Brad Johnson is an author and blogger who helps writers discover their niche, build successful habits, and quit their 9-5. His books include Ignite Your Beacon, Writing Clout and Tomes Of A Healing Heart. For strategic content and practical tips on how to become a full-time writer, visit: BradleyJohnsonProductions.com.
https://writetodone.com/blogging-mistakes/
Editor’s note: We all make blogging mistakes. Even editors of blogs like WritetoDone occasionally mess up! Often this is because we forget to KISS. KISS stands for ‘Keep It Simple, Stupid’. It’s not meant to be derogatory, as the first article in the series explains. Instead, it’s meant to be a way to check if […]
The post 5 Simple but Crippling Blogging Mistakes (& How to Avoid Them) appeared first on WTD.
As an editor, one of the first pieces of feedback I give to writers is to vary word choice and sentence structure. But there’s one place where I go in the complete opposite direction: quote attribution.
When I started managing a local alt-weekly five years ago, I inherited their style guide. I could change it, but I decided to give it a little test drive first.
That style guide recommended that writers almost exclusively use a simple “subject says” format to attribute quotes. I bristled a little. Taking all the wonderful varied ways to frame a quote and jettisoning them in favor of “says” felt wrong, sparse and cold.
But as I worked with more and more writers, I converted to the “subject says” formula. It strengthened pieces in a few ways, and I’ve carried this framework into other work. This advice is drawn from non-fiction and journalistic style writing, but you could also apply this approach to fiction if it suits your voice.
If you’re unsure about fully converting to a “subject says” formulation, here are two ways it could help strengthen your writing.
When introducing a quote from a source, you’ll include some context around who’s speaking.
Sometimes it’s more basic, such as the source’s occupation and expertise in an area. If the interview was held in a location that highlights your subject’s relevance to the subject, that could make its way in as well.
It makes a difference if the mayor is making a statement outside City Hall, or an offhand comment to a writer who’s followed them along to their kid’s soccer game. If you’re writing about someone who champions minimalism and they’re sitting behind a desk covered in post-it notes and stacks of books, that’s information your readers could find interesting.
This context helps, but remember that you’ve included your source in the piece for a reason. They offer credibility, or an insight, or an experience that is unique, and their voice matters. The context surrounding a quote shouldn’t overshadow the quote itself.
Your goal should be to showcase your source, not your writing. And overly flowery quote attributions can subtly (and not-so-subtly) pull focus away from the quotes – and away from the source – toward the writer.
The beauty of sticking with “says” is from a reader’s perspective, it doesn’t jump out. It does its work quietly, lets the reader know who’s speaking and then leaves them to continue on with the piece.
Not every word or turn of phrase needs to showcase the craft of the writer. A habit of “says” relieves your quote attributions of the pressure of communicating more than they have to. It makes space for your quotes to stand out. It keeps the focus on the source, not the framing of their quote.
Are there exceptions to this? Of course! Context is important for framing a quote, and unless you’ve interviewed someone who’s very tight-lipped, you’ll likely end up with more usable quotes than you have room for in your word count.
Sometimes selecting the best section of the quote means losing part of the context. Quote attributions can put this context back in concisely while keeping an otherwise low profile.
Examples of these include:
Other attributions might seem to add something, but often don’t say much more than “says,” including:
If you’re unsure, ask yourself: would the meaning of the quote be lost if the attribution was changed to “says”? If not, stick with “says.” Sometimes less is more.
Another trick to keep your attributions clean and clear is to use the “subject says” order rather than “says subject.” The closer the source’s name is to their quote, the less work there is for the reader to connect the two.
Consider our hypothetical minimalism expert from earlier – let’s call her Linda Lesser – and some possible options to frame a quote of hers. None of these frameworks are necessarily wrong, but while reading these over, consider how many elements of the story you’re mentally keeping track of while finding your way through the sentence.
Linda Lesser, a self-styled consultant in minimalist approaches to work spaces, says that “A clean desk is like a clean slate, and can reduce potential distractions.”
Consider the distance there between Lesser and her quote, and if her qualifications add much in the preface.
“A clean desk is like a clean slate, and can reduce potential distractions,” says self-styled consultant in minimalist work spaces Linda Lesser.
This puts the quote up front and is more engaging, but there’s still a gap between quote and attribution.
“A clean desk is like a clean slate, and can reduce potential distractions,” Linda Lesser, a self-styled consultant in minimalist work spaces, says.
This is my preference for combining a quote with context, as we’ve linked the words directly to Linda, and then add context after. The reader doesn’t need to keep track of too much. And even simpler yet:
“A clean desk is like a clean slate, and can reduce potential distractions,” Linda Lesser says. She’s a self-styled consultant in minimalist work spaces, and…
The quote is linked to the source, and then we move on to more about Lesser. Her qualifications act as a transition from the quote, so another interesting fact could be added in afterward without bogging the sentence down.
It’s essential to vary sentence structure somewhat, but consider how many elements you’re asking your reader to carry along the way.
A source adds a new voice to the piece. A simple quote attribution can help readers keep track of the action without getting too distracted.
How do you attribute quotes in your writing? Let us know in the comments below.
Photo via metamorworks / Shutterstock
The post “Ah, That Was Easy!” — A Quick, Simple Trick to Make Your Quotes Stand Out appeared first on The Write Life.
https://conversionsciences.com/the-cluetrain-manifesto-twenty-years-later-still-relevant/
Having trouble viewing the text? You can always read the original article here: The Cluetrain Manifesto Twenty Years Later: Still relevant
“Markets are Conversations.” This the opening salvo in the Cluetrain Manifesto. It’s 95 theses were written at the dawn of the commercial internet to help businesses understand how things had changed. Twenty years later, did we heed their advice? Is the Cluetrain Manifesto still relevant? Contrarians. They’re trouble. At least they’re trouble in structured organizations. […]
The post The Cluetrain Manifesto Twenty Years Later: Still relevant appeared first on Conversion Sciences.
https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/614982578/0/convinceandconvertconsulting/
Building consistent organic search traffic is every digital publisher’s dream. But what does it really take to make your content SEO friendly?
The good news is it is not a rocket science.
On top of that, despite what many people think, it has nothing to do with “tricking” Google into thinking your content is high-quality or SEO friendly.
SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”, which basically means making sure a search algorithm can easily access and understand your content. There’s no dark art involved.
So you have an idea in mind which you feel like writing about. This is where any content creation starts: “I have something to say on this topic, and I feel like it will be interesting and/or useful”.
Is anyone searching for this topic?
Chances are, if you have come up with the topic, there should be other people who may feel intrigued enough to research it in Google.
But how exactly are people searching for it?
This is the key question you should ask if you want to generate organic search engine traffic to your future content.
You need to know what people type in a search box when trying to find answers to questions you are covering in your content.
So your first step is to find those actual search queries.
This exercise is also useful because it helps research. Knowing what people are typing in Google’s search box will likely help you discover interesting angles, narrow your initial idea down to make it more specific and even structure your future article to make it more useful.
So even if you don’t really care about organic search positions, keyword research is useful to do.
But how?
The keyword research process — at its core — hasn’t changed much over the years. We do have much more data to work with, but the actual process is the same.
These days, we have a variety of tools that help you identify a keyword to focus on. Here are a few tools and approaches you can try:
Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer is a great tool for that because it offers “All keyword ideas” tab that broadens your initial idea to related and synonymous terms.
So if you were to type [grow tomatoes] and click through to that section, you’d find both phrases containing the term (e.g. “how to grow tomatoes”) and related concepts (e.g. “when to plant tomatoes“):
This broadens your outlook and helps you come up with more words to include in your copy.
If you’ve done at least some research on your content idea, you may have found some resources that are on the same or similar topic. So use those URLs to discover what they are ranking for.
Serpstats’ URL Analysis section is great for that:
Notice that Serpstat is also showing all “extra” search elements that show up for each query in Google, so you get a good idea of what your future target SERPs (search engine result pages) may look like.
Note that both of these platforms offer “keyword difficulty” metric signaling of the level of your future organic competition. Obviously, the lower the keyword difficulty is, the better.
On the other hand, the higher the search volume, the more clicks each SERP may drive. So you want to try and pick a keyword that has high search volume and low keyword difficulty.
Here’s a more detailed guide on keyword research for you to become better at it. And here are even more keyword research questions answered.
While the process of researching keywords hasn’t changed much, the way we use keywords within content has.
These days, we don’t sacrifice the quality or flow of our copy for the sake of keyword density. In fact, we don’t pay attention to how many times we have used those keywords on-page.
We do use those keywords in prominent places on the page to make both Google and our human visitors more comfortable and confident there.
To put it simply, upon landing on your page, your users should clearly see terms they initially typed in the search box. That will put them more at ease and prompt them to linger a bit longer.
Keyword prominence means making your keywords visible on the page. It helps both search engine optimization and user-retention. Both of these help rankings.
Basically, you want those keywords to appear in:
Many SEO plugins (like Yoast and SEO Editor) can handle a lot of these SEO elements, so it is a good idea to pick one.
As I have already stated before, Google has moved away from matching the exact query to the pages in its index. Ever since its Hummingbird update, Google has slowly but surely become better and better at understanding each query context and searcher’s intent behind it.
To match that context better and optimize for the intent, use semantic analysis, which is basically about clustering each query into underlying and related concepts and covering you in your content.
Text Optimizer is a tool that takes Google’s search snippets for any query and applies semantic analysis to identify areas of improvement. Text Optimizer can be used for writing new content from scratch:
You can also use the tool to analyze your existing content to identify areas of improvements:
As you can see, Text Optimizer also helps analyze whether your content meets the query intent.
To increase your score at Text Optimizer:
Google loves textual content, but the Internet in general and Google in particular has moved beyond text-only. Web users expect to see more formats, including videos and images. And Google recognizes that demand for content diversity, so it will feature all of those content formats.
In my previous article for Convince and Convert I described how videos improve SEO on many levels, including more exposure in search engine result pages and better on-page engagement.
With that in mind, any time you work on your article, think which other content assets can be created to enhance its value and improve SEO.
Luckily, creating videos doesn’t require any budget or skills. With tools like InVideo you can turn your articles into videos in a matter of seconds:
You are done! Now, upload the video to Youtube, add a keyword-rich title and description and embed it to your article.
For images, you can use Venngage or Visme to create nice visual takeaways or flowcharts (in case you have instructions to follow).
Finally, there’s always room for improvement, so monitoring your organic traffic is an important step here.
The must-have tool for that is Google’s own Search Console, which will show you which queries are sending you traffic. Just check your “Performance” tab regularly:
Another useful tool to have is Finteza, which shows your organic traffic performance allowing you to dig deeper to see whether your organic traffic clicks engage with your ads.
… or whether each search query sends traffic that brings conversions.
Obviously, it is more to Google position than on-page optimization. You still need those backlinks that would help Google assign some authority to your content. But that’s a topic outside of the scope of this article. Besides, there’s a lot of content already written on that. And here’s another collection of tips on how to build links.
Finally, the above steps apply to any kind of optimization, whether it’s a blog, product pages or lead-generating landing pages.
I hope this guide will help you optimize your content to make it easier for Google to understand and hence help the search giant’s algorithm assign search positions it truly deserves.
The post How to Make Content SEO Friendly appeared first on Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting.
https://www.rohitbhargava.com/2020/01/ten-stories-about-non-obvious-megatrends-you-should-read.html
Earlier this week I sent the 200th edition of my weekly Non-Obvious Insights email and my book Non-Obvious Megatrends just launched on Tuesday so there is lots happening this week!
Thank you to everyone who has already bought the book and shared their review. Last night I found out with hit #1 in about fifteen categories on Amazon, #2 overall in the Business category (behind the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People) and the Top 25 of ALL books on Amazon.
In honor of launch this week, I thought I would share some fascinating stories from the week organized in terms of each of the ten megatrends from my latest book. I hope you enjoy the stories this week and if you happen to live in one of the cities where we are having launch events coming up (DC, NY, Boston, Orange County, Seattle, SF or Cincinnati) – then perhaps we might meet up in person!
There were two elements of this megatrend that came out in the news this week. The first was an interesting exploration from Psychology Today on whether the extreme social withdrawal of the Hikkomori in Japan (which I also wrote about in the chapter) may be leading to a global epidemic of isolation. Another side of this megatrend is the importance of our online selves to our overall identity, and there was a story about new survey results from Kaplan suggesting that universities are once again using social media profiles to help evaluate college applicants.
People expect to learn everything faster and are frustrated when they can’t. This story about Captain America actor Chris Evans was a perfect example of Instant Knowledge. Evans was frustrated by the length of Wikipedia entries on political topics and so he decided to create his own site to more simply explain complex issues. While this article snarkily called it “a vanity project to save democracy,” we’ll likely see more efforts like this in the coming months.
Every week there seem to be several stories about gender issues and how our culture seems to be evolving. This week was no different with a story about a new single from rapper Saucy Santana suggesting that anyone of any gender could be a “material girl.” This week Gucci also unveiled their Winter 2020 menswear fashion line – featuring a rebuke of toxic masculinity and including plenty of ungendered options.
It’s a good week for remakes and we’re just a week away from the new Star Trek show bringing back Patrick Stewart as Picard (which I’m insanely excited about) and the network already renewed for a second season. NBC is even talking about doing a remake of Quantum Leap.
There are continually stories of the power of human connection and authenticity and this week I loved this story about Brazilian photographer Angélica Dass who is “on a mission to capture examples of every skin color in the world, to prove that diversity goes beyond the standard confines of white, black, red, and yellow.” You can check out her collection of images here. (HT to my friend Gautam Gulati for sharing this story.)
Trust is hard and skepticism is high. This megatrend talks about both and so there were plenty of related stories this week that brought it to life. In one example, Instagram announced they would start hiding Photoshopped images. Another story focused on Nordstrom’s renewed efforts to create a more experiential retail experience to stand out. And my friends over the Future of Storytelling spotlighted a very cool new augmented reality experience called the Museum of the Hidden City which is worth checking out.
The importance of brand purpose in an era of empowered consumers is the focus of this megatrend, and this week marketing publication The Drum explored this idea of the rise of the conscious consumer. In other news, Amazon was widely criticized for Jeff Bezos’ relatively small contribution to Australian bushfires and an excellent Vox article pointed to a key factor being Bezos’ reputation as one of the world’s stingiest billionaires.
Data stories tend to be quite black and white – there are big breaches of data or smart uses of it. This week there was a positive story of how India’s top banks are launching a system that gives consumers access to their own financial data along with the ability to share it instantly. At the same time, a new story broke about how Grindr and Tinder are selling user’s personal data.
Technology is getting smarter and more proactive about protecting us in every situation. That’s a key idea from this megatrend and it was perfectly demonstrated in the story this week of how Microsoft is trying to improve child abuse detection by opening it’s Xbox chat tool to other companies.
The central idea behind this megatrend is that the lines between what used to be different industries are starting to blur. In yet another example of this, Warner Brothers film studio announced this week that they signed a deal with Cinelytic, a machine learning startup that uses AI to predict a film’s commercial success.
For most authors, creative writing is a labor of love: You’re probably not going to make enough money to pay off your bills and retire to a private island. Literary journals often operate on a shoestring budget and can’t afford to offer more than a token payment, if anything, for the stories, essays, and poems they publish. Some writing contests offer cash prizes, but only if you win. But don’t put away your piggy bank yet, writers: You may be able to make some money with personal essays and narrative nonfiction. The experts at Writer’s Relief know where to look for the best opportunities to make a little pocket change.
Write For Local Publications
Print media has taken a hard hit, but there are still opportunities to write for local news outlets or magazines. Many traditionally print-only publications are now offering digital versions as well, and they’ll need material to post.
Check Out Freelance Writing Websites
Websites like ProBlogger and iWriter offer frequently updated lists of freelance writing opportunities for hopeful contributors. Every freelance writing website has pros and cons, so make sure you do your research before selecting one to work with. Once you’ve determined which freelance website best suits you, making contact: The more you apply, the more likely you’ll get a gig—and the sooner you can get paid for it!
Start Blogging
Writers who have built an online following may be able to make some money by blogging—and a few dedicated writers may even blog full-time. If you want to bring in money by blogging, you’ll need to draw in a large crowd. Find your voice so you can deliver a message that’s unique and engaging. And stick to a schedule! Many bloggers start out with a promising premise, but then fade into obscurity when they become lax about posting regularly. Both your audience and the online algorithms will appreciate—and reward—consistent posts!
Research Possible Literary Magazines
While most literary journals don’t pay for accepted submissions—some do! You’ll have to spend time researching to find publications that pay their contributors. Once you find literary magazines that do pay for personal essays and nonfiction, be sure your writing style and subject matter are a good match; don’t send willy-nilly to any and every paying journal just for the sake of submitting. All you’ll end up doing is annoying the editors and get a reputation for not following publishing industry etiquette.
Before You Submit Personal Essays To Publications That Pay—Do This!
Of course, before you try to get paid for your personal essays and nonfiction, you must do this one important thing: Write a great essay! It’s important to understand the market you’re writing for—know what the readers want and what the editor is looking for in submissions. By putting a personal spin on the bigger issues, you’ll engage more readers. Then you’ll be ready to try the opportunities listed above and maybe make some money with your writing!
Question: What strategies have you found successful for getting paid for your writing?
