Can you write a 1000-word article on a topic you know little or nothing about? Of course you could. Do some reading, take lots of notes, and get to work. Let’s face it. Very little you write is completely original—you learned it from somewhere. Even if it’s a personal experience essay, the slant you take … Read more
You’re beating your head against a wall. Staring at a blank screen. You need to write a blog post fast, and it’s got to be good. You google “writers block” and hope to find a solution. If you had all day or all weekend to write, you know you’d come up with something. You always … Read more
Sometimes they’re good, sometimes they’re not. You know what I mean. Some blog posts just take off and go crazy like a space shuttle on steroids. Sure, it’s great stuff. Great ideas. Great writing. But what accounts for the thousands of tweets and shares and readers gushing in the comments like they’ve never read anything … Read more
How many spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors can you count in one of your recent blog posts or email newsletters? Go ahead. Go count them. Take your time, read out loud, take it sentence by sentence. How many mistakes did you find? If you didn’t find any, try again. Almost every blog post has at … Read more
One of the best ways to learn about blogging is to watch other bloggers. Read their posts. Check out their sites. Get a feel for what each blog is about and a sense of what you like and don’t like. Compare writing styles. Are the posts formal or casual, long or short? Are they mainly … Read more
If you’ve been around on the blog circuit for any length of time, you’ve heard the advice: be authentic. Be yourself. Let your readers see the real you. What a lot of people don’t get is that there’s no way to be more authentic. You already are authentic. You already are the real you. Think … Read more
Subtitle: Avoid everyone, everybody, nobody, and no one unless you’re 100% sure of your facts or you’re in marketing. Why? Because there’s almost always an exception.
Case in point: Seth Godin’s blog post Talker’s Block. In the first paragraph, he establishes his argument by asserting that “no one ever gets talker’s block.”
The headline is catchy, and it promises a reward when I click on the link in the email. Just last night, in fact, I was thinking about this topic, and it’s definitely something I need to work on. I’ve read plenty of articles written by this guy, and he knows his stuff.
Eagerly, I click. Eagerly, I start to read. My eyes move quickly from left to right, left to right, left to right, left to right and down, down, down. My hand reaches for the mouse to scroll further down the page. Dark gray type sprinkled over white blurs together without meaning, like so much chicken scratch: back and forth, back and forth.