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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 content marketing ROI, I only had a couple personal case studies to draw on, but they’re outliers. (More on them in a minute.) Instead, I pulled up statistics from several other content marketing and digital marketing sources.

  • Blog posts are statistically the most effective tool for building brand awareness, with 31% of B2B companies listing short articles as the highest-performing content in this respect (Content Marketing Institute)
  • B2B companies who blog consistently receive 67% more monthly leads than companies who don’t blog regularly (Demand Metric)
  • 78% of marketers have seen an increase in email engagement over the last 12 months (Hubspot)
  • 47% of B2B buyers consumed 3-5 pieces of content from a company before engaging with one of their sales reps (Demand Gen Report)
  • 95% of the B2B service and product buyers admit that they view content as a trustworthy marker when evaluating a business (Demand Gen Report)
  • 71% in the B2B industry review an organization’s blog during their buyer’s journey (Demand Gen Report)
  • On average, a company’s blog produces 67% more leads per month. (Demand Metric)
  • Costs 62% less than traditional marketing, generates 3x more leads (Demand Metric)
  • The return on investment for email marketing in 2018 stood at $42, which is an increase of $10 from the DMA’s previous report. (Direct Marketing Association UK)
  • The ROI for manufacturing can reach 1,372% (FrontPageSage’s own customer research)

“What’s YOUR Content Marketing ROI?”

I’m sometimes asked about my own content marketing ROI. That’s a little harder since I’m an outsourced vendor, and most companies won’t share their internal sales data with me. But I have a couple.

“Do you at least have a range or an estimate?” they’ll ask. I tell them this:

“In the early days of this agency, we worked with a construction equipment manufacturer that made $200 million per year in gross revenue. He was Internet-savvy and tracked the hell out of everything. He found that he got a 6% bump in his total sales as a direct result of our blogging services. That worked out to another $1 million per month in increased revenue.

“About the same time, we worked with a mystery shopping agency with two full-time employees and two part-timers. Their total sales were roughly $750,000 per year. After three years of writing 8 blog articles per month, they had tripled their business three times and grew to 27 full-time employees. They also landed a million-dollar contract for a national wireless company during our first year with them.

“So, our range of improvement can be anywhere from 6% to 900%.”

Of course, this is a bit frustrating since it’s a broad range, but I use it as an example to illustrate a few important points:

  • Your content marketing ROI is only as good as your actual content.
  • Quality rules over quantity, but you should still blog at least once a week. Don’t forsake consistency either.
  • There are a high number of variables that affect your content marketing ROI, anything from your field, your content, your competition, and how much Google updates its algorithms.
  • High-quality written content will always outperform mediocre content. Always.
  • A variety of content formats will outperform a single format. In other words, don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
  • On the other hand, don’t rely solely on video. At this point of SEO development, videos help SEO, but not in the same way that written content does. Google still relies heavily on written content.

What about email marketing?

Email marketing has a number of different benefits — too many for me to go into here, but I can say this. Email marketing is a great marketing method because it’s the only one where potential customers have said, “Yes, I’d like to hear from you later. Here’s how you can reach me.”

  • The problem is, most email marketers abuse it by sharing poorly-written and created content. If you want high engagement, send out interesting stuff.
  • Some email marketers send too many messages. (I just unsubscribed from a new newsletter after getting four emails in four days. I don’t have time for that!)
  • This is the place to customize content. Segment your subscribers into different groups and offer them different content options. Bookriot.com has almost a couple dozen email newsletters each about different book genres, giveaways, and contests. This way, you’re not given one single email that appeals to everyone. I get only one email per week about the books I would want, and nothing about the books I don’t.
  • Your email list is all yours. If they wanted to, Twitter and Facebook could wipe out all your followers and fans. You can’t export that list or use it somewhere else. You can’t switch social networks and take all those followers and fans with you. But your email list is worth its weight in Bitcoin!

Your content marketing ROI is going to be a lot higher and easier to measure and manage than traditional marketing or even social media marketing. It can also give online advertising a run for its money because content marketing reaches people when they have a question or an interest. They’re thinking about buying, so they do a Google search to start their buying journey. If your blog content shows up on the Google search, then you’re in the hunt!

But if not, then you may have a problem.

Photo credit: 12571684 (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)

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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 the first three areas gets 25% of the budget, but only one of them gets the remaining 25%. Which one do you pick?

Being a creative professional, I said the Creative was the most important. The analysts said Data Analysis, and the strategists said that was dumb and that I was correct.

Just kidding, the strategists said Strategy was the most important.

And of course, there were those predictable few who thought all worked hand-in-hand and they were equally important, and no parent should ever have a favorite child and blah blah blah.

A quick aside

Some people are bad at thought exercises. When you’re presented with one, the goal is to make you weigh the options, consider each one, and then pick the answer you believe is correct. You’re not committed to anything, and no one is going to judge you for your choice.

In a thought exercise, you don’t have the option of whining, “Oh, but they’re all equally important!” And you don’t get to come up with some other option. That’s weasel thinking by someone who couldn’t make a firm commitment if their life depended on it. If it were a real-life decision, I could see the importance of trying to find an equitable solution. But this isn’t that.

The point of a thought exercise is to think and make a choice, and then defend your choice. Ruminate on the results. Consider what would happen because of the choice you made. Try to predict the future based on what you chose.

Don’t be so wishy-washy about your decision. It won’t kill you to commit to an idea for two minutes.

Back to the article

My logic was this:

The Creative element is the most important in the marketing department because if you create mediocre content, a great strategy will only ensure that more people see your polished turd. And data analysis will tell you how many people actually saw it.

Bad or mediocre content won’t convert, it won’t create fans, it won’t move people down the sales funnel. They won’t sign up for your newsletter, they won’t follow you on Twitter and Instagram, and they won’t remember you when it comes time to make a purchase.

So do you really want to improve the number of people who see your content by putting all your money into the strategy element? And do you really want to know, down to the last decimal place, how many people thought your content was awful? Because data analysis has never sold anything, it only tells you what worked and what didn’t. It never tells you what will work, it only tells you what already worked, and then you can infer from the data that you should do it again.

I’ve told the story elsewhere of the data analyst who once got annoyed with me because I wrote about putting vehicle wraps on tournament fishing boats for a client. The client was known for doing vehicle wraps, as well as other commercial signage, and the boat wraps were something one of their franchisees was doing.

The analyst said, “No one has ever come to the website looking for boat wraps! Why would you waste the energy to make that?”

I said, “How much content do we have on boat wraps now?”

“Well, none.”

“That’s why no one has ever come looking for it.”

The following month, our boat wrap article was the second-most visited article on the entire blog, only behind the front page.

During our next meeting, I said, “Did you see this month’s numbers?”

The analyst said, “Yes, I did.”

“Did you see where the boat wraps article ranked?”

*angry silence*

I wrote another boat wrap article the following month and it stayed in the top 10 for a few months. I know, because I asked the analyst about it at each monthly meeting.

The big lesson I learned was that analytics should never, ever drive content, it should only measure what was done. Being a data-driven marketer means you’re a reactive marketer, not proactive. You’ll never try something new because the data hasn’t told you to try it.

For that reason alone, analytics has to be dropped from consideration for the extra 25% of our budget.

Choosing between creative and strategic elements of marketing

This is a tougher choice, and if I made a wishy-washy weasel choice, I would split the remaining 25% of my budget between these two areas. But that’s not possible, so I have to make a choice.

And yes, I will admit that I’m biased as a creative professional myself.

But I also believe that well-done content leads to more engagement than mediocre content. So if I have to choose between getting my work in front of 10,000 people with a 20% engagement or 50,000 people with a 2% engagement, I’ll take the smaller audience with the bigger engagement every time.

I see this a lot with self-published book authors on Twitter. These are the Twitter cheaters who grow their follower count to low six-figures, and then blast out message after message about “Buy my books! Buy my books!”

They don’t engage, they don’t have conversations, they don’t ask or answer questions. They just follow a bunch of people, get them to follow back, and then bombard them with nothing but advertisements.

They do all this work in gaining an audience, and then put out nothing of value or interest. If they at least put in some time and energy and created some interactive content, they’d probably have a lot more customers.

Instead, they focused completely on strategy and didn’t do anything at all for the Creative. Are their books any good? Who knows? Their ads were so bad, I didn’t want to find out. If anything, their content and strategy turned me off of their books.

They got a low six-figure audience, which is a great strategy, but couldn’t do anything with it. It’s like getting a high-powered car and then letting it sit in your driveway because you didn’t put any fuel into it.

So Strategy doesn’t get the remaining 25% either.

Which means Creative is the most important part of your marketing, and it gets the remainder of the budget. Which is what happens when Creative people are in charge of writing their own stories.

Bottom line

Two lessons: First, don’t be afraid of a thought exercise. It’s a survey that no one (except me) is going to remember in 24 hours, and no one will lambast you because of your choice. (Unless you gave a Kumbaya, “Why Can’t We All Get Along” answer, in which case you should be roundly mocked.)

Second, good creative work will do more for your successful marketing than the strategy or analytics ever could.

Put more of your marketing budget into getting good creative work. Come up with the best strategy you can for the money you have. And then look at your analytics and see what’s performing the best. If you’re a small business or have a limited product line, it’s not like you need a Ph.D. data scientist anyway, so don’t spend more than you have to.

What do you think? Where would you put the remaining 25% of your marketing budget? Make a choice, defend your answer, and don’t give me any of this “they’re all equally important” nonsense. Commit and defend!

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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 not going to be some new method of content delivery that we’re going to have to learn.

Because when you look at content at its barest essence, it’s just words, images, and sounds. That’s what it has always been, that’s what it will always be.

It was words, images, and sounds when cave dwellers drew on cave walls and grunted their delight. It was words, images, and sounds when the Ancient Greeks passed down knowledge with stories or told stories with plays. It was words, images, and sounds — well, not so much sound — when the first ever movie of a galloping horse was made or the world’s oldest surviving film, Roundhay Garden Scene, was made.

It was words, images, and sounds when newspapers, radio, and television all had their heyday and when they were replaced by blogs, videos, and podcasts.

Content marketing is no different from any other form of communication in our history. We’ve used words, images, and sounds to communicate the entire time. But the only thing that has changed has been the medium we use — the way the content gets consumed read, watched, or heard.

Content creation tools don’t matter

Eighty years ago, we had newspapers, radio shows, and movie newsreels. Television became popular 70 years ago, launching the Golden Age of Television.

And now, everything you could ever want — including samples of old newspapers, radio shows, newsreels, and TV shows — are all available on your laptop, tablet, or mobile phone.

You can read about how those media were made eighty years ago, or you can make and share a 21st-century version of it for other people to read, watch, or hear.

Because it’s still the same old words, images, and sounds.

And it won’t matter one bit how those are made. The secret to doing well at content marketing is to be able to do words, images, and sounds well.

You have to write well. You have to sound good. You have to know how to frame a photo or a video. You have to create things that are interesting. You have to know how to tell a story. You have to know how to capture your audience at the very moment they click your link.

The tools don’t matter.

I’ll say it again: THE TOOLS DON’T MATTER!

Years ago, I used to argue with people who claimed: “there’s no such thing as social media experts because the tools are too new.”

My response then is the same as it is now: I don’t have to be a tools expert, I have to be a communication expert. I have to be good at conveying a message in my chosen medium. The tools can change from week to week, and it won’t affect me one bit because I don’t have to master the tool, I just have to master the craft.

Think of it another way. A carpenter that has spent his entire life swinging a hammer isn’t less effective just because you gave him a pneumatic nailer. A chef doesn’t forget how to cook because you switch out her gas stove to an electric one. And writers aren’t suddenly reduced to creating doggerel just because they switched pens.

So when people think you need specific Mailchimp or Constant Contact experience to be an effective email marketer, that’s wrong.

When people think you need to know how to use Hubspot or WordPress to be an effective blogger, that’s completely wrong.

It’s like saying a photographer is not a good photographer because she uses Nikon and not Canon. Or that a writer is not a good writer because they use Apple Pages and not Microsoft Word.

The tool does not create quality content. WordPress and Hubspot don’t make you write well. Constant Contact doesn’t make you a good email marketer. The latest video camera doesn’t make you a good videographer any more than a great camera makes you a good photographer.

The tools do not make the artist. A good artist can make good art with crappy tools, but a bad artist cannot make good art with good tools.

So it doesn’t matter what happens to the tools: WordPress may go away. Hubspot may fall into the sea. YouTube could be eaten by a pack of hyenas.

None of that will change how content creators make their art.

If WordPress were to go away, bloggers aren’t going to be thrown for a loop or cast out on the scrap heap. We’ll just shrug our shoulders and continue to tell good stories on the new distribution method. And blogging itself won’t go away, it will just be called something else.

Podcasting won’t go away because there will be other ways to deliver episodic information and entertainment via audio distribution.

Videos won’t go away because — well, video’s just never going to go away. In fact, it just surpassed blogging and infographics as the most commonly used form of content marketing. (I’m still a little salty about it, thank you very much.)

The artists and creators will still have a way to make and distribute their work, even if the tools for that distribution go away, change, or die completely.

Remind me how is this about the future of content marketing again

My point is, when you ask about the future of content marketing, just remember, the core elements of content marketing — words, images, and sounds — are never going to change. We’re still going to read, we’re still going to watch videos and look at pictures, and we’re still going to listen to music and information.

The channels will change, the methods of production will change, and even the popularity of the content formats will change. (Freakin’ video!) But the need for quality content will never change. That’s the one constant you can count on.

So if you’re in the content creation business, just focus on improving your craft. Become the best creator you can. Learn your art so you can be one of the best creators around. Worry less about the technology, because that won’t affect whether you’re good at your job. And when the method changes, you’ll already know what you need to do.

Photo credit: Steve Shook (Flickr, Creative Commons 2.0)

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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 the eight writers’ archetypes.

The 8 writer archetypes. Each one is a progression of the one that comes before it.
  1. Informer: These are the journalists and the news writers. They tell us the who, what, where, when, why, and how of the world.
  2. Analyst: What does the news mean? What can we infer from the latest political polls? What will the U.S. pandemic relief package do to the economic recovery? The political pundits, the economists, the financial gurus are all Analysts.
  3. Educator: Writers who convey knowledge to help others learn. It’s more than just being an Informer because their readers presumably already know how something works. The writer who writes to intentionally teach is an Educator.
  4. Chronicler: The Chronicler is the observer of the human condition. You find a lot of newspaper columnists here. They’re not quite news-tellers (Informers), but they don’t fit anywhere else. Historians are usually found among the Chroniclers.
  5. Advocate: The rabble-rouser with a pen. They observe the human condition, but they speak for those who have no voice to effect change. The Advocate brings awareness to a cause to get people to care about it and be informed.
  6. Persuader: One step beyond the Advocate, the Persuader gets people to take action on something, but not necessarily a social cause. Political speechwriters, people in ministry, and public relations people work here, but marketers do not.
  7. Merchant: The Merchant is a Persuader who gets people to spend money (i.e. Marketing). You could call this a subset of Persuader, but this is the only writing archetype where the primary focus is to get people to spend money.
  8. Entertainer: Writers of fiction, poetry, stage plays, screenplays. Anything you would read, watch, or hear for entertainment or escapism lives here.

I also said that it’s not uncommon for writers to bounce around between the different archetypes. For example, a typical writing week will see me bounce from Educator to Merchant to Entertainer to Chronicler, sometimes all in a day.

Others can mash a couple archetypes together. For example, an entertainer-merchant is someone who regularly writes short pulp novels strictly with an eye toward making money, not art. The Chronicler-Advocate observes the human condition in the hopes of changing it, like a columnist with a partisan publication. Even an Educator-Merchant is possible, with people teaching webinars and seminars on some topic, but in exchange for money. (We all need to make a living, yes?)

Can content marketing fit within the Writers’ Archetypes??

Short answer, yes.

Longer answer, it depends on what your goal is. Any of these eight archetypes’ “hats” can be worn when you’re trying to create regular content for your company’s website. Let me show you.

  1. Informer: How does your product work? What problems does it solve? Did you know you can do this with it? If nothing else, this content only serves to boost your SEO efforts, provided it’s interesting and well-written. (Don’t just put up flat bullshit content to bulk up your website.) Company history fits here, as does your About Us page. These are also important for your website, so don’t neglect them.
  2. Analyst: What’s going on in your industry? What does it mean for your customers? What’s happening in your company and what does that mean? We all ask “how does this affect me?” This is where you answer those questions. Show people your expertise by answering that question about your industry’s news.
  3. Educator: How do I do this better? How can I get better at my job? A lot of the content I write for this blog is educational because I’m actually teaching new content marketers about how to do their jobs better. Can you do that for your customers?
  4. Chronicler: This one is a little tougher. You could put case studies in here because they’re little mini-histories. “Company A had a problem that was costing them $X. Company B brought Company A a solution. It worked so well, it saved them $Y.” If you can answer the question “What happened and what does it mean?” it fits here.
  5. Advocate: This person is almost a non-profit Marketer. We want you to change your beliefs, at least long enough to give us money. Your stories are just like a Chronicler’s, but there’s a deeper lesson you want us to learn from it. Think of the nonprofit asking for money by introducing us to one particular person that they’ve helped in the past.
  6. Persuader: Content that gets us to take action, but maybe not spend money. Sign up for our newsletter, follow us on Twitter, write to your elected officials. These are all persuasive actions that don’t require us to spend money.
  7. Merchant: This is the “BUY THIS NOW” content. The advertising copy, the catalog copy, the sales messages. The Merchant content is written strictly to separate customers from their money.
  8. Entertainer: This is a tough one. Content marketing that is written strictly for entertainment purposes is few and far between. However, it can be done. This is where you find the unusual content pieces, like a comic book, radio play, podcast, or even a magazine. As Neil Gaiman said in 2012, “Make good art.” That’s what you should do, but no one said the art couldn’t make money too.

If you’re a writer or content creator of any type, you can branch over into another type and get your feet wet. Don’t pigeonhole yourself and think “I’m only a copywriter” or “I only make podcasts.” You can play in other areas because you already have the basic tools you need. Copywriters can write poetry and short stories. Podcasters can make audio theater or collaborate with a novelist and make audiobooks.

Expand beyond what you think you can create and find something new. Figure out ways to offer that kind of content on your website. Go beyond the dry old blogs about products and start offering a little more, even if it’s telling stories about past victories and customers you’ve helped. Make them entertaining and fun to read. Use those great writing skills to get more people to like what you have to say about your company.

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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 wants it, or the editors thought they wanted a certain product, and your job as the writer was to produce that product. And over the time I was at Sports Illustrated, it became more and more oriented towards customer service and that didn’t touch me.

If you’re in it because you like to write in a certain way, and then you’ve got to write in a way that’s going to get eyeballs, you’re not really writing with the kind of integrity that you want. And I felt that and I didn’t think I was ever going to get to the point, for good reason, where I had the kind of autonomy to write in the way I wanted to write

The phrase writing with integrity stopped me in my tracks. I had to pause the podcast and ruminate on that for several minutes.

As content marketers, we don’t get the chance to write with integrity very often. Sure, we like to be ethical and truthful. Despite the stereotype people have of marketers, we do try to operate with honesty and truth. But when do we get to actually write with integrity?

When do we get the chance to be open and transparent — the buzzword among many bloggers in the early-2010s — and share what’s really going on? When do we get the chance to tell a good story because it’s a good story and not just one more entry on our content marketing calendar?

“Today, we need an article about how developers can download our API and use our testing environment.”

Not something that allows for a lot of “writing with integrity.”

The problem is, the same that Greene experienced at Sports Illustrated, is that the integrity articles — the long-form, in-depth articles — are not the most popular ones. They’re the best ones, to be sure. But they don’t get the eyeballs. And that’s what journalism is about these days: getting eyeballs and clicks and visits to move advertising revenue. The long, well-done articles don’t get the traffic, and so they don’t get the attention. They’re the ones that get submitted for awards and for inclusion in anthologies. But they don’t get the same kind of traffic as “10 Reasons Why Your Favorite Team Sucks and 10 Why They’ll Win Their Division.”

It’s this way with business blogs. There are certain articles that get all kinds of traffic, but they’re not always the enjoyable, long-form articles that exercise your writing muscles. Instead, you have to write the kinds of articles where you say, “I got a creative writing degree for this? A damn monkey could write this!”

It’s even harder if you write for a corporation, or if you’re in the B2B world, where being dowdy and rigid is practically the price of admission. Very rarely do I see B2B blog articles that are fun, funny, or interesting. (And the ones I did see were more than likely ones that I wrote.)

Content Marketing With Integrity

But that doesn’t mean you can never do it. There are times that companies should be a little vulnerable and tell some stories that show people your history. Let them learn from your mistakes. Write a piece that talks about how your company nearly folded, and it was only thanks to some last-minute maneuvering that saved everyone. (Trust me, that story will be out there anyway, so you might as well be the one to tell it.)

Tell the story about how your solution didn’t work for a customer right away, and it took some additional work, consulting, and even training to get things to work properly. Don’t skip over that part in your case study, embrace it and showcase it.

Just like sportswriters have to write the daily news stories and game recaps (also called “gamers”) in order to be able to write the long-form features that make sportswriting so interesting, marketers need to carry water on a daily basis, writing the serve-to-order stories before they can write their other, better stories.

Of course, you may be in an industry or work for a business where you don’t get to write with integrity at all. Financial services, lawyers, pharmaceutical companies, and other highly-regulated businesses tend not to be able to write something that risky.

But for the rest of you, stop worrying about stories that will only bring in the eyeballs. Take a risk once in a while on a story that’s not a listicle, or something that promises “X Secrets to Improve Your Productivity.” While I like those articles and think they’re great traffic generators, they’re not very interesting or deep.

If you’re into the content marketing funnel philosophy, keep writing your “top of funnel” articles to bring people in. But try writing with integrity and transparency, and write the article you’ve been itching to write, and use it at the bottom of the funnel where people are about ready to sign.

Take a risk, try something new, and write the story you’ve been feeling, not the story on your content calendar.

Photo credit: Devanath (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)

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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 these grammar rules have changed over the years, thanks to common usage. The English language is an ever-changing tapestry of nonsense, and what may have been true once is true no longer. For example, “nice” used to mean “ignorant,” and the word “naughty” used to mean “poor.”

Here are five grammar rules you’re allowed to break, or at least shouldn’t blindly cling to because it’s what you learned in the 7th grade.

Ernest Hemingway sitting at a desk writing on a tablet. This guy knew a few things about writing and breaking grammar rules.

1. You CAN end your sentences with a preposition.

People cling to this rule like it’s carved in stone, but it should never have been a rule in the first place. While there are a few cases where you should not end your sentences with a preposition, there are plenty of cases where you just sound silly trying to meet it.

The rule was basically started by a guy named John Dryden, who, by all accounts, was a not-well-liked fusspot of a writer in the late 17th century. He abhorred the use of prepositions at the end of sentences, so he declared this should be the case.

Robert Lowth thought this was a smashing idea, so he included it in his A Short Introduction to English Grammar, which he published in 1762. It was the first book on English grammar, and its effects are still being felt.

it didn’t help that both men were Latin scholars who wanted English to bend to the same rules as Latin. In the Latin sentence structure, it’s not possible to have a sentence end with a preposition. Ergo, said the pedants, English shouldn’t either.

But it’s wrong. There are times you have to end your sentences in a preposition. For example, let’s say you stepped in something that stinks, and your friend says to you, “In what did you step?”

Wouldn’t you look at her like she lost her mind?

In that instance, it’s perfectly okay to say “what did you step in?” It’s proper English, it’s grammatically correct, and it doesn’t sound completely idiotic.

On the other hand, “where’s it at?” is wrong.

The basic rule is: if you can remove a preposition and the sentence still works, you shouldn’t use the preposition. But if you remove it, and the sentence changes, you should leave the preposition at the end.

Okay: What did you step in?
Not Okay: Where is it at?

2. You CAN start a sentence with And, But, or Or.

This may have been a real grammar rule at one point, but it is no longer. Common usage has rendered it obsolete. It may not be completely acceptable in business writing, but I can foresee that rule breaking down in the next ten years as more business people speak that way.

Besides, it looks pretty cool. And dramatic. And punchy. And intense.

And it turns out the practice has been around since the 10th century. It’s just some arbitrary rule our English teachers liked to enforce without ever knowing why.

3. You don’t have to start with the dependent clause first

A dependent clause is a sentence clause that can’t exist on its own. “Before the trial even ended” is a dependent clause (it’s also called a subordinate clause). And we were told that you needed to start sentences with a dependent clause. (Ooh, look, I just did rule #2!)

“Before the trial even ended, the real killer had been arrested and the defendant was set free.” not “The real killer had been arrested and the defendant was set free, before the trial even ended.” Even though you might want the important information at the front of the sentence, our teachers told us to put the dependent clause first.

You don’t have to do that anymore. For one thing, it sounds clunky. For another, there are times where the dependent clause will get in the way. Third, there are times a dependent clause needs to be set apart in a different way.

“The real killer was arrested — before the trial even ended — and the defendant was freed.”

It doesn’t always fit at the end, but it doesn’t always have to go first either.

Your better bet? Eliminate the dependent clause completely, or make it a standalone sentence. Which brings me to my next point.

4. You CAN use incomplete sentences.

This was a very minor point of contention while I was writing Branding Yourself (affiliate link). One of my editors would tell me not to use incomplete sentences.

Like this.

“But it’s a style choice,” I would say. “Not a grammar issue.”

And while you don’t want to make that a regular habit, stylistically, it doesn’t hurt to do it once in a while. It’s another common usage issue, where enough people have begun doing this that the grammar sticklers have to bow to majority rules and allow the change in the accepted use. (They don’t have to like it, and they’ll talk about it at dinner parties, but they’ll generally leave you alone about it.)

They also add some punch and drama to your writing, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction. Pepper them occasionally throughout your writing and see what it does for you.

5. A sentence does not always contain a subject, a verb, and an object. A paragraph does not always contain 3 – 5 sentences.

Journalists violate this rule all the time.

Because it’s a dumb rule. And untrue.

For one thing, people read differently than they did 30 years ago. We’re so impatient that we don’t want to read a lot of text. We need white space to break up the monotony of the Tolstoy-esque blocks of text we find in some books, tech manuals, and magazines. If you’ve ever looked at a page with a lot of tiny text and no breaks at all, you know what I’m talking about.

Newspaper publishers learned a long time ago that people won’t read long paragraphs and über-long sentences. So they encouraged writers to use short punchy words, short sentences, and short paragraphs.

Even one-sentence paragraphs.

My daughter has been told her paragraphs all need to be 3 – 5 sentences long, and I keep telling her it’s not only unnecessary, but it leads to bad writing. If you try to fill up every paragraph with 3 – 5 sentences, you start writing filler just to get there.

But if you keep some extra white space in your writing — by using short paragraphs — people are more likely to continue reading long beyond when they thought they would quit.

How about you? What grammar rules do you gladly (or unwittingly) violate? Are there rules you wish you could break? Leave a comment and let me know.

This post has been refreshed and updated from its original June 2011 publication.