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Written on 8/27/2012 at 6:08 am by

How to Write Like Your Teacher Told You Not To

Filed Under: Writing Content

This guest post is by Karol K of 100WPthemes.com.

These days, everyone’s a blogger. I’m a blogger, you’re a blogger, most people who end up commenting on this post will be bloggers too. And literally every one of us has the main goal of providing the elusive “quality content”.

However, the main problem is that virtually everything around us—social media, other commitments, you name it—tries to prevent us from doing so.

And despite the fact that there’s a massive number of tips online on how to write properly, the advice isn’t structured. There are just various bits of information here and there, so it’s difficult to keep everything in mind once you begin working on a new piece.

That’s why I want to share this following idea with you. The idea of writing exactly not like your teacher told you to.

This should be easy to grasp as we all went to school, and we all kind of remember what “good writing” is—according to our teachers.

Just a word of explanation before we begin. I’m from Poland. The school system is different here, but I’m pretty sure that the general rules of writing taught by teachers are pretty similar worldwide. Feel free to correct me, though!

The trick for us as bloggers, however, is to take this advice and flip it completely by doing exactly the opposite thing.

Don’t use long blocks of text

Chances are that your teacher told you to use long paragraphs so you can explain your points in great detail. Long blocks of text are easy to grasp on a piece of paper, but not on a computer screen.

Use a maximum of four to six lines of text per paragraph.

Don’t use complex language

In real life, using complex language doesn’t make you smart, it makes you a smart alec.

Simple words are better for getting your point across quickly.

Don’t wait to deliver your main point

The whole trick of online writing is to deliver your point early on. People simply don’t have time to read 600 words of your article to get to the point. That might work in school, but it doesn’t online.

Deliver your point in your second paragraph (unless you’re creating a list post).

Don’t introduce too many ideas

A blog post should be simple in nature. Remember that people are reading it on their computers, and reading from a screen is not the most comfortable thing to do.

One idea per post is enough. If you try to introduce more, the thing will end up being too confusing and difficult to grasp.

Don’t summarize anything

If you feel like you need to summarize your post then you’ve made it too complicated (see the previous point).

A post should be easy to grasp on its own—no summary required.

Do use readable subheadings

Subheadings were virtually nonexistent at school. At least, I don’t remember using a subheading in any of my school work.

However, using subheadings is the main trick bloggers have up their sleeves. The point of subheadings is to make a post understandable even if someone reads just the subheadings alone.

Try reading only the subheadings in this post. Does it still make sense?

Do write using “you”

Using “you” to refer to the reader directly is among the biggest sins you can make when you’re writing at school. I don’t know why … that’s just how it works.

On the internet, however, not using “you” is the biggest sin you can make. Your writing is your way of speaking to people. And how would you speak to anyone without referring to them directly?

As an example, there are 34 instances of “you” in this post.

It’s not all bad…

Really, I’m not all that pessimistic. Feel free to let me know which elements of school education you believe are extremely useful for bloggers—we’d love to hear them.

Karol K. is a freelance writer, and a blogger at 100WPthemes.com. Feel free to come by if you’re searching for some information on choosing a WordPress theme.

Written on 8/22/2012 at 12:03 am by

What Is Cyber Liability, and Why Should You Care?

Filed Under: Writing Content

This guest post is by Matt Setter of MaltBlue.com.

Recently, here on Problogger, I was discussing the topic of privacy breach notification and how it affects us as bloggers. The article looked at the protection of our site’s information and the potential impact that the loss of that information may have on the privacy of our readers and customers.

Today, I want to look at another, closely related, topic—cyber liability. The internet is an amazing medium, providing us an enormous amount of flexibility and affording us nearly the same opportunity as an organisation ten to 100 times our size. But unlike the days of old, the internet landscape is not what it once was.

Whereas in days gone by, we could pretty much write anything, anytime, for any reason, and either no one cared, or if there was a concern, the legal jurisdiction we fell in to was largely undefined or near-impossible to enforce. Fast-forward to 2012 and the law’s rapidly catching up, if it hasn’t already caught up.

Now I’m not saying for a moment that we are or should be careless, callous or unthoughtful individuals inconsiderate and unprofessional in our conduct. Quite the opposite: we’re professional in our approach, conduct, content, and more.

But from time to time, mistakes happen. There are people around who, potentially, don’t share our level of professionalism or may, justifiably, feel that we’ve wronged them.

However, as in my previous article on privacy breach notification, I don’t want to unnecessarily alarm you about these issues. I just want to take a minute or two to let you know about cyber liability, specifically about one key component of it, the infringement of intellectual property and discuss:

  • what it is
  • how it may affect you
  • what you can do about it, if you believe you may be at risk.

What is it?

The intellectual property aspect of cyber liability is quite similar to other fields, such as in computer software, academic papers, books, magazines, and other works. If we infringe on someone’s copyright or trademark, then we run the risk of having action taken against us by the other party to right what they perceive as a wrong.

If we, intentionally or otherwise, use a certain proportion of someone’s work as the basis for our own, we stand the risk that the aggrieved party may seek to take action against us.

Consider the following examples:

  • In 1990 music artist Vanilla Ice was sued for copyright infringement over his track “Under Pressure”, by Queen and David Bowie. The track appeared on his album “To the Extreme” but didn’t give credit to the original artists, nor did he seek their permission.
  • The Wall Street Journal reports that in 2008 blogger Shellee Hale was sued for remarks she made in forums relating to a software company. The article goes on to say that by 2007, 106 lawsuits had been brought against bloggers, up from 12 in 2003.
  • Lotus corporation claimed, in the case of Lotus Development Corporation v. Borland International Inc., that “the structure of the menus by Borland was copyrighted by Lotus.”
  • Oracle is currently suing Google for $1 billion dollars in damages, alleging copyright infringement over the Java programming language, which Oracle acquired when by bought Sun Microsystems in 2010.

How can it affect you?

In this modern day and age, we’re no long just bloggers—we’re also publishers. And as such, we increasingly have some of the same legal exposures and responsibilities as more traditional publishers.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. A number of countries, including the United States and Australia have what are referred to as “shield laws,” and these are increasingly being extended to include new media workers, such as bloggers.

Those living in countries such as the United Kingdom and other European nations are also, potentially, covered under the European Convention of Human Rights.

According to Out-Law.com, a shield law:

protects “publisher, editor, reporter, or other person connected with or employed upon a newspaper, magazine, or other periodical publication, or by a press association or wire service” and a “radio or television news reporter or other person connected with or employed by a radio or television station.”

However, checking your facts before you seek to be covered by one of these laws is critical, as Montana blogger Crystal Cox found out the hard way. She was sued by Obsidian Finance Group for $2.5 million and tried to invoke shield law protection.

However, during the hearing, the judge ruled that she was not covered by them because she lacked:

  1. any education in journalism
  2. any credentials or proof of any affiliation with any recognized news entity
  3. proof of adherence to journalistic standards such as editing, fact-checking, or disclosures of conflicts of interest
  4. keeping notes of conversations and interviews conducted
  5. mutual understanding or agreement of confidentiality between the defendant and his/her sources
  6. creation of an independent product rather than assembling writings and postings of others, or
  7. contacting ‘the other side’ to get both sides of a story.”

This goes to show is that although shield laws exist and appear to be becoming increasingly universal in their protection of bloggers and new media workers, they’re not universal yet. What’s more, they’re not a “get out of jail free” pass, nor do they give us carte blanche to say whatever we want.

It pays to double-check the laws before attempting to use them.

What can you do about it?

To keep it simple, ask yourself the following questions and write down your answers to them:

  • Has what we’ve published infringed someone’s copyright?
  • Has what we’ve published infringed someone’s trademark?
  • Have we defamed someone?
  • Have we invaded someone’s privacy?
  • Have we misused confidential information?
  • Has someone in our forums posted material that does one or more of these things?
  • Has one of our members or staff made derogatory comments about a person or organisation?

Did you answer yes to any one of those questions? If you have, then it’s a good idea that you take action immediately about it so that you don’t fall foul of cyber liability laws. If you’re uncertain or would like professional advice, always remember to consult a legal expert.

Should we feel the need to do so, we can also take out insurance cover against legal action relating to cyber liability. An increasing number of insurers who will do this for us, including QBE and Trafalgar International.

However, looking at the list above, you can see that with a healthy amount of common sense and a professional editing process, we should have nothing to worry about.

Before anything gets published, bloggers should to continue to ensure that:

  • our content’s been checked to ensure that we haven’t plagiarised or wholly copied anyone’s work
  • if we make statements, we can and have backed them up
  • if we’ve used content, we’ve sought relevant permission to do so and cited its original sources
  • we have a fair usage policy in place for commenting on posts and participating in our forums, and that it’s enforced
  • even if we’re cheeky and attention-grabbing in the content of our sites, we’re not crossing the line and being derogatory or defamatory of anyone or organisation.

You could sum all this up in two words: being professional. If we’re professional and use common sense, I don’t see that we’ll have any serious problems. However, if you’re not sure, or you just want to double-check, take the time to seek professional advice.

Summing up

While there’s always been, and likely will continue to be, a low barrier to entry for online publishing, that doesn’t mean that we can disregard normal, professional, and civilised etiquette.

We need to ensure that when we’re publishing content online, we’re keeping a professional tone, especially as the web becomes increasingly intertwined in all aspects of our daily lives.

Have you ever been on the receiving end of threats of litigation regarding your blog? Do you often see sites infringing content—even your content? Share your experiences with us in the comments.

Matthew Setter is a freelance writer, technical editor and proofreader. His mission is to help businesses present their online message in an engaging and compelling way so they’re noticed and remembered.

Written on 8/14/2012 at 12:08 am by

How Inspiring Your Readers Drives them to Search for Information (and Interact)

Filed Under: Writing Content

One of my mantras that I’ve shared many times when speaking, and here in posts on ProBlogger, is to build blogs that:

Interaction

Image courtesy stock.xchng user Eastop

  1. inspire
  2. inform
  3. interact.

My experience is that a blog can really come alive when you not only provide readers with information, but also give them inspiration and a place to interact with one another.

One of the first times I discovered the secret of inspirational content was on Digital Photography School (my main blog) when I started posting image collections of great images that I’d found on Flickr.

Up until this time, most of the posts on dPS would have fitted into the “informational” category of posts—they were largely tutorials and how-to type content.

These new inspirational image collection posts were simply collections of images on a theme, with little written content.

For example, here’s one of the early ones—7 Clone Shots. At the time, thise was widely linked to around the web and rose to the front pages of social bookmarking sites like Digg.

These inspirational image posts really resonated with readers, and were the kind of content people wanted to share. They drove large amounts of traffic, so I built them into dPS’s regular posting schedule.

Inspiration leads people to search for information

After a while, I discovered that besides the traffic that they drove to the site these inspiration posts had another impact: they drove people to our “information” posts.

I noticed this one day after posting an image collection of 15 Long Exposure Images. Not only did the post attract a lot of traffic, but I noticed another post on our site was also getting quite a bit of traffic that day—a post I’d written a year earlier called How to Shoot Light Trails.

This second post was not linked to from the image collection post. What I discovered was that people arriving on that post were so inspired by the images in the image collection that they were using our search tool t find information on shooting long exposures—that’s how they were finding the earlier post.

What was happening here was something I’ve seen repeated many times since—people’s inspiration was driving them to seek information.

I also realised that there were other relevant tutorials in our archives that readers inspired by that image collection might find useful, so I updated the image collection post with further relevant reading (as you can see in the screen shot below).

inspiration-information.png

I tracked the flow on to these information posts over the coming days and saw a significant clickthrough rate to these articles.

I also noticed quite a few extra subscribers to the site that week—I guess the combination of inspiration and information hit the mark.

These days I still use this same technique (in fact we’ve done these image collections many times (here are just a few more examples). Just last week I published 27 Great Panning Images [and How to Take Them].

panning-collection.png

You’ll notice in the screen shot above that I started the post with an image and then introduced the topic and included links to two previous panning tutorials. I then have a section at the bottom of the post which mentions the further reading tutorials again.

Once again, this week I can see a heightened level of activity on those older tutorials as a result of those links.

Here’s a chart showing the traffic to the Mastering Panning article mentioned in the image collection:

panning.png

That post (which was published back in 2009) usually gets 150-200 visitors a day, but this week, after I linked to it from our image collection, more than 7000 visitors viewed it in one day. The other post mentioned in the image collection saw a similar spike in traffic.

Inspiration and information leads people to interaction

The last part of this journey of discovery has been to complete the “inspire, inform, and interact” mantra. In the past few months I’d started to follow up each of these inspiration image collections with a post a few days later that invites readers to interact around that topic by doing some homework.

We run these “challenge” posts every weekend to get our readers interacting with us, but I hadn’t not previously made the collections tie in with these interactive posts.

Here’s an example of how I recently tied them together.information-inspiration-interaction.png

  1. First I led off with an image collection—25 Dreamy Images Shot Wide Open (featuring some beautiful images shot with wide open apertures).
  2. This image collection linked to information posts on the topic of Aperture, as well as other relevant tutorials.
  3. A few days later, I ran a ‘Wide Open’ Photography Challenge. This challenge linked back to the image collection as well as the tutorials (and also included a few more inspirational images as examples).

The take-up of our photography challenge that weekend was up on normal figures and it drove a heap of traffic backwards and forth around the site to the image collection and tutorials.

It also seemed to create momentum as the topic built over the week. I had a number of readers indicate that by seeing the inspirational images, reading the tutorials, and then being given an assignment to go away and do, they found themselves really driven to take what they were learning and implement it.

How could something like this work on your blog? Do you inspire, inform, and interact with your readers? I’m intrigued to hear if you use a similar strategy.

Written on 8/12/2012 at 6:09 am by

Get More Clicks Using These 3 Emotional Hot Buttons

Filed Under: Writing Content

This guest post is by Glen Andrews of GlenAndrews.com.

Here’s what the top internet marketers know that most people don’t…

It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to get traffic from social media sites, article directories, or through Google’s organic search. The three most effective ways to get someone to click on your links is to invoke one of these three emotional hot-buttons:

  1. pain
  2. pleasure
  3. curiosity.

Let’s take a look at each of these three emotions and how they can get you more traffic and more clicks.

1. Pain

MayhemMost people will do more to avoid pain than they will to gain pleasure. Marketing firms all around the world have know this for decades. Advertisers have placed fear statements into ads in order to get us to take action. And guess what? It works! Advertising firms have made trillions of dollars using fear as a motivator to get us to take action.

The “mayhem” Allstate commercials on US TV are all fear-based. Most political campaigns are fear-based. Heck, the next time you watch TV, pay attention to the commercials and see which of the three emotional hot buttons they’re using to motivate their audiences.

So how can you use fear (pain) to get more traffic?

Most of what we do online is driven by headlines. Our tweets are short headlines. Our blog posts and pages are effectively links with headlines. Our videos, Facebook pages, and articles are all propelled by headlines. We all decide which links to click based on the text, and our own personal desires.

Examples of fear- and pain-based headlines

  1. The Top 3 Reasons Most Entrepreneurs Fail Online
  2. 6 Things To Avoid if You’re Going To Be Successful
  3. Here’s Why Most Blogs Fail Within 24 months

If you can target your headlines (that is, links) so that they’ll speak to the emotions (pain, pleasure, curiosity) of your audience, you’ll not only attract better prospects, but you’ll quadruple your clickthrough rate.

2. Pleasure

Everyone wants to know “What’s in it for me? Why should I pay attention to you?” So you’ll get more clicks and traffic if you can tell your readers what benefits they’ll get by clicking your links. Let your readers visualize the pleasure they’ll receive from taking action.

Examples of pleasure- and benefit-based headlines

  1. Top 3 Ways To Boost Productivity and Profits
  2. Double Your Subscribers Within 14 Days
  3. Earn a 6 Figure Income Part Time

3. Curiosity

This is by far my favorite. We are all born with a sense of curiosity. From infants to old age, we all have an incredible appetite for the unknown.

You’ve seen or heard TV and radio personalities use curiosity to keep us from changing the channel. Just before a commercial break, the radio or TV personality will spit out a headline that piques our curiosity, so we’ll stay tuned in for the answer.

HooksThey’ll say something like, “When we return, we’ll reveal how you can save hundreds on your property taxes.” or “When we come back, you’ll hear why President Obama doesn’t want you to see his birth certificate.”

These curiosity-provoking statements are also called “hooks.”

Some examples of curiosity headlines

  1. Shrink Your Fat Zones
  2. 8 Lies About Sunscreen
  3. The NO-Pill Pain Remedy
  4. 3 Things To A More Effective Blog
  5. The 1 Thing All Bloggers Must Do To Make Money

Target your headlines

Again, your headlines should be targeted towards your readership. The more they speak directly to your audience, using these three emotions, the more clicks and traffic you’ll receive.

Note that it’s important to make sure your content is worthy of the headline. Nothing will turn people off more than a great headline, that “gets the click” but doesn’t deliver on the promise.

Everything we do on the internet revolves around headlines and links. If you get good at writing clickable headlines using these three emotions, you’ll easily get more traffic.

Glen Andrews has created niche sites, ebooks, and info products that produce a steady reliable income. Glen is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs create and market a business online that makes them money.

Written on 8/11/2012 at 12:08 am by

How Often Should You Blog? (Hint: The Answer Might Surprise You)

Filed Under: Featured Posts, Writing Content

This guest post is by Ali Luke of Aliventures.

Writing

Image courtesy stock.xchng user GinnyLynni

If you’ve been blogging for a while, you’ve probably come across advice to blog every day.

Perhaps you feel that you must blog every day—and you’re reluctant to even start your blog because you know you don’t have that much time.

Or maybe you’re already blogging, and doing your best to get out a post every single day—but you don’t seem to get many comments or tweets.

The good news is that you almost certainly don’t need to blog every day. In fact, you may well find that posting just a couple of times a week works better for you.

But before you dismiss posting daily altogether, here’s why it could be a good idea.

Why posting every day might work for you

Some bloggers do best when they’re in a steady routine—and you might be one of them. If you find that posting once or twice a week quickly ends up as posting once or twice a month, then you might actually find it easier to post every day. That way, you can build a strong writing habit.

Another reason for posting daily is if you’re writing a news-focused blog in a fast-moving niche. One weekly post just isn’t going to work if you want to be on the cutting edge of what’s happening.

There are also some SEO benefits to quickly building up a lot of posts on your site: all else being equal, the more pages you have, the more opportunities a reader has to find you through search engines. (Of course, it’s not quite as simple as that in practice—one high-ranking post will generally bring you much more traffic than five so-so ones.)

If you’re going to post every day:

  • Keep your posts short and to the point.
  • Plan ahead, so you don’t end up publishing sub-standard content when you’re in a rush.
  • Vary your post types: try video posts, or image-heavy ones, for instance.

Why one, two or three posts per week is usually better

Over the past couple of years, there’s been a shift in the blogging world. More and more prominent bloggers-on-blogging are moving away from daily posting—and reassuring their readers that you don’t have to post every day in order to be successful.

Five years ago, there weren’t so many “pro”-style blogs around, and readers were eager for content. Today, with a wealth of blogs to choose from, readers quickly get burnt out.

I once surveyed readers here on ProBlogger about the reasons they unsubscribed from RSS feeds, and the number one answer was “posting too much.” Respondents expressed that they developed “burnout” and would unsubscribe if a blog became too “noisy.” —Darren Rowse, You MUST Post Every Day on Your Blog [Misconceptions New Bloggers Have #2]

As a reader, I much prefer blogs that post once a week or even once every two weeks—but always say something genuinely useful—than blogs that post every day just for the sake of it. If you look at the blogs you read in depth versus the ones you skim, you’ll probably realize that you feel the same way.

As a blogger, posting once or twice a week lets me write in-depth, carefully constructed posts—ones that are more likely to get links and tweets. I also get more comments per post this way, and have the time to engage with readers over several days of commenting.

If you’re only going to post twice a week:

  • Look at which content on your blog is most popular, so you can make every single post a successful one.
  • Experiment with longer posts, perhaps 1,000+ words.
  • Focus on evergreen content, so that each post will stay relevant for years.

Finding your perfect blogging routine

As bloggers, we all have different skills, personalities, and constraints on our time and energy. Don’t force yourself to stick to someone else’s blogging routine—it won’t necessarily work well for you.

Your perfect blogging routine might be one post a week, or one post a day. It might involve writing posts when you’re feeling inspired, or writing posts to a set schedule. You might use a content calendar to help you plan ahead with all or some of your content—or you might have differently themed posts on certain days of the week or month.

There’s no “one size fits all” approach to blogging, and what’s important is that you find a routine that you can stick to over the long term—not one that leaves you burnt out after a few weeks.

Don’t worry that readers will get upset if you change your posting frequency. I’ve chopped and changed on different blogs—and I’ve never had a reader complain that they wanted five posts a week, not three, or that they wanted my posts to be on Mondays and Thursdays, not Tuesdays and Fridays.

When you’re experimenting with your blogging routine:

  • Don’t change things too abruptly: try going from five posts per week to three posts per week, for instance.
  • Consider surveying your readers to find out whether they’d like more or fewer posts.
  • Experiment with writing posts ahead of time, or with creating a content calendar.

Blogging shouldn’t be a chore: if posting daily isn’t working out for you, it’s probably not working well for your readers either. Today, take a look at your blogging routine and see whether you want to make any changes—and leave a comment below to let us know what you decide.

Ali Luke will be leading day-long blogging courses in London from September 2012. If you’d like to learn more about blogging, with hands-on exercises and one-to-one support as part of a small group, book your place today. (Numbers limited to 8 people per session.)

Written on 8/8/2012 at 12:00 am by

From Zero to Manifesto in 4 Easy Steps

Filed Under: Writing Content

This guest post is by Michael Alexis of Writerviews.com.

Chris Guillebeau’s 279 Days to Overnight Success has been downloaded over 100,000 times, and the guys over at ThinkTraffic credit their manifesto to the first viral traffic bump on Expert Enough.

They didn’t slave away finding the right words to empower their mission, defining values, and getting the end result all dolled up for publishing just for the kicks—a manifesto is the mark of a serious blogger. And they have been known to offer three incredible benefits:

  1. Your manifesto becomes a consistent path for you to follow with your work.
  2. It becomes a rallying call for readers to share your vision.
  3. You can offer it as a free download to snag email subscribers.

Basically, when you create a manifesto, you go from thinking, “I have a blog” to realizing the start of your world-changing movement—overnight.

I learned the information in this post from this interview I did with Kyeli and Pace Smith of Connection Revolution, a mission to change the world.

With such a large goal, this blogging duo have explored many ways of reaching their audience, including publishing a book and earning over $20,000 the first time they offered an online course. So let’s see how Kyeli and Pace created a great manifesto.

Step 1: Hit them with the problem, then hug them with your solution

If we didn’t have a manifesto, the Connection Revolution would be a hodgepodge of apparently unrelated junk. —Pace Smith

The first step in creating a manifesto is to come up with an idea. This idea should be a cohesive vision for your blog’s larger goal. It will make it really clear why you are doing what you are doing.

Brainstorm your idea by asking what’s wrong with the world you engage with. If you blog about children’s hockey, maybe you think it’s a problem that physical contact is allowed when the early-bloomers outweigh the others by 30 pounds. If you blog about activism, maybe you think people should do more and protest less. If you blog about blogging, what’s wrong with that world?

You’ll use your words to paint a really ugly picture that gets people to say, “Yeah, you’re right! I’m not okay with that either.” But, don’t dwell on the negative, or Pace warns you’ll “become a documentary and people will feel horrible and drained.”

Instead, you want people to feel good after reading your manifesto. So, the second part of the idea is to tell a story about what a perfect world could look like. The perfect world of little league sports. The glorious dream of contact-free play! Make it a vision as vivid as you possibly can.

Want an easy way to remember all that? Think IDEA. Initially Depressing Eventually Awesome.

Action step: Create an idea for your manifesto using this easy formula: IDEA = [What's the biggest problem with your world?] + [What does your ideal world look like?].

Step 2: Revise and outline your idea

Sometimes I think I must have been in a drug addled haze or something. I felt like I had a brilliant idea, but then when I bring it into the world people will be like “what are you talking about?” —Pace Smith

Once you have your idea(s), spend an afternoon considering it. You can do this by reading what others have written about the topic, conversing and communicating it to others, or journaling. This process will clarify your thoughts and feelings. You might also develop new viewpoints and see what resonates, especially if you talk about your ideas with others.

When you are satisfied that you’ve come up with “the idea,” create an outline. This could be a mind map, table of contents, or something similar that starts to provide structure to your idea. By seeing the flow of ideas you can ensure that they are logical and you haven’t missed key steps.

Action step: Revise (or refine) your idea by talking about it with a friend. When you have the idea, create an outline containing the major points.

Step 3: Write your manifesto (with the help of a plan!)

Everyone says “I wish I had time to write a book”, but actually everyone has time to write a book, you just need to make it a priority. —Kyelie Smith

You might write a blog post in one sitting, but a manifesto can take weeks. So to make sure you finish, you need a plan. Set a schedule that compliments your regular routine and make it a habit. An example is writing your manifesto one hour a day for six days a week. If you are like me and write in bursts, commit to drafting a certain number of pages in a certain number of days.

You can also do a daily brain dump. This is a writing practice that you do before your public work, and is intended to clear your mind. Spend 15 minutes writing about your distractions: the cat that keeps biting you even though you rescued it from the streets of Beijing, how difficult it is to experiment being a vegan when you can’t eat wheat, or whether CommentLuv is good for your blog.

By having a plan, and clearing your mind to execute it, you will finish your manifesto.

Action step: Commit to a writing schedule. It can complement your current writing habits, or jolt you into action.

Step 4: Give your manifesto a design that complements the theme

I really loved your manifesto and the design was awesome! —Kyelie Smith

The design and custom illustrations for Connection Revolution’s manifesto cost between $500 and $800. Worth the investment? Absolutely. Professional design complements your words, and enhances their value.

Pace and Kyelie hired a designer and artist they knew in the offline world. The designer had never created a manifesto before, so she researched what others charged and then they all negotiated.

Another way to find a designer is to look at the credits in another manifesto you liked. Usually the author will credit the designer for their work. If there is no credit, send the authour a quick email saying that you liked it, and especially the design—then ask for the contact information for the designer.

Action step: When you have a designer and price settled, revise the work until it’s just as you like. Make the design consistent with your blog theme.

Have you created your own manifesto? Thinking about it? I’d appreciate your thoughts on how to create a good one.

I’m Michael Alexis and I video interview the world’s top bloggers at WriterViews. Check out this ProBlogger article from when I interviewed Ramit Sethi.

Written on 8/6/2012 at 12:07 am by

The Power of Personal

Filed Under: Featured Posts, Writing Content

This week, we’ve got a couple of intriguing blog posts coming up that deal with bloggers’ personal stories.

Obviously, personal stories tend to do well with blog readers. But look around, and you’ll see that personal stories have become a mainstay of the media more generally.

Personal

Personal stories are big

We have reality t.v.—real stories about real people (admittedly in some pretty outlandish situations!). We have the social media explosion, where anyone and everyone has the opportunity to “go viral” and enjoy their fifteen minutes of fame. We even have a whole generation of people who are reputedly more self-assured—and self—promoting—than ever before.

Personal stories are big—and not just online, or among bloggers. So if you’re yet to experiment with the power of personal on your blog, now’s the time to commit to it across the board.

But blogging is inherently personal, right?

Blogging might have started as online journaling, but I think we’d probably all agree that it’s come a long way since then.

If you’re blogging as an employee for a company, you may not consider what you do to be very personal. If you’re running a news-style blog, you may feel that your job is to report facts objectively, not tell stories.

So, depending on the kind of blog you run, you may find it difficult to inject a personal element into what you do.

Personal isn’t always about you

What if you are writing blog posts for a corporation? Or what if you’re just shy about revealing too much of yourself?

How can you get personal without making it about you?

Simple: put the personal focus onto others:

Personality-rich post formats

Personal posts don’t just have to revolve around topics—certain post formats seem to do a lot to help us create a personal connection.

Here are a few of my favorites:

  • The personality roundup: A roundup of personalities within your niche—with images and links—is a great way to give a human feel to any blog.
  • The interview: I mentioned this above, but your interview could use video and audio too—and be the better for it.
  • The image post: Images do speak a thousand words. The great thing about them is that a good image will elicit emotions from your readers, so often you can say less about yourself and more about your niche—and still create that personal connection.
  • The irreverent post: Reporting the facts in chatty language is another good way to create a personal feel—provided it fits with the tone and thrust of your blog.

Are you using the power of personal?

Are you confidently creating a sense of personal connection through your blog, or is it something you struggle with? what techniques do you use? Share your tips and advice with us in the comments.

Written on 7/22/2012 at 12:07 am by

Weekend Project: Write Posts that Hold Readers to the End, Part 2

Filed Under: Writing Content

This guest post is by Peter Sandeen of Affect Selling.

In yesterday’s post, you learned how to get people to start reading your posts. So, if you haven’t already checked that out, do so now!

But do you want your visitors to increase your page view count by one, before leaving for good? Or do you want them to read what you have to say? Great headlines will get you the latter benefit, through Twitter and the merry company of social media sites.

But getting those visitors to read to the end is a different goal. And something most bloggers get really wrong.

The content that comes after the headline has to accomplish two things:

  1. meet expectations
  2. create and intensify suspense.

And when it does those things, readers read to the end.

What I’m about to say next will sound a bit like a wine review. You know, like, “The softness of this metallic wine makes your mouth as dry as the sea.” But here it is:

You must give your readers what they want without giving them what they want.

Again that’s simple, but not necessarily easy. But keep reading and you’ll write posts that every visitor wants to finish.

Meet expectations

The headline sets expectations. If you don’t meet those expectations, visitors will leave after the first few sentences—regardless of your post’s quality and content.

The expectations range from the actual value you provide to the way in which it’s delivered. For example, 5 Simple Ways to Discover What People are Dying to Read promises simple ideas you can use immediately, but it also promises clear and easy-to-follow advice (no “set up a pop-up poll with JavaScript that you introduce to repeat visitors when they scroll to the 8/9 part of a page, after reading for at least three and a half minutes, but only if they’re from Timbuktu…”).

Another example is 3 Strategies for Email Marketing and How to Succeed with Each. Headlines that have two parts, like this one, create even more expectations. In this case, you’re not promising that the reader will get a good understanding about email marketing. Instead you’re promising that in an easy-to-understand form that gives practical steps for getting real results.

On one hand, specific headlines usually capture attention better than vague ones. On the other hand, it’s more difficult to meet the expectations they set if you don’t understand headlines really well.

After you’ve created certain expectations, there’s no going back (unless you rewrite the headline); the beginning of the post has to reassure the reader that they’ll get what they came for. If you promised simple steps, but your first paragraphs don’t meet or reinforce that expectation, readers will leave and maybe never come back.

Likewise, if your headline promises entertaining content, but your first paragraph feels like it’s copied from “The 1001 Traditional Oven Mittens”, your visitors won’t risk reading more.

But now the wine review part: You shouldn’t give them what they came for…

Don’t share your goodies

If you’ve read a lot of blogs, you’ve probably noticed how you often lose focus right before the final call to action (comment, share, read more…).

Have you noticed why that happens? And if you have, then do you write in a way that keeps readers reading to the end?

The reason you lose focus is that you got what you came for. In other words, you don’t expect to get any more value from the post if you keep reading it. That doesn’t mean you could hold all the value to the end of your post; no one will get there unless the post is useful from the start.

So, how do you keep readers reading, then?

Create suspense

Great headlines create suspense. Great first paragraphs add more suspense. Great content keeps adding suspense while providing value.

Suspense is a blogger’s best friend. Without it, your blog has a squirrel’s chance on a 16-lane highway to succeed: suspense is the reason why anyone reads anything you ever write.

So, how do you create suspense?

Suspense in headlines

Your headline should always promise clear value. It can do that in countless ways:

But as your headline cannot (and shouldn’t try to) make multiple promises, it’s not enough to keep readers reading to the end.

If you’re deprived of the promised value for long enough, you skip straight to the end—or you leave. So, your content has to play its part in suspense-creation.

A hunger that grows as you eat

Your content has to create more and more suspense, but it also has to offer value.

Suspense doesn’t last forever; you’ll forget the promises at some point and your interest will be gone as well. You could remind the reader about the original promise, but if you constantly go back to that, it starts to feel like annoying hype…

Instead of going back to the original promises, make new ones and deliver what you promised before.

But there’s a big “but” to this approach: people came to read your post because of the headline, and they kept reading because of the first paragraphs. So, if you deliver the promises you made there, you lose most of the suspense.

The solution? Make smaller promises along the way that move the reader towards the main promises that you’ll deliver at the end.

Sub-headlines are maybe the easiest way to make more promises. For example “Suspense in Headlines” promises to explain how to create suspense in headlines. Deliver those promises in the following paragraphs and make promises about what’s to come to create more suspense.

And now I’ll finally deliver what I promised in yesterday’s post: what to do if you write about a general topic, or about something that your audience has already read a lot about.

Be weird or be square

Let’s say you write a post about healthy foods. Odds are your audience has already read a post or two (or 100) about the same topic.

You could be more specific and write about the health benefits spirulina has. But maybe you want to write about healthy foods in general and you know your post is the greatest article ever written about it.

Well, none of your readers care to read more about that … unless you frame your message the right way.

How do you frame something ordinary as something new and interesting? You do something unexpected, or weird.

How interesting is “How to Eat Healthy”? Compare that to: “How Not to Eat Yourself to Early Death,” “How to Be as Green as a Gorilla,” or “Are You Killing Your Children with Food?” Any one of these headlines will most definitely get more people to read your post than the original one.

But it’s not quite that simple. Most people make two mistakes with being weird:

  1. The headline isn’t weird enough or it’s not weird in the right way, so it doesn’t capture attention or create fascination.
  2. The content loses the fascination the headline created.

The first problem isn’t so difficult to solve. Just think of something so freaky that you’d skip your trip to the Moon to read what it’s about.

The second challenge is what most bloggers get so wrong. When you start with a weird headline, you promise weird (that is, entertaining) content. And most importantly you promise your content to stick to the weirdness of the headline; if you just explain what the headline means in the first paragraph, readers will probably leave.

So, if your headline is, How to Seduce a Goldfish, you’d better write about seducing goldfishes…

Can you write a post that gets read to the end?

Have you written a post that gets visitors to read to the end? Why not share it in the comments below?

101 Headline Formulas is a FREE eBook that’s Not Just a Swipe File; it also explains what should come after each headline to keep readers reading to the end. To learn Persuasive Copywriting, building High-Conversion Landing Pages, and the Real Principles of Effective Marketing, check out Affect Selling by Peter Sandeen.

Written on 7/21/2012 at 3:05 am by

Weekend Project: Write Posts that Hold Readers to the End, Part 1

Filed Under: Featured Posts, Writing Content

This guest post is by Peter Sandeen of Affect Selling.

Do you know why most of your blog’s visitors quickly scroll down your home page, read a couple of headlines, and go back to watching cute kitty videos on YouTube?

Reading

Image courtesy stock.xchng user svenic.

And why those who begin reading a post, only read the first two paragraphs before leaving to read their favorite blogs—blogs which might not even be as good as yours is?

There are two principles behind the solution.

The principles are simple, but not necessarily easy. But when you do get them right, you’re much closer to your goal of having the most popular blog in the world, and getting an email from Darren Rowse asking if you could read his guest post idea for your blog (I’m still waiting for this to happen…).

If you write posts that don’t get read, you’re wasting your time. Your audience can’t grow, AdSense will keep making you $0.08 per month, and your email list’s reach will stay limited to your mom and your dog (for whom you created an email address to have more subscribers).

If and when you start to use these principles in your posts, you’ll see a shift in your audience; they’ll share your posts on social media, they’ll leave comments, and they subscribe to get more of your content.

Here are the principles you must know, to have any chance of making it as a blogger. Just understanding them will get you leaps and bounds ahead of other bloggers in your niche.

The headline captures attention

The headline is the most important part of any post. Why? Because people either read your posts or leave your site based on your headlines.

In other words, publishing a post without a great headline won’t do you any good.

There are three things you need to get right in the headline.

  1. The topic.
  2. The angle.
  3. The placement.

When you get all of these right, your headline will capture your audience’s attention and get them to click it anxiously, waiting to read the post.

1. The topic of the headline

The most obvious topic of your post isn’t nearly always the best topic for the headline.

For example, let’s say you write a post about weight loss—more specifically, about “man boobs.” You have two headlines to choose from:

  1. How to Lose Weight
  2. How to Get Rid of Man Boobs

Which one will attract more attention from the target audience for that post?

Grabbing attention is not just about being specific: it’s about using what your audience wants to know more of. Weight loss is such a general and common topic that most people wouldn’t dream of reading another post about it, even if they’re somewhat interested in it.

“Man boobs” on the other hand (I promise I won’t say, “man boobs” anymore), is specific—it’s probably not something anyone has read 100 posts about previously.

What if your topic is actually something general like “weight loss,” with no more specific focus? Well, you’ll get the answer to that in tomorrow’s post, so remember to check back…

2. The angle of the headline

Did you think it’s enough to just pick the right topic to feature in your headline? Figuring out the topic is just the start: you need to find the right angle for it too.

What is an “angle” in a headline? It’s the way you present a topic. For example: “Basics of landing pages” isn’t really that interesting. What about Stockmann-Syndrome – Don’t Try this (Landing Page) at Home?

The first headline may point to the same content as the latter one. But there’s an important difference: the latter is unlikely to make you think, “I’ve already read that.” Instead, it makes a promise to deliver something new to an old topic, or at least to be entertaining.

There are also really important differences between the words used here, even when they’re basically synonyms. For example, “How to” implies simple and easy-to-use-use content made for non-experts, while you can use “Learn to” with more complicated topics, and when your audience is better educated about the topic. “How to Build a Helicopter” sounds like a joke, but “Learn to Build a Helicopter” sounds like there’s something to it.

And one more mistake you can make is to ask a question people will answer, “No, I’m not interested in that.” Copyblogger did that some months ago, and they wrote an interesting post about the mistake.

3. The placement of the headline

What if you saw the headline, “How to Be a Good News Anchor,” here at ProBlogger?

You might click through to see what the heck it’s about. But you’re not here to learn about building a career as a news anchor. On the other hand, what if it said, “How to Look Authoritative on Video”? You’d be much more interested, right?

The context of your headline changes how people react to it and what expectations it creates. Sure, you won’t write a headline that far off the mark, but smaller details make a huge difference as well.

Can you write a headline that gets clicked?

If you’re up for it, leave a link to your best headline (or just tell us what your headline is) in the comments below.

Keep in mind, this is just the first principle. You’ll get people to start reading your post with a great headline, but getting them to read to the end is a different goal. We’ll look at that in the second post in this series!

101 Headline Formulas is a FREE eBook that’s Not Just a Great Swipe File; it also explains what should come after each headline to keep readers reading to the end. To learn Persuasive Copywriting, how to build High-Conversion Landing Pages, and understand the practical application of the Real Principles of Effective Marketing, check out Affect Selling by Peter Sandeen.