Archive for How to…Tips – Page 10

Starting a Business Blog? Read Me First

I hear it all the time:  smart professionals, who are great at what they do, don’t have enough time to blog, or even start a business blog. Recently someone shared with me how they had started blogging with great gusto – they put in a lot of time – but got stuck, and never went back.  It reminded me of something I once heard…

About 20 years ago I was recovering from an illness and to avoid being bored, I took up needle work, you know, cross-stitching designs on canvas with yarn. One day as I was completing a big canvas, I was listening to a motivational speaker.

All of a sudden, I heard these words:

Most people just start doing things without reading the instruction manual.”

Loud and clear. I looked down at my needle work and like a shock, it hit me. I’d been doing them all backwards.

Sure enough, a quick reference back to the user manual clearly showed that I was inserting the needle backwards, not producing the right effect. I put down my work and never went back to that hobby ever again.

My point is that I see many professionals who are pretty smart at what they do, but they start blogging without reading any instructions at all. Later, when they get stuck, they complain about not having “enough time” to blog. Read More→

7 Blog Writing Steps BEFORE You Check for Keywords

This is a little story I share with new blogging clients who get hung up about keywords. One client in particular (let’s call him Ted) had written about 10 blog posts which were saved as drafts because he was worried about keywords.

Let me say that there’s a learning curve involved in writing for your blog, and there’s no way around it. The only way to learn to write good blog posts is to write and publish blog posts—a lot of them. Saving them as drafts won’t work.

Being that it’s U.S. Open time, I was thinking about how this relates to tennis (of course!). You can practice your serve on a tennis court by yourself too. But until you serve the ball to someone on the other side of the net and keep score in a game, it really doesn’t count. You can’t learn from your results.

Here’s what I told Ted, “When you sit down to write a new post, focus first on these steps:

7 Blog Writing Steps BEFORE You Check for Keywords

  1. Write to deliver valuable information that solves a problem for your typical reader
  2. Grab their attention and make it interesting to them through stories or examples Read More→

Does Your Blog Post Answer These 4 Questions?

This is important: You want your blog posts to educate, entertain, engage, and enrich readers of your business blog. Aim for all four of these goals when blog writing, and you can’t go wrong.

What do you need to remember when writing a post that’s designed to educate? I wrote about that here: Educate Your Readers, about the four different learning styles of blog readers.

According to the 4MAT system on www.aboutlearning.com, when you’re educating people you need to appeal to four different kinds of learning styles:

  1. Imaginative learners
  2. Analytic learners
  3. Common sense learners
  4. Dynamic learners

How does this translate into blog writing for your business? Think in terms of the questions each type of learner would be asking as they read your blog post:

  1. Why?
  2. What?
  3. How?
  4. What if? Read More→

How to Avoid Problems with Hyphens and Dashes…

Have you ever encountered this problem when blogging or writing content marketing?

Because of the informal nature of writing on a blog, or for online ezines, people now write like they speak – you know what I mean? Instead of commas or semi-colons, everyone uses dashes to interject phrases – just like the way we talk.

But everyone uses them differently! Forget the Chicago Manual of Style! As I read through other great blogs, I see lots of variations on the use of hyphens and dashes:

1. People use a double hyphen–like this. Sometimes with a space on both sides — like this, sometimes with no spaces on either side.

2. People use a hyphen instead of a dash. This is most likely because the dash is not on the keyboard. You have to find it under symbols and who wants to take time to do that?

3. People use an en dash instead of the em dash. An en dash is the shorter version of the em dash. With an en dash there is a space on both sides – with an em dash, there are no spaces—you just put it in.

Am I the only one who cares about this? If we are not going to follow the rules of academia as outlined in the manuals, are we inventing new usages because of the lack of a dash on the keyboard?

(WordPress tip: you can insert custom characters found in the omega icon in your wysiwyg editor.)

I feel like the author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves (Lynn Truss)…my inner stickler is on the loose.

Let’s all get together and decide: if we use a hyphen instead of a dash, let’s make it just one with spaces on both sides – like this, okay? Personally, I prefer the em dash with spaces on both sides — but that’s not supposed to be correct.

Unless you write in to tell me you’d prefer something else, I’ll keep on doing that and assume you agree with me…

Landing Pages: Get Readers to Take Action

How do you get readers to take action? Short answer: a landing page. (Also known as a sales page, squeeze page)

You can’t get results from all the content you’re creating and publishing on your blog, e-newsletter, social media sites, unless eventually you send people to a landing page and ask them to take action.

Otherwise, you may be creating a great brand, great thought leadership, great content… and so what? Sooner or later, you need to ask your readers to actually do something. You need a landing page to do that.

Landing page definition: An attractive, compelling page:

  • Published on the Internet that is
  • Optimized for search engines and
  • Designed to persuade a defined group of readers
  • To take one specific action

Here’s what I created (yes, again with the Smart Draw) to illustrate:

Read More→

Tips on Blog Post Optimization

What are the steps you need to follow to ensure each blog post is optimized for search engines as well as well-written for your readers’ interests? Oh my… there are a lot. But to keep me out of overwhelm, I wrote them down, and put them into a flow chart.

This is good for days when I’m brain dead and likely to forget something important. But it’s also a good chart for anyone working with a V.A. or assistant who needs to take over some of the tasks for you.

After I decide what it is I want to write about (see my earlier post, Blogger’s Block: Writing Tips to Get “Unstuck), I follow these steps for posting on my blog:

Flow chart, continued: Read More→

Blogger’s Block: Writing Tips to Get “Unstuck”

What do you do when you’re stuck and can’t write on your blog? Here are some blog writing tips. I diagrammed them out.

It’s the rainy season here in Mexico – a great time to do a lot of reading and writing.  At least, that’s what one would think…But…I’m having trouble.  I’m stuck.  I’ve got Blogger’s Block.  (Yes, even experienced bloggers can get stuck from time to time.)

Solution? Start writing about where I’m at, what’s going on here, and then tie it in with something useful and relevant to readers. That’s one blog writing tip that usually bails me out.

Source of problem? I’ve been blogging so much lately for my clients that I’m dried up and stale for my own blog.

So what? I’ll bet some of you have the same blog writing problem or similar. You give your all to your clients, then when it comes time to do your own content marketing you’re as dry as toast without butter.

It’s no wonder the cobbler’s children have no shoes.

What to do? One blog writing tips is to “Just do it,” just start writing and see what comes out. You may surprise yourself. One of my clients tells me he doesn’t write that much anymore. He finds it easier to hook up the Web cam and post a video clip. Hmmm…wait a sec.

Just by starting to write, I had to trace my thought processes to find what I usually do when I am stuck. This time I diagrammed it out using SmartDraw.

It’s interesting, no? Much easier to show than tell, and you can clearly see my four favorite resources for breaking bloggers’ block.

I will now go walk my talk and come up with some good blog posts.

And if you’re still having trouble, I’ve got more tips in a great little package you can have called Time Saving Tips for Smart Bloggers, audio, transcript, PDF handouts. You can solve your blogging blues with all the tips in this program.

What resources do you use to find ideas? Hit the comment link and share.

Online Persuasion: How to Write to Create Desire

When writing online, how can you appeal to readers’ emotions on a business-oriented site? Online persuasion works best when you appeal to both the logical and emotional centers in the brain.

If you want to write content that persuades readers – both thinking type and feeling type processors – to take action, you write about emotional triggers AND provide reasons to act.

Many online content marketers misunderstand what it means to “appeal to emotions.”  How exactly do you bypass the conscious thinking brain and instantly connect with readers’ emotional centers, out of their conscious awareness?

It’s easier than you might think. Stephen Denning writes about this in his book The Secret Language of Leadership, and these lessons for leadership communications are applicable to writing web content.

Here’s a diagram of how many business professionals traditionally write content when they want to persuade people to take action:

The traditional communication approach follows this sequence:

Define the problem ► Analyze it ►Recommend a solution

Effective content marketers, however, follow a unique, almost hidden pattern:

Grab the audience’s attention ► Stimulate desire ► Reinforce with reasons

When language follows this sequence, it can inspire enduring enthusiasm for a cause and spark action.

Grab Attention:

  • Write headlines that draw the reader in
  • Use images that evoke curiosity, humor, or desire
  • Format your content for easy reading

Stimulate Desire: Read More→

7 Writing Tips to Connect Emotionally with Readers

How do you create an emotional connection with your readers? More importantly, how do you get them so inspired they want to take action, like join your list, opt-in, comment, or buy something? Here are some psychological secrets to keep in mind.

When writing on the web – either in a blog post, an ezine or other forms of content marketing, readers are more likely to respond to your offers of service or products if there is a resonance between you. An emotional connection is forged when your reader experiences being on the same ‘wave length’ as you. This can be done several ways.

I have to warn you: this is not always easy to do in an email, ezine or blog. Why? Because people are so different, and what is appealing on an emotional level to one is aversive to another.

Furthermore, the written word lacks the vocal intonation and body language that usually communicate meaning to your messages. So you have to be very clear when writing, more so than with speaking.

Remember, in another post I talked about 50 percent of people being ‘feelers’ and the other 50 percent ‘thinkers.’ So using emotional language will probably put off some people instead of connecting with them.

Don’t forget that even thinking type people have emotions. And emotional type people are also quite rational. So striking resonance means you have to show you care and show that you are logical at the same time.

Make no mistake: it’s not easy to successfully connect on an emotional level with a large subscribership. Here are my
suggestions for doing this:

  1. If you want to forge emotional ties, try reaching your readers on a level of their “humanness”… universal needs and wants of all human beings. We all want a sense of belonging, we all want to feel a part of life and society and we all seek meaning out of life. There are certain emotions that are common world-wide: loneliness, alienation, love, achievement, pride, shame—the paradox of being human means we are sometimes bad and sometimes wrong as well as good and right.
  2. Another way to connect on an emotional level is to share some of your own humanness. Mistakes are a great way to do this. When a reader reads about something stupid you did, they access a memory link to something similar that they did. When you then explain your lessons learned, you are teaching them indirectly how they can apply this lesson to their own lives, without actually telling them to do anything. They can feel a kinship to you because they know you are like they are.
  3. You can also create emotional pictures by using words that ask the reader to imagine something. Ask them to become aware of their feelings when they imagine something. This is called hypnotic suggestion. Since we know that people buy for emotional reasons and then find a rationale for their purchases afterwards, this makes sense, no? Read More→

Are Your Content Readers Thinkers or Feelers?

Have you ever read an e-newsletter or blog post and got a feeling of disappointment? Maybe it was just too subjective, airy-fairy and touchy-feely? If so, then you may be like me, a thought-processing person who wants facts and data when reading content online, an e-newsletter or blog post.

Several years ago, my friend John Agno published this review of personality types in his newsletter.  It contains important information to consider when writing your blog, e-newsletter or content marketing to attract clients, and it still applies today.

The Myers-Briggs Personality Inventory is a method for helping people match their communication styles to others’ personalities.  Understanding Myers-Briggs allows you to foster the kind of interpersonal climate that paves the way toward better understanding.

One of the four Myers-Briggs dichotomies is Thinking/Feeling — that people use to assess their preferred ways of communicating, processing information, analyzing that information, and coming to a decision.

The population is evenly divided between thinkers and feelers. Two-thirds of men are thinkers and two-thirds of women are feelers, but 70% to 90% of businesspeople are thinkers, regardless of gender. The name of this dimension is slightly misleading. Thinkers aren’t unfeeling, and feelers aren’t fuzzy-headed. Both process information carefully. The difference is in what facts each group considers to be most salient. Read More→