Blogging has gone out of style. But for writers, it’s as current as ever. I don’t care if you post on WordPress, LinkedIn, Medium, Substack, Twitter threads, or even Facebook. The key is to regularly write moderately long (at least 400 words) chunks of prose about ideas and post them where you can get feedback….
Let’s do a little experiment. Imagine for a moment, that you and I are friends. We run into each other in the park and sit down on my favorite park bench to engage in a little conversation. I say “Hey, I heard that there is a new Ben & Jerry’s ice cream store going into…
“I wrote a whole bunch of meaty blog posts. Could I make a book out of them?” That’s the seductive reasoning I hear from many clients. So let’s talk about what it takes to turn a blog into a book. Here’s a comment that appeared on my author survey yesterday: I write a blog, to…
Content marketing is a way to drive traffic to your site, get leads, and generate business, right? Well, sure. But if that’s all it is, it’s just inside-out advertising. No, I think there’s more to it than that. I’m considering this as I prepare for three upcoming conferences. Starting tomorrow, May 2, I’ll be at…
I hate clickbait. I love posts that spread. So here’s a process for creating content — like blog posts — that spreads usefully, not exploitatively. I’m writing this post because I had an argument with a client. The creative people at this company were creating valuable and interesting posts, then giving them titles that were…
Matt Mullenweg, the originator of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, is fighting with Avishai Abrahami, CEO of Wix. (Both companies make it easy to build web content.) The question driving this fight is the appropriate use of open source code. But what’s really at stake is reputation — and on that front, Abrahami’s wry commentary…
Blogging is wonderful. People all over the world have shared their perspectives with me. While many of my blog commenters are apparently not native speakers of English, I find their idiom delightful, almost poetic. I had to reject 1,077 comments on this blog. But so you won’t miss out, I present here the most poetic excerpts from…
Everybody Writes by Ann Handley is a spectacularly useful book about writing, organized into 74 bite-sized chunks. Ann and I look at the world through the same eyes, and we are fighting the same fight — to help you express yourself more clearly. Here’s my interview with her: Why a book on writing now? There are so…