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One More Method to Breaking Writer’s Block

March 13, 2012 By

Yesterday, I shared six methods for breaking through writer’s block. But I forgot one of my most favorite ones.

Writer's Block

If you find you’re stuck for a way to explain something or can’t quite figure out a direction of a story or article, explain it to a friend. I mean actually sit down face-to-face with someone and tell them what you’re trying to accomplish. If necessary, pull out paper and pen, and diagram what you’re talking about.

I’ve often found that in order to be able to put my thought process into words, I have to be able to crystallize my thoughts. It causes all the thoughts that are pinballing around my head to get into formation, and I can express them clearly and logically.

Once I do that, I get unstuck for what I’m trying to say, and everything makes sense. I will occasionally pop open my laptop or notebook and scribble down the thoughts in a brief outline, which I can go back to later. It especially helps if I have several minutes after talking to that person to put everything down in a complete idea dump, which I can go back and fix later.

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    Six Sure-Fire Methods to Break Writer’s Block

    March 12, 2012 By

    A lot of writers suffer from writer’s block. That big mental wall that sometimes get in the way of getting any writing done. But it doesn’t have to be permanent. Only a few times have people suffered career-ending writer’s block, but when that happens, we’ve gone beyond just plain ol’ writer’s block, and are getting into some serious performance anxiety.

    Here are six sure-fire methods you can use to break through your own writer’s block.Erik Deckers' Moleskine & Coffee Tumbler

    • Carry a notebook with you at all times: I keep a little black Moleskine notebook and pen with me close at hand. Whenever I have an idea or a thought that I know I’ll want to use later, I write it down. If I have several minutes, I’ll write as much as I can about the idea that inspired me. Oftentimes, when I’m stuck for a topic or struggling with an idea, I’ll pull out the notebook and refer to what I’ve already written. Or if I’ve written enough, the material from the notebook is what I needed in the first place. I just transcribe it and clean it up.
    • Write something else: Most writers I know get hung up on one particular project. They can’t write this blog post, they can’t write that article. So write something else. If you’re a professional writer, or even a persistent amateur, there’s always something else to write. So write that instead. It often gets the juices flowing, and you can break the block. When you feel it break, immediately switch over to the project you were stuck on.
    • Write it in an email instead: Most writers seem to get stuck because they’re writing for posterity. They’re thinking not only of The Reader, but The Reader in 50 Years. I don’t know how many journals and notebooks I started and then trashed because I thought, “what if my grandchildren read this in 50 years” or “what if someone wants to study my writings in 100 years? What will they find?” I immediately froze up, got two entries into the journal, and then quit. I lost count of the notebooks I’ve pitched because of this.
      If this happens to you, regardless of what you’re writing, write it in an email instead. Start it out with “Dear Mom, this is something I’m working on right now.” Then write your project/article/blog post to your mom. We love our moms, and they love us. But they don’t always get what we’re working on. So write this in terms your mom will understand. Then, go back and delete the greeting, and you’ve got your piece. Stop writing for The Reader and The Future Reader. Write for yourself. And your mom. And call her once in a while, she misses you.
    • Pick a different environment: I have two offices. My regular office and my favorite coffee shop. Some weeks see me in one office more than the other. And there are times that being in one place or the other is not conducive to getting work done. So I go to the other office. The change in environment is often enough to jolt me out of my stuckness. But if it doesn’t work — and I can usually feel the torpor coming on — I’ll go somewhere completely different. A different coffee shop, a friend’s office (Tip: Make sure they own the business. Don’t stop by your friend’s place inside the giant corporate building.) The new setting is usually enough to jolt me out of my complacency and get my creative juices flowing again.
    • Write nonsense:I’ve never been a fan of writing exercises to get warmed up. This isn’t running. I’m not going to injure my brain if I don’t write something “creative” before I start real writing. But that doesn’t mean there’s not some validity to just writing complete and utter crap for the first 20 minutes. If you’re stuck on a particular topic, write stream-of-consciousness stuff about your subject, maybe even the piece itself. As you write, do it in an over-the-top voice and style, like Sideshow Mel from The Simpsons. As you do this, you’ll find yourself breaking through the block and starting to write some real material. But don’t delete the crap. Cut-and-paste it into another document, and then go back and read it a couple days later. You may find some nuggets worth keeping.
    • Quit waiting to be inspired: Once you become a professional writer, you don’t have the luxury of having writer’s block. You also don’t have the luxury of “being inspired” or “waiting for the right moment.” Real writers don’t get inspired. Real writers plant their asses in their chairs and start writing. If the words aren’t coming, try one of the other five things I mentioned. If they still aren’t coming, put your head down, and keep writing. They’ll come to you eventually.
      Most professional writers ignore the writer’s block, because they have a job to do, and they do what they need to to get it done. There’s no such thing as an accountant’s block, where the figures just don’t add up. Or a chemist’s block, because they can’t get the formulas right. When you reach this level of writing, the words just come automatically, like breathing and eating. You may have times where your work is better, but as a professional writer, even your “good enough” should be pretty good.

    What about you serious writers? How do you break through writer’s block? How do you prevent it? Has anything worked or not worked? And did any of those involve alcohol?

    Update: After I wrote this post, I thought of one more method to breaking writer’s block, which I published the following day.

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      Author :  •  Content Location : Indianapolis, IN  •  Headline : Six Sure-Fire Methods to Break Writer's Block  •  Keywords : writer's block, writing, Moleskine,  • 
      Filed Under: Blog Writing, Blogging, Communication, Writing Tagged With: , ,

      5 Changes to Make to Your Blog After Google Panda 3.3

      March 9, 2012 By

      Google Panda 3.3 has caught some people off-guard and made a lot of SEO professionals freak out. After perusing SEOMoz’s discussions on the matter — these are the guys who do SEO for a living — it seems no one really knows what Panda 3.3 has done to their sites. I just know a lot of people aren’t happy about it.

      There was one particular change, out of 40, that has everyone freaked out: “Link evaluation: We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years.”

      Now, no one knows for sure what it means, but chances are, if you have been relying on a backlinking strategy to increase your search engine ranking, or you’re painfully agonizing over your anchor text’s keywords, that may become a problem for you in a few days or weeks. We’ll have to see.

      In Wednesday’s post, I discussed four changes Panda 3.3 is bringing to bloggers.

      • Improvements to freshness: Google can put fresh content in their results more quickly. Newer posts, articles, and pages are found more easily. This means the quicker you are in hopping on a trending topic, the more likely you are to win search.
      • Consolidation of signals for spiking topics: They can see when a new topic is spiking in popularity, and makes it easier to identify in realtime. If you search for breaking news, you’ll be able to find it sooner, and start writing about it.
      • Improved local results: They can more easily detect whether search queries and the results are local to you. If you search for “Topeka plumber,” and you’re sitting in Topeka, they’ll make sure you see those results first.
      • Link evaluation: This is the big one that’s freaking SEOs out.

      Based on these four important changes, what kinds of changes can/should you make to your blog to take advantage of the Google Panda 3.3 update, as well as past updates over the last 12 months? These are five long-term changes you need to start making right now, and make as a part of your regular blogging habit.

      1. Focus on local content whenever possible.

      If you own a local business, or you’re a local businessperson, you need to write about your business in your city whenever possible. If you’re a real estate agent, write posts about real estate in your city. “How to Stage Your Minneapolis Home Before a Showing,” “Five Things To Fix Before Your Next Minneapolis Home Inspection.” Be sure to use the name of the city in the body copy too.

      Learn the html schema code for your particular data types, and tag the appropriate content. (More on schemas in a minute).

      2. Use the rel=author tag in your Author bio, point it at your Google+ profile.

      First, make sure you have a Google+ profile. (There’s plenty of stuff out there about why you should be using it, so I won’t go into that here. Just know that it’s especially important to SEO now.)

      Next, make sure that every blog post you write, whether it’s your own or a guest post, links back to the Google+ profile, and uses the “rel=author” tag. Here’s an example:

      <a href=”http://bit.ly/xyLk6s” rel=”author”>Erik Deckers</a>

      Hint: By shortening your Google+ profile link with Bitly, it gives you another analytics measurement point. If you really want to get creative, use campaign codes with each article you publish or guest publish, and you can see what kind of click-through traffic you’re getting from a post to your profile.

      3. Use schemas whenever possible.

      Schemas are a new web classification system created by Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Among other things, this is going to help with local search, as well as personal branding, because you can add your city and your name to your blog posts. This will help Google and the other search engines identify you and your town. You’re going to get a boost in local results and a boost on searches for your name.

      There are a few hundred schema types, and you’re going to have a hell of a time trying to learn and use them all. In the meantime, there are plugins to use, and you can also identify a few useful schema tags for yourself to use on a regular basis.

      For example, if you’re using the PostalAddress schema, to tell Google “this is my local address,” you would write:

      <span itemprop=”streetAddress”>5348 Tacoma Ave.</span>
      <span itemprop=”addressLocality”>Indianapolis</span>,
      <span itemprop=”addressRegion”>IN</span>
      <span itemprop=”postalCode”>46220</span>

      We’re starting to use schemas here at Pro Blog Service, but we’re still learning the best ways to use it, and are limiting ourselves mostly to the SchemaFeed plugin for WordPress. Suffice to say, schema is a giant, complex system, and by using it only for blog posts, it’s like using a race car to drive down the block. Still, we’re just bloggers, so what do you want?

      We’ll have more about using schemas for blogs in a future post. For more information in the meantime, visit Schema.org.

      4. Fix your grammar and punctuation errors

      One of the changes that Panda has wrought, starting back when it was first introduced was, that it even started looking at grammar and punctuation errors. While Google has not said they are evaluating pages for grammar and punctuation quality, we have discussed in the past how they are looking at user-generated indicators — time on site, bounce rate, click-through rate — to determine the quality of a blog or website. If your page is filled with errors, and visitors don’t like reading what you wrote, they won’t stick around for very long, and Google will determine that your page must not be a good one.

      The same is true for the quality of your writing. If you’re a good writer, or even a fairly passable writer, you have nothing to worry about. If your writing has all the quality of a 10,000 word conspiracy theory manifesto that was written at 3 am in someone’s parents’ basement, then you’re going to have problems.

      5. Don’t worry so much about anchor text and backlinks

      Like I’ve said, no one is sure exactly what Google meant by “we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years.” Some people think it means anchor text is no longer a factor, other people think it means they have devalued backlinks. Google already devalued backlinks when they first released Panda, but others have tested this and found that links still carry some weight.

      We do know that Google has been seriously knocking many of these link farms and poor quality sites that did nothing but create thousands upon thousands of backlinks. Any SEO strategies that were built on this tactic are now (or soon will be) on the scrap heap, completely useless.

      If you have been knocking yourself out trying to earn backlinks and you agonize over anchor text, you may want to pull back a little on it. Don’t give up on it yet, because until someone knows for sure which indicator has been shut off, it’s still a viable strategy. All we’re saying is don’t give yourself an aneurysm trying to figure out exactly the right keywords and placing all the right backlinks in all the right places.

      While these five changes are rather involved, they’re going to be important in the coming months as Google continues to force us to focus more on the quality of our writing and content, and less on the automated SEO strategies that many people have been employing as a way to game the system.

      If you’ve already been writing good stuff, and earning your links organically, you’ve got nothing to worry about. You’re good to go. Keep up the good work.

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        Author :  •  Content Location : Indianapolis, IN  •  Headline : Four Changes to Make to Your Blog After Google Panda 3.3  •  Keywords : Google Panda, SEO, search engine optimization, blogging, schema,  • 
        Filed Under: Blog Writing, Blogging, Corporate Blogging, Search Engine Optimization, Tools, Writing Tagged With: , , , ,

        Four Important Changes Google Panda 3.3 is Bringing to Bloggers

        March 7, 2012 By

        Google Panda has been the bane or boon of every serious blogger and SEO professional, provided they can remember the difference between bane and boon (bane = bad; boon = good). While most regular bloggers and web people were unaffected, it was the power SEO users (and spammers) who were greatly affected by the changes. Many of the professionals saw their analytics and search engine rankings plummet after Panda was introduced.

        Several days ago, Google’s newest algorithm update, 3.3 (codename: goddammit so much!), has given us 40 new changes for the month, ranging from improved local search results to improving SafeSearch results to tweaking the Turkish weather results.A panda bear

        Some of the major developments that affect us as bloggers — Turkish weather results notwithstanding — are:

        • Improvements to freshness: We’ve applied new signals which help us surface fresh content in our results even more quickly than before.
        • Consolidation of signals for spiking topics: We use a number of signals to detect when a new topic is spiking in popularity. This change consolidates some of the signals so we can rely on signals we can compute in realtime, rather than signals that need to be processed offline. This eliminates redundancy in our systems and helps to ensure we can continue to detect spiking topics as quickly as possible.
        • Improved local results: We launched a new system to find results from a user’s city more reliably. Now we’re better able to detect when both queries and documents are local to the user.
        • Link evaluation: We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often rearchitect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.

        (Note: these are just four of the 40. I borrowed their descriptions, and you will have to look through the entire list to find them. The one on Link Evaluation is near the bottom.)

        Some basic implications I can see right off the bat:

        • Freshness = regular updates. Once a week is barely going to be enough to move the needle. You may need to publish 2 – 3 times a week.
        • Spiking topics means if you can stay on top of, and write about, trends the day they happen, that would help you be a big part of the conversation. Read David Meerman Scott’s ebook Newsjacking (affiliate link) for more information on how to that.
        • If you have any kind of local focus, start writing about your city and naming it when you can. Taht tells Google your content is locally specific.
        • Don’t knock yourself out on linking strategies. It’s important, but it’s a whooooole lot less important than it was two years ago.

        This last improvement is what has a lot of people worried. We don’t know what exactly the link analysis was (Google never tells), whether it affects backlinks by shutting them down completely, turns of title tags within links, or whether they’re going to send a flaming bag of dog poo to your house if your anchor text and <H1> title tag don’t match. But you can be sure that a lot of SEO pros will be checking it out.

        Tomorrow we’ll discuss five ways these four changes will (or should) affect your blog.

        Photo credit: jlantzy (Flickr)

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          Author :  •  Content Location : Indianapolis, IN  •  Headline : Four Important Changes Google Panda 3.3 is Bringing to Bloggers  •  Keywords : Google Panda, SEO, search engine optimization, blogging, backlinks  • 
          Filed Under: Blogging, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Tools, Writing Tagged With: , , , ,

          Writers, Your Biggest Competition Isn’t Other Writers, It’s Mediocrity

          March 6, 2012 By

          About 20 years ago, I used to sell high end stereos. Across the street in our small city was another high end stereo store.

          The first time their sales manager walked in the door and started talking with our sales manager like they were good friends, I was surprised. After the guy left, I asked my manager why he was so friendly with the competition.

          “He’s not the competition,” he said.

          “How do you figure?” I asked.

          “Because our competition is the Big Box store a few few miles away.”

          He explained that our high end stereo store, whose low end components were a $400 Yamaha receiver and a small pair of $300 speakers, appealed to audiophiles and people who could appreciate the quality of a really good stereo system. The store across the street sold different brand names, but equally high quality.

          Leaf on a puddle with small water droplets on the leaf

          The difference between a great photographer or writer and an acceptable one? Skills, experience, and knowledge.

          Big Box, however, sold $179 receivers and giant speakers for $120 a pair. (To put it in perspective, you could walk out with a $12,000 system from our store; the most you could spend at Big Box was about $800.)

          They were our real competition, because we had to convince the price shoppers who showed up on a Saturday that there truly was a difference in the sound quality between ours and Big Box’s, and that the bouncy lights on the front of the cheap stereo didn’t actually do anything for the sound quality. (You wouldn’t believe how many people I tried to talk out of the bouncy lights.)

          They didn’t hear the difference. They believed a stereo was a stereo, and while, yes, ours was very good, they could get a whole stereo with bouncy lights for a fraction of the price we wanted for an average receiver. Of course, they were disappointed when they got home, and they realized the music just didn’t sound as good as it did in our store.

          It’s the same problem we writers face. Too many times, we talk to potential blogging clients who think writing is writing. They’ve found a writer who will work at a fraction of our price — sure they live in another part of the world, and English is their third or fourth language, but, you know, they charge a lot less — or their nephew got an A on his senior English paper, and knows a lot about the Internet, and he’s going to do the whole project for $75 and a Starbucks gift card.

          Our biggest competition isn’t other writers, it’s people who think that writing is writing. That stringing coherent sentences together is so easy, a monkey can do it. After all, they reason, we learned it in high school, so how hard can it be?

          Recently, I was talking to Paul D’Andrea, a professional photographer friend, who said he faces the same thing. Despite the years of study and practice, and the thousands of dollars of equipment he carts around his biggest competition is not another equally good photographer. It’s the guy with a $200 digital camera or the latest and greatest mobile phone. (Paul took the leaf photo in this post. You can’t do that with a cell phone.)

          After all, they reason, you just point and shoot. Don’t cut off the heads, crank up the flash, and hit the little button with your right index finger. How hard can it be?

          I may have a decent camera, but I realize that even Paul’s “average” work has a level of mastery I’ll never achieve. If I ever want good photos, I need someone like Paul. And if someone wants good writing, they can’t just hire a college senior and expect expert-level writing.

          Unfortunately for writers, while the Internet has made it possible to reach more customers from a wider base, it’s also created a problem for us. Now anyone with a laptop and a rudimentary command of the English language can hang out a shingle and call themselves a writer.

          If you want to demonstrate your writing ability, you need high-quality samples, strong testimonials, and be able to demonstrate how your writing has succeeded and benefitted your clients. Be able to measure ROI, sales, and even regular readership. Show search engine placement and rankings. List writing awards. And most importantly, show whether businesses have made money by working with you.

          Look, anyone can take pictures with even the crappiest cameras. Anyone can write copy with a laptop and an 8th grade education. That doesn’t mean it’s any good. Sadly, it also doesn’t mean that people will recognize its lack of quality either.

          It’s going to take some work on your part, writers and photographers, to educate your potential clients as to why all writing isn’t the same, why your work is better than everyone else’s, and why you’re worth the higher price tag.

          Photo credit: Paul D’Andrea (Flickr)

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            Author :  •  Content Location : Indianapolis, IN  •  Headline : Writers, Your Biggest Competition Isn't Other Writers, It's Mediocrity  •  Keywords : writing, blog writing, writers, photography  • 
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            How Google Caught a Plagiarizing Newspaper Editor and Ended His Career

            March 1, 2012 By

            I’m baffled at the fact that, when we live in a day and age where you can find anything — anything! — on Google, people will still try to plagiarize and steal your stuff.

            It just happened to me yesterday, when I was alerted by a fellow humor writer, Dave Fox, that 28-year newspaper veteran, Jon Flatland, had stolen at least two of my past humor columns, word for word, and passed them off as his own.Photo of a raccoon on a trash can

            To make matters worse, Flatland had done the same to Dave and four other writers, including a friend of mine.

            Flatland didn’t just paraphrase our ideas, or copy a joke or two. He copied-and-pasted entire columns, changed a couple of details, like replacing his wife’s name for my wife’s, or changing the name of a city where an event took place.

            Dave immediately got in touch with the publisher, as well as a state newspaper association who had given the writer an award for best humor last year (I’d love to know whose columns actually won the award for him).

            One of the writers also called Flatland up and confronted him. Flatland said he didn’t believe he had plagiarized, but that he had found the stories in an old folder, thought he had written them, and published them as his own.

            I’m not buying it. One of my stolen stories, ‘Twas the Month Before Christmas, was written in the exact same rhythm and rhyming pattern as the original Night Before Christmas. You don’t forget writing something like that, as much as I’ve tried.

            Apparently Flatland knew something was about to hit the fan, because he sent an email of resignation to the publisher — admitting to only one column, even though we have proof of eight — and was gone before the publisher ever got into work. The publisher has since removed all of Flatland’s columns, and has notified his state’s newspaper association about the incident, blackballing Flatland and preventing him from working in newspapers ever again.

            That all went down yesterday. I heard about it at 11:30 am, and by 11 pm, it was done. A career died in less than 12 hours.

            What’s sad about this is Flatland was a 28 year veteran of the industry. He’s someone who knew better. He was one of the people who was supposed to teach young writers all about journalistic ethics. Flatland has had a long and impressive career in the community newspaper business, and has been the president of at least two state newspaper associations. So his name has carried a little weight in his corner of the world.

            And he ended his career in disgrace, because he violated the one rule, the one foundational principle, the entire media business is built on: don’t steal someone else’s shit. In fact, Rule No. 9 on the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics is never plagiarize.

            I feel sympathy for Flatland. His career has ended in the most embarrassing manner possible. Former colleagues and association members will be talking about him, shocked that he would do the one thing that journalists are never, ever supposed to do.

            But what makes it so stupid and senseless is that WE CAN FIND THESE THINGS OUT! Holy sweet jebus, it’s so freaking easy to find anything on the Internet! There are entire companies that have built multi-billion dollar empires by making it possible to do exactly that.

            Want to see Portlandia’s “Put a Bird On It” video? Google it.

            Want the lyrics to Inna-Gadda-Da-Vida? Google it.

            Want to see if a phrase you used in a humor column in 2006 has been used anywhere else? Google. It.

            Enter a unique or uncommon phrase from one of your posts or columns, and put quotes around it. That tells Google to look for exactly that phrase, with all those words, in that particular order.

            If the phrase, along with most of your words other words, shows up without your name on it, it was stolen. If it doesn’t, it wasn’t.

            It truly is that easy. And why Flatland didn’t know that or couldn’t figure it out is probably the most staggeringly disappointing part of this whole mess. He didn’t think he would get caught. He didn’t think that people might/could/would look to see if any of their stuff was appearing anywhere that it shouldn’t be.

            And now, because Flatland didn’t know that one basic fact — that, and he’s a column-stealing thief who benefitted financially from my years of hard work, while I got nothing — he’s ended his career in the worst possible way, ensuring he’s never going to work in that industry again.

            If you get nothing else from this column, please burn these two lessons into your memory forever.

            First, don’t steal people’s work.

            Second, if you do steal, please know that there are giant f—ing search engines that will find you out, no matter what tiny part of the globe you’re in.

            Just write your own stuff, or don’t turn it in at all.

            Photo credit: Adam Thomas (Flickr)

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              Author :  •  Content Location : Indianapolis, IN  •  Headline : How Google Caught a Plagiarizing Newspaper Editor and Ended His Career  •  Keywords : plagiarism, newspapers, Google, journalism, traditional media  • 
              Filed Under: Blogging, Citizen Journalism, Newspapers, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, Traditional Media, Writing Tagged With: , , , ,

              How to Write, for the 21st Century

              February 28, 2012 By

              David Ogilvy was a master advertiser. He was a big proponent of “give away the good stuff,” writing an entire monograph on how to do automobile advertising, and then giving it away to all the automakers in the United States.

              He was also an ardent proponent of quality writing. So I was very interested to stumble upon Shaun Usher’s Lists of Note blog, with Ogilvy’s list of How to Write.

              David Ogilvy

              David Ogilvy

              Woolly minded people write woolly memos, woolly letters and woolly speeches. Good writing is not a natural gift. You have to learn to write well. Here are 10 hints:

              1. Read the Roman-Raphaelson book on writing*. Read it three times.
              2. Write the way you talk. Naturally.
              3. Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.
              4. Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.
              5. Never write more than two pages on any subject.
              6. Check your quotations.
              7. Never send a letter or a memo on the day you write it. Read it aloud the next morning—and then edit it.
              8. If it is something important, get a colleague to improve it.
              9. Before you send your letter or your memo, make sure it is crystal clear what you want the recipient to do.
              10. If you want ACTION, don’t write. Go and tell the guy what you want.

              Writing for the 21st Century

              Having never seen Ogilvy’s list before, I was very excited to see that some of the same writing rules I’ve been teaching are the ones that he espoused. Like a confirmation that I was doing it right. It also made me rethink some of what I’ve been telling people, and forced me to crystallize my thoughts on the matter.

              So, if I may be permitted to stand on the shoulders of giants, here are my 10 hints for writers and bloggers in the 21st century.

              1. Read Stephen King’s book On Writing. Also Bird by Bird
                 by Annie Lamott and The War of Art by Steven Pressfield.
              2. Avoid adverbs. Use descriptive verbs, don’t describe the verbs.
              3. Still use short words, short sentences, short paragraphs. Big words don’t make you sound smart. Being accessible to many readers makes you sound smart.
              4. Write visually. Use metaphors, and if you have to, similes.
              5. Write intentionally. Practice your writing whenever you can, whether it’s a new blog post or an email.
              6. Never write more than 1,000 words on any subject. No one wants to read that much, unless they’re following the #longreads hashtag.
              7. Read more than you write. Don’t just read books in your industry, read fiction, history, and biographies. Especially fiction.
              8. Never publish anything important the day you write it. Let it sit for at least 24 hours before you edit it again.
              9. Agonize over word choice. Don’t just spit out the first words that come into your head. Choose the best ones for maximum impact.
              10. Don’t wait for inspiration. If you only wait until the “right moment,” you’re not going to have many of them. The right moment will come when you’re already busy, or when you’ve got the time, you won’t be inspired. Schedule a regular writing time, either every day or a few times a week.
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                Author :  •  Content Location : Indianapolis, IN  •  Headline : How to Write, for the 21st Century  •  Keywords : write, writing, David Ogilvy  • 
                Filed Under: Blog Writing, Blogging, Social Media, Writing Tagged With: , ,

                Attorneys Should Have Their Own Blog Content, Not Syndicated Content

                February 16, 2012 By

                Attorneys need to approach the use of syndicated blog content with care. Many times, syndicated posts are written as a one-size-fits-all approach, and you can make tweaks and changes as needed. But what if you don’t have time, or don’t know how, to make the changes? What problems could you see if you relied on syndicated content?

                Here are three reasons we think attorneys should have their own blogs with their own content, instead of relying on syndicated content.

                1. Syndicated content does not perform well in search.

                If you buy a copy-and-paste content service, chances are it’s not going to be picked up by the search engines. That’s because Google has a “no duplicate content” rule they follow, meaning they don’t want to see a lot of websites using the same content over and over.

                You may hear this described as the duplicate content penalty, but it’s not a penalty. Rather, Google just does not index the content. The Google bots see it and say, “we already saw this back at another website, so we’ll ignore this one.”

                One of the primary reasons to have a blog is to rank high on the search engines, and it doesn’t make sense to pay for syndicated content if it’s not going to help you rank in the first place.

                (That’s not to say that all content syndicates do this. The better ones don’t. The cheaper ones, not so much.)

                2. You can localize your content.

                Google is paying a lot more attention to local search, because they’re delivering local search results to their users. Check it out. Go to Google, and do a search for “Italian restaurant.” The results you’ll see will be for the city where you perform the search. That’s because Google can see where you are, and it wants to deliver the results you’ll be most interested in. If you’re in St. Louis, Google assumes you don’t care about Italian restaurants in Jacksonville, Florida, so they deliver the results you’re most likely to be interested in.

                To that end, it’s more helpful to write localized articles about your areas of specialty and include your city or geographic practice area in things like the headline and body copy, so Google will know where they should have you listed.

                • Five Things to Look For In An Indianapolis Personal Injury Attorney
                • When Does a Startup Need a Chicago Intellectual Property Attorney?
                • Should I Hire a Florida Attorney to Plan My Estate?

                You need to do this so when a potential client does a search online for an attorney, they find your page. Google is not going to return the best-optimized pages around the country. It’s going to show them the results from the pages in their city and/or state. If your site is properly optimized, clients will find you, not your competition.

                3. Your Content Can Fit Your Readers’ Style

                Syndicated blog content is written one way, and it may not be your style. But, you paid for it, so you might as well use it, right?

                Wrong.

                If you’re paying for it, you’re presenting your image in a style that doesn’t quite fit with you, or more importantly, may not appeal to your readers.

                It’s important that you communicate with your readers in the way they want to be communicated with. And since you know your clients the best, you can best dictate the kinds of topics they want to read, the style, language, and even readability of the posts. You should even be able to decide the best keywords to write about that week or month.

                Since you know your readers best, you need to create content that they will find and read, which will ultimately lead to them calling you when they need you.

                Whether you write your own blog posts 2 – 3 times a week, or work with a ghost blogging service (which we recommend, given your hourly billing rates; otherwise, blogging will end up being your lowest priority), you need to have content that is geared toward your style, your geographic region, your clients, and can help you win search for your niche and your keywords.

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                  Author :  •  Content Location : Indianapolis, IN  •  Copyright Year : 2012  •  Headline : Why Attorneys Should Have Their Own Blog Content Instead of Syndicated Content  •  Keywords : blog content, business blogging, corporate blogging, legal blogging, attorney, lawyer  • 
                  Filed Under: Blog ROI, Blog Writing, Blogging, Business Blogging Content, Corporate Blogging, Lead Generation, Marketing, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Writing Tagged With: , , , , ,

                  Three Ways New Fiction Writers Can Promote Their Work With Social Media

                  February 15, 2012 By

                  How can a writer promote their own work, especially if they are just releasing their first published work? Thanks to ebooks and ereaders, as well as print-on-demand and self-publication, any fledgling writer can publish their work and make it available to the general public.

                  But how can they get readers before they have even established their writing career? Here are three ways new writers can promote their newly published works to a wider audience than their moms.

                  1. Find readers on Twellow and Facebook.

                  Twellow is a Twitter directory that lets you search people’s Twitter bios. Look for anyone who would fit your target readership. If you write sci-fi, look to see if anyone has science fiction or sci-fi in their bio. Chances are they’re fellow writers, but you’ll find a lot of sci-fi fans too.

                  Check out the Facebook pages and groups too, and start friending and connecting with people in those groups. As you follow the other two steps, they’ll be the people you want to reach out to.

                  2. Pre-release the book in blog form.

                  As you’re writing your book, try publishing sections of it on a blog. Invite reader comment and ask them to give you feedback, ask questions, and make any suggestions. Make your changes from the blog and incorporate them into the final manuscript.

                  You’ll also get readers who start to follow along because they get drawn into the serial nature of the story. Plus, don’t worry about people not wanting buy the book because it’s on the web. There are plenty of people who have written books that were originally posted online first, and went on to great success. They’ll be willing to pick up your book too.

                  3. Create an audio version of your book.

                  Seth Harwood released the self-published Jack Wakes Up book as an audio podcast. He would read approximately 45 minutes of the book each week and upload it as a podcast. While that seemed to fly in the face of conventional publishing wisdom, the Jack Wakes Up ended up garnering enough attention that it was then picked up by Three Rivers Press and published.

                  It’s possible with some publishers that you can keep the audio rights to your book. If you’re self-publishing it, you own all versions, including audio and ebooks. So take advantage of that. Get a decent microphone (I prefer the Blue Snowball USB mic), and start reading it. Don’t launch until you get at least half the book recorded though. It builds in some extra time in case you run into a production delay.

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                    Author :  •  Content Location : Indianapolis, IN  •  Copyright Year : 2012  •  Headline : Three Ways New Fiction Writers Can Promote Their Work With Social Media  •  Keywords : social media, writing, social media marketing, publishing, Seth Harwood  • 
                    Filed Under: Facebook, Marketing, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Social Networks, Twitter, Writing Tagged With: , , , ,

                    Ten Steps to Blogging Every Day

                    February 14, 2012 By

                    I’m always amazed — and irritated — at my colleagues who are blogging every day. I’ve tried that. I did it for a whole year once on my humor blog. By month four, I was regretting my choice. By month seven, I hated my blog. And by month 10, I longed for the sweet, sweet release of a sledgehammer to my monitor.

                    But I stuck it out. I made it the whole 12 months. And I saw a great increase in traffic. So much so that it is now about 80% less than what it once was, now that I’m publishing once a week. But I gained enough regular readers that publishing day (Friday) is the same level it was when I was doing the daily thing. That is, my regulars keep showing up and they keep reading. They just don’t keep coming back every day.

                    Tired marathon runner

                    Yeah, you'll feel like this around the 9th month

                    But if you want to blog on a daily basis, here are the 10 steps I took to make sure I made it all 365 days. (And remember, “daily” means “every day,” including Sundays. Be sure to take that into account.)

                    1. Write certain evergreen posts that can be used anytime. Plug those in when you just can’t write that day from sickness, vacation, other plans.
                    2. Write all posts the day before. That gives you an extra 24 hours cushion for that time you missed a post.
                    3. Be prepared to use videos and photos. YouTube is a veritable cornucopia of blogging topics. Do a quick search, embed the video (when it’s permitted of course), write a few sentences of commentary, and voila!
                      • Do the same thing with photos.
                      • Depending on your blog platform, you may be able to email your posts in. Snap an interesting picture with your smartphone, attach it to an email, tap in a few sentences, and email it to your blog. You can always go back in later and expand it and clean it up, but at least you have the beginnings of the post.
                      • (Note: Most blog platforms publish the emailed content as soon as you send it, so that won’t work to save ideas for later. Use Evernote for that.)
                    4. Carry around a notebook and write down ideas as you get them. Nothing is worse than an escaped idea. And if you can start sketching out notes at the same time, do it. Even go so far as to make an outline. Think about the outline on your way to and from work. Then, when you sit down at your computer, the thing is already written. You just need to type it out.
                    5. Go for brevity. Remember, a blog post is not a 750 word column. A post can be 400, 300, even 200 words. You don’t want to make a regular habit of writing short pithy 100 word posts, but you can slip them in once in a while.
                    6. Break up longer posts. Got a top 10 list of something? Turn it into two top fives. A couple months later, take each item from that top 10 list and expand on it for an additional post.
                    7. Set a regularly scheduled topic for certain days of the week. For example, on my humor blog Sundays were always videos, Wednesdays were always reprints of old humor columns.
                    8. Find other outlets in your industry that are about your chosen topic. Pull from them for inspiration. Since I wrote about some of the stuff that stupid people did, I got a lot of inspiration and ideas from Fark.com. (And let me just say, the British Town Councils are ripe for the picking for a satirical humorist.)
                    9. Schedule your blogging time. Make it the same time every day. If you don’t, you’ll have to…
                    10. …get up earlier or stay up later. This is like pro athlete training. You have to do it every day and you have to make sacrifices. That means missing sleep on one end of the day or the other, especially if you were screwing around and didn’t get it done when you should have. A few days like this, and you’ll learn to stay on schedule.

                    Your daily blogging goal will not succeed unless and until you commit to doing it. I don’t mean, “yeah, it sounds like a good idea,” but then it’s broken like a New Year’s resolution, by late morning on the second day. I mean, you absolutely say you’re going to do it, come hell or high water. (And then the theme to Rocky starts playing, and you find yourself dancing around at the top of your courthouse steps with a bunch of computer nerds yelling and cheering around you.)

                    When I made that commitment, it meant a lot of bleary-eyed posts that were written at 1:30 am and had to be polished up the following morning. It meant a lot of scrambling around to find new post ideas, and rehashing a lot of old topics. And sometimes it meant putting up some less-than-worthy posts and ideas just so I could keep going.

                    All in all, I’m glad I did it. I had a sense of accomplishment when I was done. It got me noticed by a lot of people, and got my name out to some new people. And I find myself being drawn back to it. This blog post marks the third business day in a row that I’ve written something on this particular blog, after being sporadic from time to time.

                    Will I keep it up? I don’t know. Do I have enough to say that I can keep up the momentum? Definitely. Do I have the time? That’s a tough one. I have clients to take care of.

                    I do know that I’m skipping weekends.

                    Photo credit: Kit Oates (Flickr)

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                      Author :  •  Content Location : Indianapolis, IN  •  Headline : Ten Steps to Blogging Every Day  •  Keywords : blogging, daily blogging, video, photo, blogger, blog writing  • 
                      Filed Under: Blog Writing, Blogging, Business Blogging Content, Communication, Corporate Blogging, Social Media, Tools, Writing Tagged With: , , , , ,
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