Responding to several requests, here’s a follow-up: one viral post on writing tips has made my blog more popular, improved my search rankings, and given me the confidence to take the next step in my journey. Here’s what I learned. Viral blog posts taper slowly. Here’s a chart of the traffic on my blog for the last…
Crappy writing springs from crappy planning. Like an architect, plan before you build. On a project that takes weeks or months to write, spend at least one day on planning. Follow these planning tips to maximize your chance to create something great. In this post, I show you how to lay the groundwork for a writing project like…
Lack of discipline pollutes your writing. Multiply by the whole world of “content creators” and we’re all consuming brown, dirty prose. I’ve spent time in Beijing and São Paulo. While the people were wonderful, the air was awful. A light brown miasma cast a pall on everything, making our eyes itch and making every incredible cityscape appear…
My insurance company Vermont Mutual was kind enough to pay my claim for house damage after this awful winter. But before I repair my house, I’d like remodel their customer communication. Vermont Mutual deserves a lot of credit. They were speedy to send an assessor to check the damage, and paid a fair amount. In…
If you’d like to publish (or self-publish) a book, you now have more options than ever. You also have a complex set of choices. I’ll walk you through them and finish with a flow-chart for the various alternatives, including Kickstarter. This post is for potential how-to and business book authors. If you’re writing fiction or history, you’ll have to…
You need to get help from someone who doesn’t know you. You’ve got their email address, but you just sit there staring at the blinking cursor. What will get the right response? Show respect, then tell the truth. Take the time to do the cold email right. Be short and to-the-point. Build the email step by step….
I recently did a Skype interview with Paul Gillin and Eric Schwartzman, the coauthors of Social Marketing to the Business Customer and proprietors of the B2B branch of the outstanding podcast For Immediate Release. Paul and Eric gave me a chance to talk about what I’m passionate about: the lack of candor in most business communication, how…
Effective writing creates a change in the reader. Whether you’re writing an email, a blog post, or a strategy document, four elements determine your success: Reader, Objective, Action, and iMpression. I use the (slightly skewed) acronym ROAM to keep all four in mind as I write. Readers: Who is the audience? Before writing anything, visualize your readers….
Holy cow. A phone company bought the original Internet content company. This has to have some broader significance. Look in the obligatory press release and you find . . . nothing. Except for some indigestible chunks of verbiage (thanks to Barak Kassar for pointing this out): . . . the combination of Verizon and AOL creates a…