Both Copy and Writing

Articles

  • Drop the Fluff and Start Producing Sharper Prose Today

    “Composition is a discipline; it forces us to think. If you want to ‘get in touch with your feelings,’ fine, talk to yourself; we all do. But, if you want to communicate with another thinking human being, get in touch with your thoughts. Put them in order; give them a purpose; use them to persuade,…

  • Earning Audience Confidence Through Consistent Content Marketing

    In 2007, something strange happened to me. I’d been publishing valuable, free content on my blog for eighteen months, no product, no service, just a relentless focus on serving the audience. And people started emailing me with a question I didn’t expect: “Why are you giving all this away for free? What’s the catch?” They…

  • Do You Have the Guts to Create Bold Content?

    In January 2006, I launched a blog with the tagline “How to sell with blogs.” Within weeks, prominent bloggers were calling me pond scum. Publicly. By name. With genuine contempt. And here’s the part most people don’t believe: that was the plan. I knew that tagline would offend the old guard of blogging, the purists…

  • Elevate Your Content’s Impact Using Features and Perks

    I once watched a brilliant software engineer spend forty-five minutes explaining his product’s architecture to a room full of potential buyers. He covered the database structure. The API calls. The load-balancing algorithm. The proprietary compression technique that reduced server overhead by 37%. When he finished, a woman in the front row raised her hand and…

  • Ditch Terrible Stock Photos and Choose Better Visuals for Your Posts

    Stock photos are simultaneously the best thing and the worst thing that ever happened to content marketing. They’re the best thing because, without them, most of us would be publishing walls of unbroken text and hoping for the best. They’re the worst thing because the wrong image doesn’t just fail to help, it actively undermines…

  • Distinguishing Between Metaphor, Simile, and Analogy Once and for All

    A friend of mine was presenting to a board of directors when someone interrupted to say, “That’s not a metaphor, that’s a simile.” He froze. He stumbled. He lost the room over a distinction he couldn’t articulate. He never made that mistake again. Neither should you. Here’s the thing: these three tools are cousins, not…

  • Crafting Intimate Prose Without Crossing into Narcissism

    I almost didn’t write this introduction. Not because I had nothing to say, because I had too much to say about myself, and I could feel the slide beginning. The one where a perfectly useful essay becomes a diary entry with a megaphone. Every writer who dares to be personal knows that slide. It’s the…

  • Developing Your Writing Personality Without Going Overboard

    I once read a blog post that opened with three exclamation points, deployed the word “amazeballs” without irony, and included so many emoji that my screen looked like a teenager’s phone had exploded across it. The topic? B2B software implementation. The writer was trying to be lively. I respect the impulse. But somewhere between “conversational”…

  • Crafting an About Page That Connects with Visitors and Drives Revenue

    I have watched people agonize over their About page for weeks, rewriting, reorganizing, second-guessing every word, with an intensity they did not bring to their actual marriage proposals. Something about writing about yourself makes otherwise confident people seize up like an engine with no oil. You become both the subject and the object. The photographer…

  • Clever Cropping Tricks to Instantly Transform Your Photos

    Cut it out. Not the dramatic kind, the photographic kind. The kind where you take a perfectly mediocre image and, with a single decisive gesture, remove everything that doesn’t serve the story until what’s left is magnetic. I learned this in design school, and it remains the single most underused visual technique available to anyone…

  • Creating Prose That Connects Deeply with Your Audience

    I once spent three hours on a blog post that I was certain was brilliant. Published it. Crickets. A week later I dashed off 400 words about a small frustration I figured nobody else would care about, and it generated more response than anything I’d written in months. The difference wasn’t quality. It was connection.…

  • Choosing the Right Topics for Your Audio Show

    A friend launched a podcast and called me six months in, voice flat with the particular exhaustion of someone who’s been talking into a microphone and hearing nothing back. “I’ve published 30 episodes,” she said. “I’ve interviewed interesting people. I’ve covered topics I care about. And my audience is still the same 200 people, most…

  • Crafting Subheadings That Capture and Recapture Your Audience’s Attention

    I watched a man read an entire article on his phone while standing in an airport security line. He never once stopped scrolling. He wasn’t reading, he was grazing. His eyes bounced from one bold line to the next, scooping up meaning in fragments, building a mental map of the piece without ever committing to…

  • Compelling Video Tactics That Motivate Viewers to Act Now

    I once watched a smart, articulate entrepreneur deliver a seven-minute video pitch for a product I genuinely wanted. By minute four, I was checking email. By minute six, I was gone. Not because the product was bad, because the video was a slow, unstructured march through a swamp of unedited thought. Here’s the uncomfortable truth:…

  • Captivate Your Perfect Audience Through Meaningful Content

    In 2014, Jerry Seinfeld sat down with Alec Baldwin for a podcast interview and said something that should have been boring but wasn’t. He explained why his show was good: “In most TV series, 50 percent of the time is spent working on the show, 50 percent of the time is spent dealing with personality,…

  • Craft Excellent Blog Posts: Seven Actionable Tips for Today’s Creators

    I used to think writing was like magic, the kind where you pull a fully formed rabbit out of an empty hat. So I’d sit down at my keyboard, stare at a blank screen, and wait for the rabbit. Sometimes for hours. The rabbit, unsurprisingly, rarely appeared. Eventually I learned that productive writers don’t think…

  • Build a Scrumptious Content Plan Inspired by Farm-Fresh Principles

    I once had a farm-to-table meal in Devon, England that I’d been dreaming about all day. Fresh, local lamb. Honey collected on-site. Baby vegetables picked that morning on farms within thirty miles. The menu read like a love letter to the countryside. Then the food arrived. Overcooked lamb. Drowning in honey. Baby vegetables reduced to…

  • Coping With Proofreading Fatigue After a Career of Catching Errors

    Me: “Hey, Brain, time to proofread.” My Brain: “We don’t want to.” Me: “This article isn’t complete until we proof it.” My Brain: “Our eyes are tired.” Me: “There might be a mistake I want to correct. Or I might find ways to make it even better.” My Brain: “We want to eat chocolate chips.”…

  • Channel Your Genuine Enthusiasm to Level Up Your Copywriting Skills

    I once got so excited about a content strategy framework that I literally clapped my hands together and said “oh, that’s delicious” in a restaurant. My dining companion looked at me with a mixture of affection and alarm, the way you’d look at a dog who’s just discovered a tennis ball machine. I am not…

  • An Effortless Content Workflow for Producing Great Writing on a Tight Calendar

    I used to write blog posts the way I used to pack for trips: throw everything in at the last minute, panic, and hope the result was acceptable. It wasn’t. The posts were ragged. The suitcase was always missing something essential. And both activities left me exhausted and vaguely resentful of the entire process. Here’s…

  • Borrow Tarantino’s Storytelling Method to Create Magnetic Content

    I saw Pulp Fiction on opening night in 1994, and I remember two things with perfect clarity. First, the audience burst into applause after the opening scene, not the ending, the opening. I’d never seen that before. Second, I spent the next two hours with a question humming in the back of my brain like…