.

Blogging is also “gong fu” sometimes. On a good day, the writing can seem to flow effortlessly, perhaps feeling something more akin to Tai Chi, or “Tai Ji Quan” in the original Chinese.

On a bad day, blogging is exhausting. The thought alone of sitting down and staring at a blank page, a blinking cursor in a field of white snow, can be utterly depressing.

If you’re writing for pleasure, this is the last place you want to be. Why spend your own free time doing something you’re not enjoying? It’s a question worth asking.

Inspiration

The other question worth asking is why does blogging feel like such hard work today? The answer is usually because you’re uninspired. You feel you have nothing worth blogging about. You feel like you have nothing interesting to say.

What you deem uninteresting and what the world deems uninteresting are often not the same thing. For starters, you spend every day with yourself, locked up in your own head.

Because we are too close to our own situations, to our own lives and the events that unfold within them each day, it’s easy to make a judgement call that we are just boring people.

That’s not true.

No one else is living your life. No one else is seeing the world in quite the same way you are. No one else is thinking the same thoughts and no one else is taking away the same lessons from each experience.

If you are feeling that writing that blog post is a bit Gong Fu today, look for inspiration. If you think you have to climb a mountain to find it, you’re wrong. Inspiration can be found everywhere, in everything.

Look in your thoughts, and at your experiences. Consider the things that make you who you are, the places you’ve been, and the people you’ve met. The lessons you’ve learned living this life.

It is said that a man is what he thinks about all day. If you think about cars, blog about cars; if you spent the whole day feeling uninspired, blog about something that will inspire others instead.

Often looking for a topic to blog about is as easy as facing up to the very one you’re running away from. The one that you think will bore readers to death.

Limitation

There is very little new and original content in the world today. What’s new and original is the way you look at something old and tired. The angle you take, the spin you put on it. The piece of your character that you bring into it.

The possibilities are endless.

There are only 26 letters in the alphabet. There are only four limbs in the body. Yet bloggers go on blogging and Kung Fu teachers go on teaching Kung Fu. So what’s the secret?

They know how to stay inspired, how to stay hungry. They know how to look at the ordinary and find the extraordinary. If you can’t learn to do this too, your blogging will always remain Gong Fu.

Time to buy some new spectacles, perhaps. Or take off your old ones. The whole world is right in front of you, like an oyster.

So start writing that latest blog post already!

Michael de Waal-Montgomery is a full-time journalism student and aspiring writer who enjoys blogging in his free time. You can read his rants over at The Monty Mike Times.

Written on 1/26/2012 at 6:02 am by Guest Blogger

10 Ways Multi-blog Authors Can Stay Creative and Generate Great Posts

Filed Under: Writing Content 21 Comments

This guest post is by Jo Gifford of Cherry Sorbet Creative.

Keeping fresh and creative is key to keeping on top of the game when writing different blogs across various sectors, and for various clients. Working with efficient workflows, time management and organization all help to keep that valuable information harnessed to be used when you need it, but how about making sure you can produce great content on time and on demand?

Keeping creative and informed means you are working efficiently to produce content that’s engaging, informative, and, of course, profitable for you. After all, time is money when you are managing a number of blogs and clients.

Here are my top ten tips for fueling that creativity, generating ideas, and managing your time and resources.

1. Make the info come to you—start mass reading

Working smartly is such a key part of working creatively. The brain loves to shoot out those genius ideas when it is free to do so, but cluttered working habits, information gathering, and idea dumping leave little space for those Einstein moments.

So, my first tip for working across blogs is to make the information you need for your different blogs or publications land on your doorstep with minimal effort. That means setting up Google alerts on your subjects of interest which are emailed to you as they occur.

Set up journo request callouts on databases like Gorkana to allow PR pros to do some groundwork for you, and of course use #journorequest and #bloggerrequest on Twitter.

Use your groups on Linked In to source info, and set up specific RSS feeds grouped together in Feedly to get the blog posts and info you need at source. And of course, the old-school way of signing up for email updates from the right resources will see you right.

Speed up your fact finding, and you can concentrate on fueling great post ideas.

Okay,so now we have info flowing in, but an inbox filled to the brim. Well let’s sort that out too.

2. Filing it cleverly: Other Inbox

If you power your mails with gmail like I do, Other Inbox is your new best friend. I use gmail to ensure all my emails across blogs I write for and my design agency to come together in one place so I don’t miss anything.

OIB is an intuitive add-on app that actually learns where you file things over time, and does this for you. You can set up smart filing to send alerts and emails from certain sources, or containing particular keywords, to go where you wish. In this way, OIB makes that overwhelming inbox panic dissipate.

No creative genius can be cooking with gas when there’s a load of emails looking urgent. Get your inbox filed for you, check it when you need to, and carry on with the magic-making.

3. Dump it! Brain dumping for multiple sources

A wonderful part of working creatively to generate great posts is that those ideas can be trained to come. The problem is that we can’t always tell when they’ll hit.

Finding a brain dump system that works for you is key to keeping your ideas to hand for those moments when you can sit down and crack out the post that you need to.

Evernote is one of my favorite tools for mobile info dumping, and for grabbing info while browsing. I also use Simple Note and Google Docs to file useful ideas.

Designing a workflow that’s intuitive and works to your strengths makes life at work and—in the time away from it—so much more fun and a lot less stressful.

4. Getting creative

One of my favorite books around creativity is The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. The book provides a 12-week, step-by-step process to unblocking creativity, and includes some fantastic tools and techniques for putting that grey matter to work.

I have gone though the process twice, both times with amazing results which have sent my business in unexpected directions that are aligned with my real aims and goals. Dip into the book. Even if you don’t do the whole thing, I’m sure you will find some of the daily tasks really useful to kickstart your creative thinking. Remember, innovation is just creativity and we can train it.

5. Find your zone and stay in it

In addition to getting your creative juices going, finding your zone to work in is so important. I wrote a post about it, the basic message being: whatever works for you, do it.

If you know that eating a banana and having a cup of coffee gets you in the zone, great, off you go. If it’s a run followed by two hours of great writing, replicate that and there you have a successful recipe. For me, it’s Daft Punk on the headphones, a coffee, and a set time limit to write with the reward of a run at the end. Find what works for you and use it to your advantage.

6. Map it!

Mindmapping is one of my favorite ways to get ideas out in a non-linear way that best expresses my thoughts. I use Mindmeister on my computer and iPhone to brainstorm business ideas and blog posts using imagery, colored segments and links, and all sorts of fun things.

I am even happier when brainstorming in real time with other colleagues or associates—it’s amazing to see ideas develop visually in a way that can be shared and presented so well.

7. Reach out

So often bloggers and freelancers work in isolation—in the ubiquitous PJs, of course. Make a point of having a few friends, colleagues of associates that you can brainstorm with, over a coffee in the big wide world, or using Facetime or Skype if you need to be surgically removed from your dressing gown.

Every genius needs to bounce around some thoughts from time to time and it’s a healthy way to get perspective, see things from a new angle, and just to ensure some human contact.

8. Step away from the machine! Illumination needs you

One of the best ways to let ideas flow is to step away from the screen. Illumination, one of the steps in the creative thinking process, needs space to happen.

I often have ideas when I step away to make a cup of tea, or to do some cooking; a process that isn’t taxing your mind or filling it with yet more information will let the ideas come for the next brilliant post you can write.

9. Unblock yourself on time

Despite our best efforts sometimes that white page or screen just catches out out. The cursor blinks, you try your best workflow habits, but nothing.

A good technique for creative thinking in a time managed manner when a deadline looms is to slice that time up into chunks of 15. Set your phone timer or computer gadget to a 15 minutes and make yourself write just a little.

You will often find if you start off, however clunky the writing is, you will get there. I wrote my MA thesis in a similar way, making myself do 500 words a day whether I felt like or not, was tired, slightly tipsy after work drinks, or just plain not in the mood. Slice it up and it will stop the panics from setting in and quashing any creativity even further.

10. If you are really stuck, go outside the box and freestyle

Try some creative thinking techniques such as random word association: auto-generate a word online or pick a dictionary page and see how that word or object makes you see your brief in a different light.

For example, a car: think of wheels, motion, driving, journeys … do these spark any ideas for your subject? Keep some tricks up your sleeve for the days when your genius is running a little slower than usual and you won’t fail to deliver.

Jo Gifford is a designer, writer, blogger, and founder of Cherry Sorbet Creative. Working primarily in the beauty, fashion and lifestyle industries her work spans graphic design for print and web, social media management and training, copywriting and editorial for on and offline publications. You will find her blogging as Dexterous Diva, and on Twitter bot ahs Dexterous Diva and Cherry Sorbet.

Written on 1/25/2012 at 12:08 am by Guest Blogger

Un-dull Your Blog Posts: Four Fiction Techniques to Try

Filed Under: Writing Content 25 Comments

This guest post is by Harry Bingham of Writers’ Workshop.

Most blog posts are dull.

They might be well-informed, offer interesting insights, teach useful things—but they can do all those things and still be dull.

Although readers do come to blogs to learn, they are only ever two clicks away from rival offerings, which means you’re under constant pressure to retain those eyeballs.

And eyeball-retention is a learnable, replicable skill. I’m a novelist, after all. People don’t come to my books in order to learn anything: they come for entertainment and will desert me if I don’t satisfy their expectations. So I—and my peers—made darn sure we satisfy them. What’s more, the approaches that work for books are eminently transferable to blogs.

Story

One driver that always works is story. Let’s suppose you’re writing about an SEO technique which yields, on average, a 30% traffic increase over a three month period. Clearly that technique is, in principle, going to be of interest to your readers.

But isn’t that presentation dull? I mean, don’t you feel your heart contract just a little when you hear those stats? You know you need to read the post but, gosh, it doesn’t excite you.

Contrast that with a post that starts with a story. Jed Edwards is a fishmeal seller who’s struggling to make a go of his business in recessionary times. He hits on a new SEO technique that doubles his online traffic in the space of three months. He renegotiates a bank loan on the back of a new business plan and for the first time in years, things start to look up.

Now that snippet still feels a little poor. We want more detail, more personalization, more that is specific to Jed and his business. But enrich that one paragraph to, let’s say, three and you have a human, empathic connection. Your reader is hooked.

Of course at that point, you’ll need to backtrack. You’ll need to say that the Jed’s experience is unusually positive, that 30% increases are the norm, not 100% ones. And you’ll need to get into the nuts and bolts of the technique. But all that doesn’t matter. You’ve got the reader into your article. You’ve won their trust. Your task isn’t finished—but it’s very well started.

The trick to this approach is to start (and ideally finish) with the personal, the specific, the detailed. You can see one example of this approach on our blog here, but you can also view countless examples of it in the newspapers. If a journalist is writing about the Japanese tsunami, for example, they’ll likely start by picking out the experience of one particular family, or one particular village. Start with the particular, move to the general, and move back to the particular with your close.

Controversy

Another good alternative is to go for controversy. You don’t necessarily need to believe 100% in the position you are presenting. Obviously, you need to have some real belief what you’re saying, but it’s okay to allow yourself to express things more strongly than you truly believe. That’s not about lying: it’s about helping to clarify things for readers. By making strong statements, you can let your readers test out what they do and don’t believe on a subject.

In the end, a controversial stance is simply a way to keep the reader interested in what follows. A recent guest-blogger on our own writing-related website made a big splash with an argument that alcohol could be used to promote creativity. It’s a controversial position—but that post scored almost three times as many hits as one of our regular posts. (His post can be found here.)

Facts

You wouldn’t think that novelists spend much time wrestling with facts, but we do! Historical fiction, for example, nearly always relies on a novelist finding some extraordinary aspect of the past and bringing it to life via story. But if the background material weren’t compelling, the book wouldn’t be either. Philippa Gregory’s international hit book (and movie) The Other Boleyn Girl worked primarily by bringing an extraordinary aspect of King Henry VIII’s colorful life to public view.

You can do the same. Most pro bloggers recycle the same old facts. You need to avoid that. You need to locate the specific, unknown fact that throws a new light on the issue you are commenting on. You don’t need to embellish that fact or wrap it in fancy packaging. If your fact is strong enough, you can hook a post to it without any of that.

Take, for example, Amazon’s launch of the Kindle Fire. Countless commentators regurgitated Amazon’s sales statistics—to such an extent that no blog advertising this fact could be of real interest. So Clint Boulton did some original research (which he discusses here) and transformed a dull post into a value-added one.

Style and humor

A fourth—difficult—approach relies on writing style and humor. It’s hard, because you need real writerly skills. You can’t just bolt them on, the way you can with the first couple of approaches. And humor that falls flat is much worse than no humor at all.

On the other hand, there are replicable skills here too. Economy, for starters. Are you saying something in 12 words that could be said in eight? If so, your blog post risks being 50% longer than it ought to be. Pedantic micro-corrections to your text can build into a large macro difference in interest.

Cliché is another grievous sin against good writing. Every cliché kills—just a little—the reader’s interest in your text. If you spot examples of cliché in your text (and that means remembering to look for them!), you can correct the problem in one of two ways. Either come up with your own original striking phrase or choose a simple but accurate replacement. So you could change “She was grasping at straws” into either of these alternatives:

She grew desperate, a drowning woman in search of a lifebelt.
Tiny facts now filled her with unreasonable hope.

Both of those options are a big improvement on the cliché.

Examples

Finally, humans aren’t particularly rational creatures. Logically, it makes good sense to state general principles and let readers figure it out from there. But readers want examples. They make those general principles leap to life.

The joy of hyperlinks means that you don’t even have to slow your prose down with reporting those examples: you can just point to them and move on. The better written and more joyous the posts you point to, the more joy you bring into your own post too. It’s like love: you create more by sharing.

Have you used any of these techniques to un-dull your writing? Share your tips with us in the comments.

Harry Bingham is a novelist. He also runs the Writers’ Workshop which offers help with all aspects of writing a book.

Written on 1/24/2012 at 6:00 am by Guest Blogger

How to Write Irresistible Blog Intros

Filed Under: Writing Content 32 Comments

This guest post is by Andrea Wren from Butterflyist.com,

Did you know that I like to have sex on roller coasters? Yes, there’s nothing that does it for me more than wondering if my partner will puke at the point of, um, no return. Okay I’m fibbing. I can’t even imagine how difficult big dipper hanky panky would be, but I got you listening, didn’t I?

While I was being a little devious, and you’re now going to be a tiny bit disappointed that I’m not going to talk about my fetish for fairground frolics, I’ve demonstrated two things:

A strong hook in the introductory paragraph of your post is crucial to grab the reader’s interest.
Your hook should be linked to what you’re actually writing about, otherwise the reader will feel like they’ve been duped once they continue.

But then, seeing as the title already told you what this post was going to be about, I can be excused. You knew I wasn’t going to be talking about my fictional amusement park passions, so I haven’t hoodwinked you after all!

But I did gain attention.

First impressions…

They count, don’t they? Unlike networking events or dinner parties, where we may be forced to stay making small-talk with a person we’ve decided we don’t like, when we’re reading blogs, we have a choice. And we don’t have to stick around. Once you’ve got your title, you have to think carefully about the all-important first impression that will follow.

So how do you write a winning intro that will make your reader read on?

Find a relevant hook

This is key. A “hook” has that name for a reason—it’s designed to capture the reader as an angler would a fish. You lay the bait with your title, and then your hook (the first sentence or two of the opening paragraph) should snatch hard enough that even the wriggliest of wrigglers won’t get loose.

How outlandish you can afford to be (a la the tabloid press) depends on the context of the writing, and how confident a writer you are. But even the most conservative of business blog posts can be strongly hooked.

Whether you begin with humor or with a serious quote, a good hook will intrigue the reader, or challenge them, and draw them into finding out where your opening gambit leads.

Therefore, it’s useful to start with a curious or unusual fact connected to the post, a question, or something that tests the reader’s beliefs. You could even try all three. For instance:

“In a new report, small businesses say they cannot afford to employ women of child-bearing age who may require maternity pay-outs. Should financially struggling SMEs be entitled to refuse to recruit women in certain age groups?”

Controversy, of course, often works well. And juicy revelations can do the trick too. Here are three other tips to make note of:

1. Set the scene

Your hook could potentially be the first paragraph in itself, depending on how succinct you are. But within the introduction, the reader should know what the post will be about.

Setting the scene is about defining reader expectations—he or she needs to assess whether the time they are about to invest in reading your post will be worth it.

In the above example of a hook, the writer might go on to say which report their information comes from, what their own position is (you will generally be shown which way the writer leans from the start, but a clever writer will make it seem that they could have their mind changed), and which arguments they are going to tackle in the rest of the piece.

You give the reader the gist, without giving it all away in the first few sentences.

2. Cut the waffle

So you’ve got the hook, and you’ve set the scene. Now read over your introduction aloud.

If it trails off around the houses and then does a few thousand miles across the world and back before it makes its point, your reader will be away with the fairies before you know it.

Like with the continuing blog post, all writing in the intro should serve some purpose. It should make the reader laugh, offer a fact, provide an opinion, make a challenge, concisely explain something, or ask a question. If it does none of these things, get rid of it.

No reader wants to wade through the ramblings of your mind if they aren’t going to lead somewhere, or if you’ve already said it. You need to convince the reader you have a good story. Waffling will not do this.

Don’t say anything that doesn’t need saying.

3. After a strong beginning…

With a good hook and a pithy opening to your article, your reader should, we hope, commit to finding out what else you have to talk about.

Writing compelling introductions takes practice, but it goes without saying that this is only the beginning. You then have to keep your audience enraptured throughout.

However, that’s another blog post waiting to be written.

Andrea Wren is an experienced freelance journalist, travel writer and blogger based in the UK. She blogs at Butterflyist.com, a site which inspires people to have the confidence to push their comfort zones and see the world. Here you can also get her free eBook ‘Travel More, Work Less and Live Life’. Find Andrea on Twitter via @thebutterflyist

Written on 1/21/2012 at 12:06 am by Guest Blogger

12 Blogging Lessons I Learned From Maxim Magazine

Filed Under: Writing Content 47 Comments

This guest post is by Tom Treanor of Right Mix Marketing.

Maxim magazine. It’s banned in my house (unless it’s used for research purposes).

With its revealing covers, dependence on taboo topics, and issues jam-packed with girls, booze, and cars, you’d think researching Maxim magazine would lead to a wasteland for any type of valuable lessons.

I decided to find out what makes Maxim tick and to understand why its target audience is such a dedicated bunch. If you’ve seen one issue of bikini-clad models, you’ve seen ‘em all. Right? How does Maxim keep the faithful coming back every month for more?

Turns out you can learn a lot of lessons that can be applied directly to blogging.

Here are the 12 most valuable lessons I took away from Maxim. (Hey, someone has to do the heavy lifting!)

1. Know your target audience, focus on their interests, and deliver the content they want

Maxim‘s audience is 78% male. 90% of its readers are between 18 and 49 (see the demographics here). The audience cares about women, drinking, cars, gadgets, sports, fitness and entertainment. Maxim includes an assortment of content related to these topics in each issue.

Key questions: Who is your blog’s target audience? What are their interests and are you delivering the valuable content that they are looking for?

2. If you’re about making money, focus on topics that sell

If you’re a non-profit, you may have a different goal. But if you’re blogging for a business or if you’re trying to use blogging as a business, you need to focus on topics that people are willing to pay money for. These topics include things like health, sports, gadgets, dating, sex and entertainment. Maxim focuses on a selection of very profitable niches.

Key questions: Are you fighting an uphill battle writing about a topic that no one cares about? Are you focusing on areas that no one will ever be willing to pay money for?

3. You need to take a creative approach, even for “no brainer” topics

Look, I know you think that a magazine like Maxim has it easy. Just put pictures and articles about sex, booze, and sports and you’re done. The reality is that they need to keep the audience interested. They have to come up with unique angles for topics that have been covered a million times already. Remember, they have to get people to pay their hard-earned money for this. If they don’t give them a reason to keep coming back, they won’t!

Examples:

“Leave The Puck, Take the Cannoli: How’d the Stanley Cups champs blow our $848″: Don’t just write about the NHL Stanley Cup winners. Why not give them an odd amount of money and tell the story of how they spend it?
“Playing Dungeons and Dragons with Porn Stars”: Maxim includes a twist on a tired topic.

Key questions: How are you breathing life into a tired topic? What new twists are you including in your blog to keep your readers coming back for more? Are you suffering blogger’s block?

4) Pictures, pictures, pictures

Maxim uses pictures to its advantage. On the cover and within the magazine. Enough said.

Key question: People love pictures. If you’re sharing your post via social media, it often includes a picture or thumbnail. Are you giving pictures the attention that they deserve on your blog?

5. Lists are still king!

Humans are naturally wired to read articles that include lists. Magazines have known this for a long time and Maxim is no exception. On the cover of the January 2012 issue, in bold lettering: “37 Ways To Rule Winter—The Best Snowboards, Snowball Makers & Snow Bunny Hangouts”.

Key question: Are you using lists to your (and your readers’) advantage on your blog? Ignore lists at your peril.

6. Compelling headlines (and pictures) drive sales and readership

Headlines are constantly streaming throughout the internet on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus, Digg, Delicious and all of the rest of the social media, social bookmarking and social news sites.

Is this any different than the traditional magazine rack where pictures and headlines scream out for attention? We’ve covered pictures earlier but don’t ignore the headlines. If you have ten minutes before a trans-Pacific flight and you’re picking a magazine or two for the trip, how do the headlines factor into your decision-making process?

Example Maxim headlines:

“Instant Threesomes! (OK, they’re cocktail recipes)”
“Bite Club – Inside the Sinister, Salty World of Snack Food”

Key question: Do your headlines pass the airport magazine rack test?

7. It’s not a one-way “conversation”

It may be a surprise to think about it this way, but a magazine is not just a one-way communication vehicle. For example, Maxim runs contests and includes reader input in a portion of their articles. Not to mention the interaction that can happen on a magazine’s blog, website and social media outposts.

Key questions: How are you fostering reader engagement? Are you treating your blog like a monologue or a dialogue?

8. How-Tos are a staple

Like lists, how-tos are another staple of magazines. Just look at the magazine rack next time you leave the grocery store. Two “important” how-tos from Maxim include the following:

“How Can I Open A Beer Bottle With My Teeth?”
“Reboot Your Life—reform your life for 2012″ (including multiple how-to articles on money, health, sex, tech, betting, food)

Key question: Are you teaching your audience how to do things that are important to them?

9. Include celebrity

Maxim doesn’t live on sex, booze, and sports alone. It also benefits from the glow that celebrities can lend to a magazine, book, movie, or TV show. Included in the January issue are JWoww from the Jersey Shore TV show (celebrity is relative), the Orlando Magic’s Dwight Howard and his vehicles, and Snowboarder Shaun White on music, movies and gold medals.

Key question: Are you including information about or content from influencers or “celebrities” in your industry?

10. Utilize third-party research and spot industry patterns

Maxim included summaries of studies in an “Analyze This” section, including highlights of studies done on pick-ups, movies, happiness and money. It also included a “Sexy in stitches” article featuring recently injured actresses Halle Berry (broken foot), Reese Witherspoon (gash on forehead), and Bar Rafaeli (broken arm).

Key question: Are you including your own take on industry research and are you actively “connecting the dots” for your readers?

11. Storytelling is not dead

Even Maxim magazine would suffer if there was no drama. No human stories. No narrative. The January issue included a multiple page article about a “prolific art forger” who has never been arrested, entitled, “The Most Famous Painting In The World … And It’s A Fake.”

Key questions: Are you bringing stories into your writing? Do you include any drama, mystery or surprises in your blog?

12. Respond to audience feedback

Most magazines includes a reader letters section. Maxim is no different. In their “Ranting and Raving” section they respond to the good and the bad from their readers.

Key questions: Are you afraid to respond to your readers? Do you ignore the bad and only focus on the good? Are you responding to feedback?

It was tough duty but these are the 12 blogging lessons that I took away from the January 2012 issue of Maxim magazine. I suggest you go back over the key questions and see where you might have gaps in your blogging strategy.

Okay, your turn. What other blogging lessons can we learn from magazines?

Tom Treanor is the founder of Right Mix Marketing, which helps businesses of all sizes with Content Marketing Strategy. Sign up for his free e-Course on Creative Blogging.

Written on 1/20/2012 at 6:09 am by Guest Blogger

Pageviews are Good. Pagereads are Better.

Filed Under: Writing Content 25 Comments

This guest post is by Paula Pant of Afford-Anything and Greg McFarlane of Control Your Cash.

Have you noticed how so many blogs are just … terrible?

There’s no polite way to say it. The writing is garbage, the design inelegant, the content inane. A bird pecking at a worm-scented keyboard could craft more interesting thoughts.

We always thought the people responsible for these blogs are idiots. But lately we’ve wondered if we have it backwards, and they’re the shrewd ones.

Pick a business model. Optimize it.

We—Paula and Greg—run different blogs, but with a similar business model. We each work toward building a following of true fans who respect us as authorities within our niche, personal finance. We want our readers to buy our books, listen to our lectures, attend our workshops and tune into our radio shows. We want editors of respected publications to tap us for freelance assignments.

So we put our full names and our faces on our work. We obsess over wording, paragraph spacing, and dangling participles. We’re each building a platform that, if you’ll excuse the cliché, is the foundation of our “brand.”

Writing quality content is a pain. From our experience, it can take up to four hours to write a worthwhile post. The return on time expended, at least in the beginning, is almost negligible.

It’s a long-term strategy, but a risky one. It might lead to recognition and fortune, or it might never amount to anything.

Strategically mindless content

Some bloggers have a different business model. They want to sell text links. Period. They know companies are willing to shell out a few hundred dollars per link to get some SEO juice, and these bloggers are hungry to sell.

Quality content is unimportant under such a model. Having a base of loyal readers is meaningless. The only important measure is PageRank, so these bloggers concentrate on building backlinks. Higher PageRank leads to more money.

If you’re blogging for people, rather than for backlinks … well, having an ardent fan base can help your PageRank, if indirectly. Devoted readers might consciously link to a site they love. But if PageRank is all you care about, waiting for your readers to promote your blog (while you spend hundreds of hours writing quality posts) is an inefficient use of your time. The more direct way to improve PageRank is to spend a few minutes pumping out garbage, then devote the rest of your time to activities that directly build rank—such as commenting on do-follow blogs.

Yet another class of bloggers uses a business model that centers on advertising impressions. These entrepreneurs optimize their blogs around any activity that maximizes pageviews. The people behind these blogs don’t care about bounce rate; they just need a five-second click.

Neither compare nor despair

If you have a passion for conveying your findings to your readers in a compelling way, you can get frustrated if you measure yourself against bloggers who only care about eyeballs (irrespective of any brains they might be connected to.)

It’s almost misleading to refer to both the mercenaries and those who go to the trouble of crafting quality posts as “bloggers”. They’re selling different commodities to different clients. Ian Bostridge, Lil Wayne, and a guy who makes his living recording commercial jingles are all technically “singers”, but they have nothing else in common. Forget apples to oranges; we’re comparing apples to cats to unicorns.

If you take time to create worthwhile content and delight your readers, reasoning that the financial rewards will come later, do yourself a favor and stop comparing yourself to bloggers who would sell their mothers for an inbound link. It’ll drive you crazy. Sooner or later, preferably sooner, you have to ask yourself: Am I blogging to share my unique perspective and contributions with the world, or am I only after revenue? It’s not a rhetorical question.

It’s easy to forget that blogging is a nascent industry. Its rules are still being written, and most of them haven’t been finalized yet. PageRank will remain meaningful only as long as it continues to be considered the gold standard of link analysis algorithms. That doesn’t necessarily mean forever. The same goes for cost-per-impression vs. other pricing models: advertisers will eventually discover a surefire method of targeting 30,000 qualified prospects, as opposed to 100,000 drones who’ll never buy.

But until the day the robots achieve sentience, there will always be an audience for innovative content spawned from inquisitive human minds. And unlike link analysis or pageview counts, worthwhile content is impossible to engineer artificially.

That doesn’t mean readers will flock to a well-written but underpublicized site. The successful paint-by-numbers bloggers know this all too well, which is why they choose to value backlinks over content.

We’re betting against that strategy. In the long term, the bloggers who downplay content do so at their own peril, as they forgo the opportunity to build long-term connections with readers. These bloggers will never sell ancillary products nor other brand extensions. Their blogs resonate no more loudly than supermarket flyers do.

Any moron can go through the mechanical steps of commenting on do-follow blogs and submitting to link exchange directories. But if you’re willing to develop a voice that readers will instantly recognize as yours, you’ll set yourself apart from the bloggers with neither the aptitude nor the desire to do so.

Paula Pant has traveled to 27 countries, purchased a 99-year-old Victorian home near central Atlanta’s most beautiful park, and has never — ever — had a penny in debt. Her blog, Afford Anything, is based on one radical idea: money can fuel your wildest dreams.

Greg McFarlane is an advertising copywriter who lives in Las Vegas. He recently wrote Control Your Cash: Making Money Make Sense, a financial primer for people in their 20s and 30s who know nothing about money. You can buy the book here (physical) or here (Kindle) and reach Greg at greg@ControlYourCash.com.

Written on 1/19/2012 at 6:07 am by Darren Rowse

3 Lessons On Blogging from My Son… the Artist

Filed Under: Writing Content 33 Comments

Our kitchen table is in a perpetual state of creativity.

Marker pens, sketch books, glue sticks, and paint sets are make their permanent home there because my five-year-old son (X) is a self-declared Artist.

While there are some challenges with living with an Artist… (last night I almost broke my ankle tripping on a glue stick) there are a lot of good things about it too. Not only is there a constant stream of art work to hang on the fridge, I’ve also seen a lot of parallels between the ways he’s developing artistically and how I think bloggers could develop their own craft.

The more you do it, the better you get

Young X is prolific. There’s no other word to describe him.

When I get up at 7am he’s usually hard at work on a project he’s been dreaming up in bed the night before (he literally gets up and draws his dreams).

When I go down to the kitchen for a cup of tea mid morning, he’ll be there drawing or crafting up some new “sculpture” (out of an egg carton, some blue tack, a chocolate box, and his Mum’s earrings).

When I collect him from kindergarten in the afternoon, he’ll leave the room with any number of paintings, pastings, and works of art, while other kids walk out with one at most.

The fruit of his constant practice of his artistry is a remarkable improvement in what he’s producing. While it’s all still very childlike (he is five) we genuinely marvel at his creations—they’re really great! Last week I even found him sitting down with a book about Picasso and trying to emulate one of his famous paintings.

The same is true for blogging (or any form of writing)—the more you practice, the better your writing gets. In fact it’s pretty much the only way to learn. You can study writing techniques all you want, but unless you actually experiment with putting them into practice and work on developing your own style, you’ll never really improve.

Experiment with new media

X is constantly trying new ways of constructing, drawing, painting, and creating. While drawing with pencils used to be his thing, he’s moved through a variety of “phases” in his artistic development as he’s explored different media.

I still remember the time earlier this year that I suggested he use his pencils only to be told that “I used pencils when I was 4 but I have been maturing. I prefer paint!”

He’s also gone through different phases when it comes to subject matter. Faces were and early phase. Then houses. Then robots. Then Toy Story characters. Then fire. Then rainbows….

Interestingly, his latest phase is something of a fusion (or mashup) of different media and subjects. It’s almost as if he’s tested and tried a variety of techniques and has now got his own little style, taking things he’s learned along the way and putting them together into his own little way.

The same is true for bloggers. I strongly advise bloggers to experiment:

Experiment with writing in different styles and voices.
Experiment with writing posts of different lengths.
Experiment with writing informal and formal posts.
Experiment with writing in a more personal and engaging tone, and writing a more academic-style essay post.
Experiment with different media—video, audio, written.
Experiment with different formats—list posts, interviews, how-to posts, stories.
Experiment with different topics.

The list could go on. As you experiment, you’ll find yourself drawn to repeat some and leave others. You’ll also find your readers resonating with some experiments and ignoring (or even reacting against) others. In time, your voice develops.

Train your mind to think like a blogger

When X is not making art, he’s thinking about his next creation. Quite often we’ll be driving in the car or out for a walk and he’ll have a contemplative look on his face, or he’ll be examining something with real intent. I’ll ask him what he’s thinking about. More often than not, he’ll say something like:

“I’m thinking about how to draw that traffic light.”
“I’m imagining what that man riding the bike will look like being attacked by a dinosaur so I can paint it.”
“I’m working out what color to draw our house in when I get home.”

X is always on the lookout for inspiration for his art work. He’s painting his next painting before he’s even sitting down to do it. He’s looking at life though the eyes of a five-year-old artist—working out how to translate what he sees and experiences into his creations.

Again, there is a lesson to be learned here for bloggers. While I don’t advise letting your whole life be taken over by thinking about blogging, over time you begin to see life through blog-colored glasses. As you experience life, there will be some things that jump out at you that could impact your blogging (or even be written about).

This post is an example of that. As I watched X draw today and began to ponder how he was developing, I began to see the parallels and analogies emerge—but they only came because I guess I’ve got into the habit of looking at life this way.