Five Steps to Starting Your Nonprofit’s Storytelling Campaign
A few months ago, someone asked me about how to start a storytelling campaign for her nonprofit. She wanted to spread the word about how the nonprofit helps young people who are blind and have developmental disabilities. She teaches gardening and horticulture and helps her students to run a business and deal with a few […]
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Half of All Written Content Online Is Sh*t
To paraphrase Ernest Hemingway, half of all written content is shit. While he actually said “the first draft of anything is shit,” I would maintain that this applies to all online content in general for a couple of reasons: If we look at a normal bell curve of distribution, you know there’s a halfway mark […]
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The Importance of Citing Original Sources In Your Content Marketing
Content marketers like to cite long-held statistics in their blog articles that get batted around from story to story, blog to blog, marketer to marketer. They’re the stories that get told over and over and over again, but no one is actually sure where they come from. They’re just widely accepted and firmly believed, even […]
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Content Marketers Need to Study Sportswriters
Sportswriters are some of the best writers around. Period, end of sentence. Especially the sports columnists. Go into any newsroom anywhere, and read samples of the best work from each writer, and the sports columnists will have some of the best writing in the entire room. That’s because they’re some of the best storytellers around. […]
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What is the Ideal Paragraph Length?
What’s the ideal paragraph length? Is there an ideal paragraph length? Are there hard-and-fast rules that govern how long our paragraphs — “grafs,” if you’re cool and/or “in the biz” — or can you just create paragraphs of different lengths willy-nilly, like some damn hippie? The latest episode of Grammar Girl’s podcast opened with this […]
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Blogging For Your Business Speaker Schedule
I’m part of the Blogging For Your Business seminar series this month, and it’s already well underway. I’m very honored to be a part of such an august group and know several of the names on here. If you want to learn about how blogging can establish you as an expert in your field, boost […]
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Five Grammar Rules You’re Allowed to Break
The English language is filled with all kinds of grammar rules that should never have been grammar rules in the first place. Some were created a few hundred years ago, some were created in the 20th century, but many of them were incorrect and are just parroted out of habit. In other cases, some of […]
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The Conundrum of Writing With Integrity
I recently heard Jamal Greene on a recent Two Writers Slinging Yang podcast interview, talking about his time writing at Sports Illustrated. He talked about writing at Sports Illustrated where the writing became an issue of what the reader wanted. He called it a form of customer service, or “serve to order.” If the customer […]
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What Kinds of Content Can You Create Based on Writers’ Archetypes
A few weeks ago, I (re)published a blog article called The Eight Writers’ Archetypes and the kinds of things they write. This breaks down the writing field beyond just fiction and non-fiction. It looks at the different areas where writers can work in education, news, politics, PR, marketing, and fiction. Here’s a truncated version of […]
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The Future of Content Marketing Will Not Be Different
What is the future of content marketing? I’m often asked, what will content marketing look like in the future? People are surprised with my answer: Just like it does now. It’s not going to be different, we’re not going to see some major new way of “consuming content” (I really loathe that phrase!), and there’s […]
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Pick ONLY One: Creative, Analytics, or Strategy
A friend recently posted a survey on LinkedIn that asked which of these three factors were most important to succeed in modern marketing: Data Analysis, Creative, or Strategy. Or as I framed it for someone, take your marketing budget and divide it into four equal parts. Each of these areas gets 25% of the budget, […]
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Understand Your Content Marketing ROI
I was asked recently about content marketing ROI, specifically around blogging and email marketing. I’m a big believer in the importance of content marketing over other forms of marketing (since I’m a professional content marketer), and I like to sing the praises of business blogging services and email marketing. When I was trying to explain […]
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Five Terrible Ways to Start a Blog Article and Five Good Ways
As a content writer, I cringe and writhe in pain when I see some content marketers’ openings — ledes, in journalism parlance — of their blog posts and journal articles. They’re cheap, amateurish, and they say absolutely nothing. They’re terrible ways to start a blog article, and they can wreck what might have been an […]
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Marketers, Put Analogies, Similes, and Metaphors to Work for You
What’s the difference between metaphors, similes, and analogies? Not a lot, unless you’re a word nerd like me. Short answer: Metaphors describe an idea; similes do the same, but use “like” or “as.” Analogies are that mystery comparison that we all pretend to know what it means, but we really think it’s a simile. Ann […]
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Don’t Worry If You Write Similar Articles: 5 Reasons Why You Should
Sometimes when I’m working with clients, I’ll write similar articles with topics that overlap in one or two ways. They cover nearly the same topic. Or they use some of the same keywords. Or they cover two different solutions that solve the same problem. Or two different problems that can be fixed with the same […]
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Be Bold with Content Marketing Choices: Podcasts, Books, Graphic Novels!
There’s such a mountain of dreck and garbage in content marketing today that it’s burying all the good stuff. And that doesn’t include anything that’s generated by AI programs. Most of it is mediocre garbage created by barely-skilled practitioners who pray at the altar of First thought = best thought. We miss out on all […]
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How to Find Your Client’s Voice as a Writer
If you’re a ghostwriter or freelance writer, it can be difficult to find your client’s voice. It’s not as important if you’re only doing a small one-off project like an email, but it’s critical if you’re ghostwriting a book, a speech, or a series of blog articles for a corporation. Here are a few ways […]
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Stop Leaning on These Five Copywriting Crutches
Even the best copywriters use clichés and rely on copywriting crutches. It’s inevitable, but it’s preventable. We’re trying to spit out a lot of copy on tight deadlines, and while our fingers may work faster than our brains, our brains will pop out any old stuff just to keep our fingers moving. And that’s how […]
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