Pro Blog Service

You are here: Home / Archives for All Posts / Blogging

Blogging

By

Half of All Written Content Online Is Sh*t

To paraphrase Ernest Hemingway, half of all written content is shit.

While he actually said “the first draft of anything is shit,” I would maintain that this applies to all online content in general for a couple of reasons:

  1. If we look at a normal bell curve of distribution, you know there’s a halfway mark where everything above it is average, above average, and excellent. That means that the other half is average, below average, and terrible.
  2. Most content marketers publish their first draft.

That doesn’t seem like so much until you realize that there are 70 million blog posts being produced on WordPress.com alone.

In other words, of that 70 million, exactly 35 million of them are above average, and 35 million are below average.

This does not include all the articles appearing on Blogger, Tumblr, LiveJournal, and all the other self-hosted blogs and websites. Let’s be generous and say there are 200 million articles posted every month.

I’ve lost count of the number of so-called content marketers and personal branding experts who publish sub-par blog articles on a daily basis. They issue a warning statement boast about how they wrote their entire week’s worth of blog articles on a Sunday afternoon, taking only two hours to complete the entire week’s work.

That works out to roughly 24 minutes to write a single blog article.

It shows, guys! It shows!

If what Ernest says is true, and the first draft of anything is shit, and half of anything is worse than average, there’s a very good chance that your 24-minute article is hot garbage.

So if you think you can get away with writing a single blog article in less than 30 minutes and expect it to be any good, you’ve got another think coming.

5 Quick and Dirty Tips to Improve Your Writing

There are entire books that will help you improve your writing, but let me give you these five quick tips to improve what you’ve already written. Even if it’s something you wrote a few weeks ago, you owe it to yourself and your readers to practice these five steps.

  1. Adopt a process of Write, Rewrite Twice, Polish Once. (Trust me, this one tip alone will make all the difference in the world.)
  2. Use Grammarly.com to find and correct any issues. Download it for Mac or Windows, and install the plugin on your web browser(s). Grammarly will check your writing anywhere and everywhere, which means it can help you identify problems in your email, tweets, and Facebook updates, which can help you correct some bad habits.
  3. Read your work out loud. If necessary, change the point size so the text lays out differently on the page. This forces you to look more closely as you read. You’ll catch double words like “the the” or sentences that you forgot to.
  4. Use Hemingwayapp.com. This works much in the same way that Grammarly does, but it forces you to look at sentence complexity, adverb usage, and reading level. (Remember, you want a lower reading level, not higher.)
  5. Edit paragraphs so there are no orphans. “Widows and orphans” is a typography term. (Read about it here.) In this case, orphans are single words on their own line at the end of a paragraph. As you’re writing your piece, edit each paragraph so there are no orphans. This will force you to tighten up the entire paragraph until you can pull that orphan up to the previous line.

    6. Excellent Work Is Being Buried Under Mountains of Shit

    There’s enough content online that the good stuff is getting buried. Remember, we estimated 200 million blog articles per month?

    Even if we created 5 million “excellent” pieces of work — something that’s two standard deviations from the dead-center average — it’s being buried by 195 million pieces of everything else.

    While you probably won’t write THE ABSOLUTE BESTEST NUMERO UNO BLOG ARTICLE OF ALL TIME!! this month (you have a 1-in-200-million chance), you can at least write a very interesting and memorable article that your readers will remember, love, and be inspired by. And you can get more of them if you can share it through social media and some clever SEO.

    If you can do these five things — especially #s 1 and 2 — you’ll greatly improve your written content online. At the very least, you can get it above that halfway mark in the distribution curve. It’s not that hard, you just have to spend a little more than 24 minutes on a single blog article.

    Photo credit: Bell Curve by Abhijit Bhaduri (Flickr, Creative Commons 2.0)
    Photo credit: GPA Photo Archive (Flickr, Creative Commons 0)

By

Five Steps to Starting Your Nonprofit’s Storytelling Campaign

A few months ago, someone asked me about how to start a storytelling campaign for her nonprofit. She wanted to spread the word about how the nonprofit helps young people who are blind and have developmental disabilities. She teaches gardening and horticulture and helps her students to run a business and deal with a few clients. I gave her a basic strategy for a storytelling campaign that used different social media channels, as well as a website and blog.

Other nonprofits that want to tell their story can do more than just launching a newsletter or being active on Twitter. If you see your ongoing communication as one long story — think of it as a long-running TV series

This is a strategy any nonprofit could use to tell the stories about their efforts and the communities they serve. The goal is to help potential donors and volunteers get to know the people they’re helping. If you can put a face and name to your work, people are more likely to give.

This is one of the reasons nearly all fundraising letters have you “meet” one of their recipients. Someone who needs your help, and who has been helped by that organization. And you can help more people just like this one just by donating $10 per month.

1. What stories do you want to tell?

Before starting a storytelling campaign, you need to figure out what story you actually want to tell. A story can have a few parts to it, so you can have more than one focus.

In fact, you could think of your story as a TV show, where there is usually an A story, a B story, and a C story. The A story gets the most attention and time, the B story gets the second most, and the C story gets the least. In a 22-minute sitcom, the A story may get 9 – 11 minutes of storytime, the B story gets 6 – 8 minutes, and the C story gets 3 – 5 minutes.

So your A story could be how you help people through a meal delivery service, your B story could be your mobile health clinic, and your C story could be your future plan to open an apartment building with in-house medical facilities.

That means your meal delivery service gets the most “air time,” the mobile health clinic gets the second most, and the apartment building gets the least. That doesn’t mean you don’t talk about the B and C stories, or that they’re always second and third on the list of your blog articles and videos. Rather, it means they get to be the sole focus of your attention once in a while.

2. Identify your channels

Now you need to know where you want to promote your story. And you do that by figuring out where your target audience is. Essentially, you want to “fish where the fish are.”

If you do a lot of events where people are likely to share photos of themselves, then you want to be on Instagram. If you don’t have a huge visual component to your storytelling, then you can skip Instagram. If your audience is older, you should focus more on Facebook and skip Snapchat.

But you can also double up in a few places. Since Facebook owns Instagram, you can automate your posting between both networks. If you post things to Instagram, you can set it up so those things automatically post to Facebook. You can even use an automation service like IFTTT (If This, Then That) or Zapier to automatically push photos to Twitter.

Just don’t go nuts. Limit the number of social channels you join, rather than joining as many as you can. You may have heard a lot about Clubhouse, Fireside, Snapchat, and every other new tool people are buzzing about, but that doesn’t mean they’re worthy of your attention.

Instead, pick the ones that are well-established and show some signs of longevity. I normally recommend Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and a blog for most nonprofits. You could also use LinkedIn, but I typically advise against it unless your nonprofit deals with work — teaching reading and life skills, helping people develop skills to find a job, educational institutions, etc.

You’ll also want a weekly or monthly newsletter — your newsletter is where you’ll collect the email addresses of your donors, volunteers, and supporters. This list is your lifeblood because these are the people who keep you in business and help you support your mission.

3. Your channels will affect your content.

What do you have the capabilities and time to produce? What does your audience want? Do you have a lot of people who watch and share videos? Or do they prefer reading long-form content? You can figure that out just by asking them with a survey.

Once you know what they would prefer, start giving it to them. Maybe it’s a weekly 700-word blog article, maybe it’s daily photos of your birds of prey, or a weekly podcast interviewing other people in your nonprofit’s mission.

At the very least, I do recommend photos and blog articles. The blog helps with search engine optimization and your search rankings, but this is where most of your storytelling is going to happen. Your blog is where you get to explore the nitty-gritty of your work, explain your positions on policy decisions, analyze how new laws and regulations affect you. It can also provide you content for a newsletter.

And if you have the time and capabilities, consider a podcast or video series about your nonprofit’s greater mission. For example, if your nonprofit is about rehabilitating injured birds of prey, start an educational video or podcast series that teaches people about birds of prey, the different kinds of birds there are, and how they live.

4. How will you tell your stories?

We’ve done the easy part, now is the hard part. How do we tell your stories? Do you tell an individual’s story? Do you tell the group’s story? Your organization’s origin and success story?

Start with what amount to case studies and testimonials. Take one person who is involved with your organization, talk about their experience before they got involved, what they learned, and how it’s helped them afterward.

For example, your story would look like this: John had a problem. He was 100 pounds overweight, constantly tired, and was at risk of diabetes. He had tried different diets, but nothing had worked, and he was worried he was going to have serious illnesses in a couple years. So John started an exercise program at Major Payne’s Get Fit Boot Camp. In 9 months, John had lost 100 pounds, had plenty of energy, and reduced his risk for diabetes by 82%. He even grew back all his hair, married a supermodel, and won the lottery.

Basically, you can build an entire campaign on stories like this. You know what you need to write and tell, and you can place each of them into your A, B, and C stories.

And you can break them up so that for every three A stories you write, you write two B stories and one C story.

You can produce a video or shoot some pictures, write a blog article, share it on your chosen social channels — share it more than once in a week; three or four times per week is perfectly acceptable — and produce those stories once or twice a week.

5. What is your storytelling campaign’s throughline?

Throughline is another TV term. It’s the underlying theme of a movie or TV show. It’s not the story, but it’s the motivation behind the story.

For example, the throughline of the Captain America movies is “Cap hates bullies.” So everything we see him do is based on his intense dislike of bullies.

Your throughline is related to the purpose of your organization. It could be education, it could be housing, it could be creating awareness of a particular disease or societal problem.

If your purpose is education, your stories will show how you’re educating your target audience, such as adult literacy, helping at-risk youth, or animal rescue. Your stories won’t be about teaching, mentoring, or saving, but that will always run through your stories.

For example, you won’t do a video on “this is how we saved this dog” or even “The 12 steps we take to save dogs.” But you’ll write about a dog that you saved, cleaned, and adopted out to a loving family.

So your stories should include your throughline. Even if you were doing a “meet our staff” story, you would want to focus on how they help fulfill your purpose and mission.

Starting a storytelling campaign can be a little difficult, but if you just start with the basics — pick a couple channels, decide what story to tell, and follow your throughline — you’ll quickly figure out what to do and how to do it.

Don’t worry if creating stories is hard or you’re not very good at first. You’ll learn a lot, you’ll get better, and pretty soon you’ll be whipping out those stories, editing those videos, and writing those blog articles like they’re second nature. As long as you build a good storytelling campaign framework, you can easily see what works and what doesn’t work, and you’ll have a formula to follow with every new story you write.

Photo credit: Tumisu (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)
Photo credit: StockSnap (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)

By

The Secret of B2B and B2C Copywriting

I’m going to tell you a secret about copywriting.

It’s a secret that the copywriters don’t want you to know. It’s a secret the marketers and the people who hire copywriters haven’t figured out. It’s a secret the business owners and managers don’t even know exists. That secret is this:

There is no difference between B2B copywriting and B2C copywriting.

None at all. It’s complete bullshit. They’re exactly the same, because they use the same thing in both camps:

  • Words.
  • Emotions.
  • The ability to use one to tap into the other.

Oh, and a decent grasp of the English language.

If you understand and can use those things, you can write for both B2B and B2C clients. Even on the same day.

Your Target Audiences Are People

One of the irritating things about content marketers, besides their insatiable greed for data and analytics, is that they forget their users/visitors/hits/views are all people.

Their users are people. Their visitors are people. The page views? Made by people.

And people have thoughts, emotions, and complex inner lives. They want things and they’re afraid of other things. And they’re reading your copy because they either want something or they’re afraid of losing something else.

People are stirred by the same emotions whether they’re at work or at home, trying to decide whether to buy your SaaS software or large-screen TV. They’re motivated with the same methods, follow the same sales funnel, and can be persuaded with the same formulas. They respond to good stories, persuasive arguments, and important ideas, whether they’re at work or at home.

No one is a completely different person between work and home. Oh sure, they don’t do the same things. They may have a work personality and a home personality, but fundamentally, they’re the same people. High-energy Type A people are always high-energy Type A people. Laid-back Type B introverts are always laid-back Type B introverts.

And that means a copywriter who is adept at telling stories or is able to simplify complex information can do that for a B2B buyer or a B2C buyer, even when those buyers are the same individual.

Whether your customer is trying to decide whether to buy a gas or charcoal grill or trying to decide which cloud-computing service to use, they’re going to use the same critical thinking and decision-making skills to solve the problem.

That means your copy needs to be concise, coherent, and complete. It needs to be well-written and informative. It needs to fire up their emotions.

Good copywriters can do that for B2B copy, trying to convince a purchasing agent or a department head to make a decision on their particular product or service. They can turn around and do that for B2C copy, trying to convince a consumer to make a decision for that product or service.

To the copywriter, there’s no difference in how they do their job, how the copy is structured, and which kinds of copywriting formulas they use.

Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

There’s Not Much Difference Between Industries Either

Years ago, I used to work in the poultry industry — we sold poultry feeding equipment and watering equipment to farmers and poultry companies.

Over the years, several of the growers told me, “Poultry farmers are like no other consumers. We’re frugal and we do things our own way.”

At the same time, our company sold hog feeding equipment and watering equipment to farmers.

Over those same years, several of those farmers told me, “Pork farmers are like no other consumers. We’re frugal and we do things our own way.”

A few years later, I worked for a software company that sold software to state governments.

The people I called on told me, “Government purchasing agents are like no other consumers. We’re frugal and we do things our own way.”

Over the last 12 years, I’ve written for startups, Fortune 500 companies, and every size of company in between. I’ve written for techies, marketers, fintech developers, small business owners, lawyers, and software companies, and you’ll never guess what they all — ALL! — have said to me:

“__________ are like no other consumers. We’re frugal and do things our own way.”

At no point did anyone ever say to me, “We’re just like everyone else and we’re damn stupid with our money.” If they had, that one would be the different one, the only one not like all the others.

“But every industry is different by its very nature!”

Well, of course, every industry is different, Financial technology is nothing like hog farming. Women’s skincare is nothing like cloud computing. And marketing software is nothing like construction equipment. I know, because I’ve written for all these industries.

(But I was successful in all of them, despite being a newbie at one point.)

Industry knowledge is important to a writer because it makes their job easier. But it does not make them better. I’ve known veteran industry writers who regularly produce some of the most mediocre, boring garbage, and I’ve seen people who just earned their creative writing MFAs writing write circles around the veterans.

I’ve also seen the reverse to be true.

Industry knowledge does not make the writer, writing skills do. The ability to use language to tap into a person’s emotion and compel them to buy? That’s the real skill.

You can teach industry knowledge. The writer can interview a subject matter expert and craft a compelling story in 10 minutes. But the industry expert can’t learn heart and style — at least not in a 10-minute conversation.

Bottom line: If you’re looking for a good copywriter, focus less on their industry expertise. All that means is they know the industry terminology, but anyone can figure that out with a quick Google search.

Instead, hire a copywriter who knows how to write so they can make your blog articles and webpages interesting, compelling, and fun to read. Hire fiction writers, poets, screenwriters, journalists, and storytellers. Get the people who know how to make boring things interesting and how to make complex ideas easy to understand.

If you’re focused on the length of time a person has spent in an industry, you’re looking at the wrong thing.

Because everyone’s industry is just like all the others, and your customers are just like everyone else’s. The good writer knows that, and they know that tapping into a buyer’s buying motivation is the key to success.

Photo credit: Voltamax (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)

By

A Quick and Dirty Editorial Calendar

One of the things that have always irritated me about social media marketing is the near-fetishization of the editorial calendar.

I’ve known companies that have scripted every single tweet, Facebook update, Instagram photo, and blog article for an entire year, dictating the date and time each message will go out, and color-coding it to product launches, corporate events, and phases of the moon.

And I’ll admit to more than a little schadenfreude when those year-long schedules were derailed by some corporate crisis, takeover, merger, or product cancellation.

I’ve never understood the fascination of such strict, rigorous scheduling because it’s so easily disrupted, but I like the idea of general guidelines. Just a few recommendations to keep me on the right path, not a step-by-step, turn-by-turn map of the route I have to take.

As I like to say, “Just tell me where I need to go, I’ll figure out how to get there myself.”

So here’s a way to make a quick and dirty editorial calendar.

  1. To start, create a spreadsheet on Google, Excel, or Numbers. Label the days of the week, and create enough lines for your posts for each day. The example above has three posts per day.
  2. Color code the alternating weeks by hand. Don’t use the application’s alternating rows command because it doesn’t let you group them this way. (At least I haven’t figured out how to do 2 or 3 rows at a time without screwing up the header..)
  3. Put the dates to the right of the block.
  4. Put a row below the month, and put the Topic Of The Day in each cell. If you’re going to run a daily theme, spell it out here. If you want a weekly theme, put it to the right, next to the dates column.
  5. You can also drop hashtags into each cell. In the sample calendar above, I could drop in #contentmarketing in every Monday spot, #language in every Tuesday spot, and so on. This gives you a little more flexibility to label each post and keep a running theme. For example, for one client, I post a funny little picture on Instagram at 3: 15 every afternoon. (You can see Marcel and his crazy little adventures here.)
  6. Do a Google News search for your particular keyword or hashtag. Start scanning the stories and open up each one that seems to fit what you’re looking for. Do a quick read through and then copy the headline and the URL and paste it into the cells. Helpful tip: Don’t go to news.google.com, because their selection of articles is rather limited. Instead, do a general search and then click the News button at the top of the page. Then select the Recent menu, and choose Last 7 Days. Copy that URL and paste it into a cell on your calendar. Do that for every keyword/hashtag you need. Label them, and set those cells’ formatting to clip the contents, not wrap. (It screws up the look of your calendar.)
  7. Schedule your posts no more than one week in advance. Every Monday morning, I schedule the week’s social media posts for all of my clients. This way, I’m not working too far ahead if there are any major disruptions to their news or social media flow.
  8. With each new month, just Duplicate the most recent page. Then, highlight the calendar, hit Delete, and start all over. Change the dates, drop in your hashtags, and start filling up the content again.
  9. Use a service like HootSuite, Buffer, or TweetDeck to schedule your posts. To schedule your social posts, use a service like one of the ones mentioned, or any of the other options out there. Of course, these all cost money, and some are more expensive than others. You can post to TweetDeck for free, but it only lets you post to Twitter. However, there’s a workaround: Set up a few automation tasks on IFTTT.com or Zapier.com. These tools will let you automate certain tasks, such as reposting an Instagram photo to your Twitter account, or texting you every time it’s going to rain in your area. For a couple clients, I use Zapier to repost all tweets with a certain hashtag (#LI) to LinkedIn. This saves me from spending money on HootSuite, Buffer, or other social scheduling tools.

How ever you set up your own social media and editorial calendar, find a method that’s easy for you and doesn’t require you spending many hours developing an entire schedule for the year. Set up daily and weekly themes to guide you for the kinds of messages you want to share, but keep things loose so you can pivot if the need arises.

By

How To Write Impactful Travel Blog Posts That Get Noticed

Every so often, I will feature guest posts from writers who actually have important and interesting things to say. Joel Syder is a freelance and travel blog writer, a topic which is near and dear to my heart. So I wanted to feature his article on travel blog writing.

Writing travel blog posts involves so much more than simply stating ‘Hey, I’m here!’ In fact, with so much noise in the travel blogging niche, it’s becoming more and more difficult to get noticed. Yet to those who pen their travel blog posts in the right way, there are ample means to get impactful results, be that a following, or click-throughs if you are supporting a product or service. With that in mind, here are some tips to producing travel blog posts that actually get results:

Use an interesting title

It all starts from the beginning, which in this case is your title. This is a one-off chance to hook the reader into your travel blog post. Make it unique, interesting and quirky if possible. Entice them to read more.

“Sometimes choosing the right title can take almost as long as the blog post itself. It’s essential that it reflects your post but that it reels the reader in. You want them to think ‘What’s this all about?’” remarks Trudy Carlton, a travel blogger at Writemyx and Brit student.

Find a different angle

Joel Syder

It can be tough to do, but your post also needs to pitch something slightly different too. In a crowded space this may seem overwhelming, but often it entails simply looking at things from a different perspective, i.e. the local people, for example. The great thing about travel is that it involves so many things: sights, people, culture, food, music, language and so on. It doesn’t have to be a huge innovation at all, just look at things through a new set of eyes, and there’s your angle.

Write engaging content

In this day and age of SEO, keyword placements, link building and so on, what can be overlooked is the fact that something still needs to be well written. In fact, this is probably truer than ever with all of the options that are available, and with audiences’ patience on the wane. Start strongly, and never let off, using clear, concise language that is proofread for mistakes. And let your personality shine through – no one wants a robotic piece that could have been written by bots! Tell a story that people want to hear, and to do that, put yourself in the shoes of the reader.

Take your own pictures

Pepper you piece with unique shots you have personally taken on your travels. Stock photos are easy to spot a mile off, so use personal shots with all their inherent flaws (no one is looking for professional pics) and this adds charm and a genuine reality to your piece: ‘this person has actually been there!’

“I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to take tons and tons of pictures. And take them of absolutely everything: the food, the landscape, the people (with permission of course), and get yourself in there too, although refrain from the cheesy selfies!,” advises Robbie Wainscroft, a cruise ship worker at 1day2write and Nextcoursework.

Look for niches within the niche

It’s important to find a niche too. Of course, travel writing is a niche itself, but as already stated, within this field there are so many sub-categories that the list is almost endless. So, think about exactly what you are aiming for before you start, and who it would appeal too. As an example, organic food production is already a popular topic, but told within the confines of a trip to Southeast Asia, it takes on a whole new angle. When you look at it like this, the possibilities are limitless.

Jot down everything when you’re traveling

Remember that everything can give inspiration, but if you are sitting on your sofa trying to recall it, the whole experience becomes a lot more difficult. With that in mind, just keep writing down stuff as you are in the middle of things, or use a dictaphone to make remarks. No matter how mundane they may seem at the time, just having these words as a reference will inspire memories, smells and sounds and a later stage.

Consider SEO

Writing well is the key, but if this can be performed in conjunction with SEO principles, then you really are on to a winner. Research keywords and think about synonyms and related phrases. Gone are the days of stuffing, but natural placement of a few integral words will certainly boost the piece on those all-important search engine rankings. But the difference is, nowadays it doesn’t need to come at the expense of quality, which is great news for serious writers.

International travel agent and travel writer Joel Syder loves nothing more than sharing his experiences and the things that excite him in the world of travel at Academic Brits and Phd Kingdom. He is a regular contributor of articles to Originwritings.

By

How to Work With a Ghostwriter

I’ve been a ghostwriter for over 10 years, working on blog articles and even books with people who have a story to tell. I’ve worked with dozens of clients and have written over 3,500 articles in that time, as well as eight books, including my new novel, Mackinac Island Nation.

My clients have ranged from CEOs of Fortune 500 companies to entrepreneurs running one-person operations, both in the United States and overseas, in a staggering variety of industries. I’ve been able to learn from all of them, and — I hope — they’ve been able to learn from me.

For those of you who are thinking about working with a ghostwriter, whether it’s for corporate blog articles or even your own memoirs, there are a few things you need to realize before you start.

It’s going to cost money.

You can tell this is an old photo (from 2004) just by the Compaq logo in the bottom corner.
Writers need to eat. We have to pay our mortgages. We have to take care of our families. We don’t write for the promise of royalties or the exposure. This is not a hobby, this is our job. And just like any skilled position, the better the writer is, the more it’s going to cost. Things will get done faster and they’ll be done better than if you go with the less expensive option.

So while many people who want to write a book have a fascinating story to tell, a good writer is not going to want to spend 3 – 6 months working on your book in the hopes that they’ll get something from your efforts. It’s impolite to even ask, so if this is your plan for paying them, either save up your money or start writing it yourself.

Typically, a ghostwriter will ask for half up front and half at the end, but my practice has been to ask for half of the fee up front, one-fourth when we reach the halfway mark, and the remaining fourth when the final chapter is delivered and/or the manuscript has gone through one or two rounds of edits. For corporate ghost blogging clients, I typically work on a retainer basis where there will be a set number of articles written each month, and the client is invoiced on the 1st.

Be prepared for some give and take.

This is a collaborative process, and the manuscript will be evolving and changing. When the ghostwriter gives you the first draft, that’s so you can make the big changes, like rearranging sections, clarifying details, and rewriting problem sentences. This isn’t the finished product, so don’t get upset that your writer just handed you a pile of garbage. Your job now is to go back and read it and make sure everything is correct and you’re satisfied with the direction this is going.

That first stage is also not the time for fixing typos and punctuation or spelling errors. That will come later. Like I tell my clients, there’s no point in polishing a turd, let’s make it a not-turd first. Make all the major revisions and changes before you start fixing the tiny errors.

Similarly, you will have to call it done at some point. Yes, you want this to be perfect, and you want it to be polished to a high sheen, but that’s not always going to be your ghostwriter’s strong suit. Their job is to write the manuscript, make some revisions, and get it to a reasonable state where a copyeditor could take it over.

So be sure to work out in advance how many revisions and changes you can ask for. No writer wants to spend 12 months polishing and changing your manuscript, so save your revisions for one major passthrough rather than trickling them in. Typically, you should be able to get to the copyediting stage with no more than two revisions. If you’re not getting there, then one or both of you are the problem.

Leave the mechanics to your writer

There’s a very good chance that you’re good at punctuation and grammar, but there’s a very good chance that your ghostwriter is a nerd about it. That means that they know whether the grammar rules we learned in school are totally bogus..

For example, I was working with a client who tried — rather smugly, I thought — to correct me on a preposition I had used at the end of a sentence. So I explained to him:

This is a rule that should never have been in existence in the first place, but it had been created by an 18th-century Latin scholar named Robert Lowth in his book, A Short Guide to English Grammar. Lowth had read a similar admonition in a commentary by a 17th-century poet and scholar named John Dryden.

The problem was Dryden and Lowth were applying Latin rules to English, even though English didn’t actually need a few of those particular rules. It has been unnecessary for centuries, and most grammar nerds will never expect someone to contort their sentences just to follow that rule.

I could tell by the reaction from the client that he hadn’t expected any of that.

“Oh,” was all he said, and he never brought up grammar issues again.

The moral of the story: When someone starts spouting 400-year-old grammar history knowledge, he probably knows when you can break the rules.

So let him.

Don’t feel guilty that you’re working with a ghostwriter

Look, if you could write, you’d be a writer. If you had the time, you could do this yourself. But chances are, you’re working with a ghostwriter because either writing is not your forte or you just don’t have the hours and hours to put in the work.

This is the same reason you don’t change your own oil, fix your own leaky plumbing, re-roof your own house, or do your own taxes. You want a professional who’s good at what they do so you can look great at what you do.

Once, when I was ghostwriting a speech for a client, they felt embarrassed to have someone writing for them, like they weren’t important enough to need a speechwriter. I told them it wasn’t a question of being important, it was a question not having the time.

“Do you have four hours to devote to this project?” I asked.

“No, I barely have four hours to do anything,” said the client.

“Well, I do,” I said. “This doesn’t make you too big for your britches, it keeps you from looking unprepared when you give this speech.”

This is true whether you need a speechwriter, blog writer, or book writer. It’s not a question of whether you’re too important or have more money than sense. It’s a matter of helping you present your best story, whether it’s in a book, your company blog, or even a speech.

You need a professional who understands the subtleties and nuances of language, can tell your story in a clear and compelling way, and can do it in a timely manner.

So if you ever need to work with a ghostwriter, be clear and upfront with your expectations, and ask your ghostwriter to do the same with you. Don’t get bogged down in the process and let them do their job, while you do yours.

Photo credit: hobvias sudoneighm (Flickr, Creative Commons 2.0)