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Four Professional Secrets to Ignite Your Writing

Do you want to make your writing sing?

Do you want it to be passionate, emotional, and to move scores of people to action? Do you want to write your barbaric yawp! over the screens of the world? Here are four professional secrets I’ve used over the years to help ignite my own writing.

Alliteration, Assonance, and Consonance

Writing can be memorable just with a little bit of alliteration. It can lighten the mood, and make a piece light-hearted without being silly or funny. Alliteration is where the first sound of a word are the same — crazy cars, beautiful beaches. Consonance is where internal consonants sound the same — Errant Erik — while assonance is where internal vowels sound the same — awful coffee, fair sherry.

One of my writers recently submitted a post about snow plows entitled “How Now Snow Plow,” which set a lighter mood for the entire piece, and we were able to do something a little lighter about something that’s usually very, well, not light.

Metaphors and Similes

Regular readers know I love metaphors. Metaphors are what give language its richness, its vividness. In the family of language, they’re the Wild Adventurer, that crazy uncle who lives exciting adventures searching for ancient treasure.

Similes, on the other hand, are the English teacher. The weak-chinnned, bespectacled, and slightly timid English teacher. They repeat, relate, and give you an idea of something, but they don’t actually do the thing they’re telling you about. (See, that there is a metaphor.)

“Life is like a box of chocolates,” said Forrest Gump. Meh. Sure, it’s nice, and it’s memorable, but it doesn’t bring anything to life.

But, “men’s words are bullets, that their enemies take up and make use of against them,” said George Savile in Maxims of State.

How sad, that life itself is reduced to a simple simile — a box of chocolates — while mere words can be bullets in the hands of our enemies. A well-turned metaphor can provide a thunderous impact to your writing.

Having said all that, similes can also be a powerful device. Think of any hard-boiled private detective story, when a sexy client entered the office — “She had legs like smooth alabaster towers that rose straight up to the heavens” — and you can see what similes can do for your writing.

While I recommend metaphors in your writing, similes will do in a pinch. But don’t rely on either device too much.

Hyperbole

Walt Whitman’s famous line from Leaves of Grass — his “barbaric yawp” — is surrounded by hyperbole. Hyperbole is an exaggeration that is not meant to be taken literally.

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me—he complains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed—I too am untranslatable;
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me;
It flings my likeness after the rest, and true as any, on the shadow’d wilds;
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I love the hyperbole here: a hawk accuses and complains, Whitman shouts over the roofs of the world, and the last scud of day flings his likeness. He’s not saying the hawk’s cries sound like accusations or complaints (which would make it a weak-chinned simile). He’s not saying he wishes his cries would ring out over the roofs of the world, or that they can only be heard 100 yards away. And a scud in Whitman’s day was when a ship runs before a strong wind, but with little sail set. So can it really fling things, especially a person’s likeness?

Whitman’s hyperbole, and excellent use of metaphor, make Leaves of Grass one of the most memorable pieces of literature from the 19th century.

Action Verbs

While I normally hate business jargon that gets turned into verbs, I love using action verbs, or even taking similes and turning them into verbs.

Last year, I gave a presentation on “10 Techniques to Rocket Your Blog to Success.” The verb phrase “rocket your blog” was a whole lot more dramatic and powerful than “make your blog take off like a rocket.”

By using the word “rocket” as a verb, I was able to create an image of power and speed, and give the idea that this was something important and powerful.

Even the verb in this post’s headline — ignite — is a lot better than the others I could have chosen: improve, help, boost, embiggen. None of them gave the impression of, well, lighting a fire under your writing. (Five cool points to anyone who can tell me what literary device I just used in that last sentence.)

So, these are just four techniques that I use to help my own writing. What are some of the ones you use? How do you punch up your own writing, and make it memorable? Share your ideas in the comments.

My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available on Amazon.com, as well as at Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy.

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Five Advanced Techniques to Help Your Blog

This is not one of those posts that restates the same damn advice you get in all the other “Grow Your Blog” posts.

I will not tell you to “write good content” or “promote your blog to your social networks.” That advice is so worn out, even the Amish roll their eyes whenever they hear it.

So I won’t share lessons from the Mr. Obvious School of Blogging. But these are five advanced techniques you should consider. They will either grow your readership, improve your search rankings, or both.

1) Find a deep niche. Not just a semi-vague niche — like “Italian cooking” — but a deeper one, like “gluten free Italian cooking.” While “food” is a hugely generic topic, and “cooking” is a little more specific, even a style of cooking is still too broad. But if you can get to one specific detail, you’ll dominate that market. While it may be a long-tail search, keep in mind that there are still thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people looking for that niche.

2) Create backlinks from other sites. Any search engine optimization specialist is going to tell you that backlinks are crucial to improving your search engine rankings. Yes, onsite optimization is important — keywords in the title, anchor text, etc. — but backlinks are the best way to optimize your site, because you’re telling the search engines your site is very popular.

The easiest way to generate backlinks are going to be via comments, but be aware that this is not a powerful way to create them. Comment links don’t have as much juice as a link on another blog. Write guest posts on other blogs, get people to reference you in other posts, and participate in forum discussions related to your blog’s topic.

If you can get your links on a site with a high pagerank (use WebRank Toolbar or other pagerank monitoring tools), all the better. Also, getting a link on a .gov website will carry more weight than a .info or .biz site, especially if that .info/.biz site is only a year old. (Google gives more weight to domains that are more than a year old, and have been purchased for more than a year.)

3) Create a secondary blog to create keyword-rich backlogs. The best way to control your backlinks is to create a second blog on a completely different platform or server, and point it back at your original site. Set something up on Posterous, WordPress.com, or even Blogger, and create content that is about the very same thing your site is about.

It’s important that you put new, original content on this second site. Don’t just run an old blog post through an article spinner, or make a few edits to a post. You need to write completely new blog posts. They don’t have to be terribly long: 250 words or so. But they should be about the topic of your primary blog, and should link back to that primary blog. (Be sure to link only a particular keyword or phrase. Don’t link to an entire sentence or extra unrelated words.)

4) Use article marketing. Article sites like Ezine.com and others are a great way to repurpose some of your writing, and build backlinks. The premise is the same as writing for a secondary blog and pointing it to your primary blog. However, unlike a second blog, you don’t have to put as much work into an article. Take an old post, rewrite and rearrange it, and then submit it to some article sites, all which will point back to your primary blog.

5) Submit to social sharing sites. The biggest spike in my blog’s traffic in the last year came when a post I wrote for my humor blog, “Understanding 7 Different Kinds of Humor,” hit the front page of StumbleUpon.com, and got 700 visits in 2 days. In fact, nearly 40% of my regular traffic comes from my StumbleUpon submissions, so anytime I write a new humor post, I always submit it to StumbleUpon.

This does two things for me: first, it builds a backlink from a highly-popular website (Pagerank of 8), and second, it introduces my site to a whole new group of readers. Many readers visit once and never return, but I have also gained a lot of regular readers who read my new posts or subscribe to my RSS feed.

Other sites like Digg, Delicious, and even Bloggers.com can all build backlinks and gain new readers as well.

While there are other advanced blogging techniques, these are the five I use over and over, whether it’s on my own blog or on our client blogs.

My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available on Amazon.com, as well as at Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy.

Photo credit: Svenwerk (Flickr)

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Is Blogging Killing Newspapers, or are Newspapers Helping Blogs?

Blogging isn’t hurting newspapers. Newspapers are helping blogs grow.

Many months ago, someone named Stephen* presented me with an interest question to my statement about whether blogging was killing newspapers. He said that maybe it wasn’t that blogging was killing newspapers, but rather it was the decline of the quality of newspapers that have lead to an increase in blogging.

The Indianapolis Star from November 5, 2008

Over the past several years, I’ve seen how Gannett (owners of USA Today) have decimated the local reporting staff at the Indianapolis Star. They get rid of people who know how to report and write (and yes, there’s a difference). They get rid of well-known writers that bring regular readers to the paper in favor of a couple of recent college grads who — together — make up 75% of the salary of the original writer. They have bombed out the newsroom, eliminated business writers, booted popular columnists, and slashed the different culture and dining critics. To add insult to injury, the design work for the Indianapolis Star will soon be moved to Louisville. All we’re left with is a sterilized husk of what was once an awesome newspaper.

The Indianapolis Star, when it was run by the Pulliam family, actually won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975, for its outstanding reporting in exposing police corruption in 1974. (The Indianapolis Star, when it has been run by Gannett has, well, not.) I’ve been reading the book by Dick Cady, one of the reporters who helped break the police corruption story wide open, and I sometimes wonder if I’m reading about the same newspaper.

I’m reading a newspaper that wasn’t afraid to go up against local law enforcement for the sake of truth, justice, and the American way. Meanwhile, I’m left with a newspaper whose median years of newsroom experience is slowly drifting toward the single digits.

And yet Gannett can’t figure out why newspaper ad revenue is dropping like a rock. I’ll tell you why: no one wants to read the Indianapolis edition of USA Today. But that’s what we’ll be left with in less than five years (some former Indy Star readers and employees think five years is overly optimistic).

Blogging is not to blame for this. Blogging has not harmed the Indianapolis Star. Blogging did not make Gannett fire people like columnists Ruth Holladay or Lori Borgman, or business writers like John Ketzenberger. Blogging did not kill what was actually a profit-making online venture by replacing the editor with someone much younger.

Instead, blogging is picking up the pieces that Gannett and other big-city newspapers are dropping whenever they gut their newsrooms yet again.

There’s a great blog on the southeast side of Indianapolis called (what else?) Southeast Indianapolis Communities. It’s a simple little blog that has nothing but news for the southeast side of town. They’re covering the news and events that the Indy Star won’t and can’t cover. They’re doing the kind of reporting that the Star doesn’t have the staff, time, or even city knowledge to adequately write about.

Basically, Southeast Indianapolis Communities is filling the gap left by Gannett’s mishandling of the Indianapolis Star, and they’re doing a great job. In this case, SIC hasn’t hurt the Star. Rather, the growing crappiness of the Star is helping the SIC.

What about your newspaper in your city? Is your newspaper holding on, or are you seeing the same decimation and ruin that we’re seeing in Indianapolis? Tell us about your city’s newspaper and if you’re seeing any local blogs picking up the slack. (And tell us about those too.)

My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available for pre-order on Amazon.com. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy, who I also helped write Twitter Marketing For Dummies (another affiliate link).

Stephen, I can’t find the post where you commented with this great insight. If you’re out there, let me know who you are, so I can at least link to a Twitter page or your blog, or something.

Photo credit: afagen (Flickr)

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Five Reasons Why We Use WordPress

We’re a WordPress house.

90% of our clients are on a WordPress site. The others are either Joomla or Compendium, a blogging platform made right here in Indianapolis.

Personally, I use Blogspot for my humor blog and Posterous for an experimental/personal blog I use for conferences and social media and crisis communicationsdemos.

Taking notes at Tammy Hart's WordPress Design session at WordCamp Louisville.

But when it comes to this blog, our clients’ blogs, and any consulting we do, we’re a WordPress house. In fact, I’m sitting at the Wordcamp Louisville conference right now, at Tammy Hart’s session on designing with WordPress. It’s informative, inspiring, and she’s done some amazing stuff. She’s also making me feel guilty for using pre-built themes (not enough to stop, but I’ll at least feel a twinge of guilt whenever I buy one).

So here are the five reasons we use WordPress, and why we think any corporate bloggers ought to use it too.

  • You can make it do just about anything you want. Tammy says WordPress won’t do your laundry, won’t fix the economy, won’t climb Mount Everest, and won’t explain the meaning of life.* But, you can create brochure sites, basic e-commerce sites, magazines, social communities, a knowledge base, even an invoicing and time tracking system. The important thing about WordPress design is to ask yourself, “How do I make WordPress do X, Y, and Z?” not “What can WordPress do?” So far, we’ve been able to make WordPress do anything our clients need.
  • It’s easy to optimize a site for search engines. We use a plugin called All In One SEO, which helps us creative keyword-rich WordPress meta tags very easily. In fact, I interrupted that last sentence to take 30 seconds to drop in my All In One SEO tags. You didn’t even notice I was gone, did you? There are a lot of companies who specialize in search engine optimization. And the one secret they don’t want me to tell you is that they use a plugin like this to make their lives so much easier. (To be fair, there’s a whoooole lot more they do offsite, and there’s no plugin for that.)
  • The developers make it so easy to use. Anyone with some technical know-how, or at least the patience to figure it out, can set up a blog with WordPress.org. (WordPress.com is easy-peasy. Just go to the site, start an account, choose your theme, and start blogging.) WordPress.org lets you download the software to your own server, where you control everything — updates, themes, plugins. Everything. Tammy says “WordPress.com is like renting, WordPress.org is like buying. If you rent, you can’t knock down walls, can’t paint, can’t change the carpet. Of course, if you rent, you don’t have to fix the toilet, don’t have to fix the water heater, don’t have to fix the refrigerator.” We like WordPress.org, because we can even design the site so it doesn’t look like a WordPress site.
  • It lets you own everything, including your content. No other site does that. Facebook, Twitter, even WordPress.com, owns the means of production and communication. If they go away, all your content is gone. If Facebook inadvertently deletes your account, all your stuff is gone. (They did that to a bunch of accounts when they rolled out Facebook Messaging a month ago, including my mom’s. They restored them all, but it showed how uncertain using someone else’s platform can be.) If Twitter goes under, all your tweets are gone. Even if Blogger (owned by Google) decides you violated their Terms of Service, they’ll delete your stuff, never to return again.But with WordPress.org, the software lives on your server, under your domain, with your content. The only thing that can make it die is you. Even if WordPress dies as a platform, you still own your copy of the software, so you can make it limp along for a couple of years until you find a suitable replacement. Why would you want to put your stuff’s safety and existence at the mercy of someone else’s whim?
  • It’s very easy to embed photos and videos. I’ve used some other blog platforms, and embedding video and photos can be a bit of a pain. WordPress makes it so easy to upload photos and videos, whether they’re from my computer (like these two are), or they’re hosted on YouTube and Vimeo, Flickr and Picasa. Just a couple of clicks, and my media is in place.

There are hundreds of reasons to use WordPress. These are just the five that make us big fans and grateful users. How about you? Why do you use it Or to turn it around, why do you hate it What is your favorite platform, and why?

* Actually, yes it will. It’s 42. And you heard it here on a WordPress blog.

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Do You Know Where to Tap the Hammer?

A parable.

A business owner is horrified to discover one morning that her company’s server is broken. Won’t boot up, won’t turn on. She calls a computer repair expert to come out and see what he can do.

The expert shows up, looks at the machine carefully, and even gives it a careful listen. He runs his fingers lightly on the side of the computer, and then taps it with a small hammer. The computer starts right up, the business owner is happy, and the expert goes away.

If I had this hammer, man, I could fix ANYTHING!

Two days later, the expert’s bill shows up. “Computer repair, $500,” it says.

The business owner calls up the expert, angry. “$500?! All you did was tap the computer, and you charged me $500?! I need to see an itemized version of your bill, to see why you thought that was worth $500.”

Two days later, the new bill arrives in the mail. “Tapping the computer with a hammer, $1. Knowing where to tap the hammer, $499.”

Knowing Where to Tap the Hammer: The Moral

Once, I was talking to a freelance writer friend, and she was worried about charging too much for her services.

“I don’t see how I can charge that much an hour, just to write a single press release,” she said, like she was worried she would be found out as a fraud, or that people would realize anyone could do it.

“Do you have special knowledge that enables you to write that press release in under an hour?”

“Oh sure, I’ve done so many of these, I can write them in 30 minutes sometimes.”

“And do you think your clients could write that same release in under an hour?”

“No, they take 3 or 4 hours to write one.”

So I told her the computer hammer story.

“You know where to tap the computer,” I said. “Your job seems easy to you because you’ve done it for years. But to someone who has never done it, it seems daunting. But then if they see how easy it is for you, they assume it’s that easy for anyone. But if they don’t know how to do it, it’s still a mystery.”

What can you do better than anyone else? What is a special piece of knowledge that you have that could be valuable to someone else? What are you putting your energy and time into?

For me, it’s writing. For Lorraine Ball, it’s PR for small businesses. For Paul D’Andrea, it’s portraits and event photography.

For us hammer tappers, we’re always learning new stuff, new tools and techniques, new ways of doing things.

Knowing where to tap the hammer is what sets us apart from those of us who will try the same things over and over — flipping the computer off and on, trying it in different plugs, shaking it — before declaring it impossible to finish.

My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available for pre-order on Amazon.com. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy, who I also helped write Twitter Marketing For Dummies (another affiliate link).

Photo credit: KyleMay (Flickr)

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Paid Consulting or Free Advice? A Moral Conundrum

A story.

Pablo Picasso is sitting in a restaurant, when a woman approaches him, gushes over him and his work, and asks him to sketch something on a piece of paper for her.

Picasso takes the paper, and does a quick-but-beautiful sketch. He hands it back to her and says, “that will be $10,000.”

The woman is taken aback. “But it only took you a few minutes to do that. Isn’t $10,000 a lot for just a few minutes work?”

“it may have taken me just a few minutes to draw, but it took me a lifetime to learn,” said Picasso.

I frequently think of Picasso whenever I’m asked to provide free advice and knowledge.

“Can we meet for coffee?” someone will ask me at a networking event. “I want to pick your brain about blogging.” Like my brain is on display, with a lot of other brains.

“Mmmmmmm—that one!”

I’m usually happy to share as much information as I can. I try to be friendly and willing to teach people, as an homage to the people who shared so much information with me when I was first starting out.

This bothers people. Most notably my business partner, Paul, my wife, and any professional consultants.

“You need to charge for your time. You’re giving away information. Information that’s taken you months and years to amass. Even if it takes you an hour to teach them, it took you years to learn it.”

Will work for food. For now.

“Cool!” I think. “My time is worth money. I have years of knowledge and experience that people think is valuable.” And I feel really good, and I promise that, this time, I’ll embrace my inner consultant, and say I’m more than happy to teach them everything I know for a pre-determined hourly rate. Like Picasso did.

But then someone asks me again, and I’m afraid of looking like a money-grubbing a-hole, so I compromise.

“Tell you what. I’m supposed to charge $100 an hour for this kind of information,” I say, rolling my eyes as if to say “they” told me to ask for money. “But if you buy my lunch, I’ll be happy to tell you what I can.”

The other person readily agrees, we meet, and I share whatever I can to help them out. Of course, when I get back to the office or come home that night, I feel like Jack did after he told his mom he traded the cow for some magic beans.

I know I’m supposed to make money from my work. I’m a professional who is hired by companies to actually use my knowledge and skill to help them be successful. That is paid consulting. I’ve raised the bar (and my rates) even higher in the last year by co-writing two books and working on a third. (At the very least, I think, I should be getting dessert with lunch, but apparently that’s still not good enough and now I have to watch my cholesterol.)

I don’t know why it’s so hard for me. Pablo Picasso scribbled on a piece of paper between courses, and charged a woman $10,000 for something that took him decades to master. I’m sharing many years of blogging and writing wisdom in 60 minutes, and I should be able to look someone in the eye and ask for $100 an hour without stammering out an apology.

I’ve talked with other friends who face the same conundrum. Some are happy to charge, while some are not. I don’t know who to believe. Even the experts aren’t sure.

On one hand, Seth Godin says if I want to be a Linchpin (affiliate link), I need to participate in the Gift Economy, and give this stuff away for free, because then I’m valuable to a lot of other people, and the benefits (and money) will shower upon me. Chris Anderson says that if I give knowledge away for Free (affiliate link), I’ll show my value to others, and the benefits and money will shower upon me some more.

On the other hand, there are hundreds and thousands of professional consultants who make their living getting paid to share their knowledge and experience, which took years to amass. Why should they get paid obscene amounts of money to share their knowledge, when I’m settling for a damn hamburger? (To be fair, it’s a really good hamburger, and I order bacon on it, which usually costs extra. Because I’m worth it.)

What should I do? Should I embrace my inner capitalist and charge people to give them my knowledge? Or should I continue to believe in puppy dogs and rainbows, and share my knowledge for the good of mankind and the benefit of the planet? What would you do? Leave a comment and let me know. I’ll discuss the answers in a future post.