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How Innocence and Fresh Perspective Can Drive Business Success
A vice president once patted me on the head, literally, physically, on my actual head, and told me I was “charmingly naive” for suggesting we treat our customers like they had functioning brains. This was in a conference room with bad fluorescent lighting and a potted plant that had clearly given up on life. I…
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Three Essential Strategies for New Writers Without a Following
I could talk about beginner writing all day. The early stage of a writing career is my favorite topic because it’s where everything is possible and nothing is proven, a combination that’s either thrilling or terrifying, depending on the hour. You decided to be a writer because you can’t not write. The impulse is bigger…
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Seven Frequently Ignored Habits for Improving Your Professional Writing
A writer at work who stands out from their colleagues can always answer one question without hesitation: What’s it like working with you? (If you’re pausing right now, even briefly, that pause is worth paying attention to.) I’d like to introduce a framework. Not the software kind. A different kind of SaaS: Skills Adaptability Attitude…
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The Trust Puzzle: Does Visual Design Establish Credibility?
Subject: Panic Hey Milt, So like I said over coffee Friday, I’ve got to get a website set up fast. And it needs to look credible! Not like I put it together in a week. Even though that’s exactly what I need to do. Not sure where to start. Thoughts? Frank Subject: Re: Panic Hey…
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Seven Essentials for Crafting List Articles That Actually Deliver Value
A lot of smart writers despise list posts. I understand the instinct. The tabloid sites have made an art form of numbered garbage: “These 17 Celebrities Used to Be Hot.” The internet is lousy with crummy listicles, and any writer who cares about craft wants to distance themselves from the whole ugly genre. That would…
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How Comparisons Can Make Your Arguments Unassailable
An old man storms into his doctor’s office, furious. “Doc, my new twenty-two-year-old wife is pregnant. You performed my vasectomy thirty years ago, and I want to know what the hell you’re going to do about it.” The doctor doesn’t flinch. “Let me tell you a story. A hunter once left the house and accidentally…
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The Surprising Reason Audiences Reject Unfiltered Authenticity
I had a t-shirt from SXSW Interactive 2000, the kind of faded, threadbare artifact that only looks cool because you actually were there and the shirt earned every frayed edge honestly. I wore it like a badge of honor. Then a friend showed up to dinner in a shirt that looked almost identical. Same vintage…
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Polish Your Drafts With the Traffic Light Editing Method
As a born-and-raised Angeleno, I’ve logged more hours in traffic than some people have logged at their jobs. The kind where you’re not moving, the AC is struggling, and you start having deep philosophical conversations with yourself about whether you actually need to get to your destination. But here’s the thing about traffic jams that…
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The One Trait All Readers Share: Leverage It for Maximum Relevance
It doesn’t matter if you write about minimalism or motorcycles. If you have an audience, it contains three concentric circles: 1. People who read your content. 2. People who read and share your content. 3. People who take action on the advice in your content. These aren’t separate tribes. They overlap. The person who implements…
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Polish Your Drafts: Transforming Mediocre Writing Into Exceptional Prose
The phrase “something more” should be engraved above every writer’s desk. Not as aspiration, as standard. Because here’s what I’ve noticed after years of editing: the difference between content that disappears and content that sticks isn’t the idea. It’s the edit. A mediocre idea, edited with care and stubbornness, will outperform a brilliant idea rushed…
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Hooks and Techniques That Keep Audiences Captivated From Start to Finish
Think back to the last time you sat through a string of presentations, a conference, a webinar, an all-hands meeting where the agenda ran long and the coffee ran out. Some sessions flew by. Others immediately triggered the thought: “Now’s a good time to go to the bathroom and get a snack.” You know the…
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The Content Strategy Spectrum: Matching Your Message to Buyer Demand
Staring at a blank page, wondering what you could possibly write to convince someone, anyone, to become a customer? That feeling has a name. Actually, it has several: dread, obligation, paralysis. And underneath all of them is a mistaken belief that every piece of content you publish needs to close the deal. It doesn’t. Not…
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Mastering the Comma: Expert Guidance for Cleaner Punctuation
The comma is the brave little toaster of the punctuation family. Stalwart, unassuming, essential. And apparently two-thirds of the internet has forgotten it exists. Somewhere along the way, web writers decided commas were optional, an annoying interruption they could just leave out because “nobody cares about that stuff anymore.” Then, possibly regretting their previous choices,…
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Letting Your Inner Artist and Tough Critic Collaborate on Your Writing
Type, type, type. Backspace, backspace, backspace. Type a sentence, delete half of it, rewrite the other half, stare at it, decide it’s wrong, and start over. Sound familiar? Of course it does. Every writer knows this rhythm, the maddening two-steps-forward, one-step-back dance of trying to write and edit at the same time. It’s excruciatingly slow.…
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Harness the Power of High Expectations in Your Marketing Strategy
The standard advice is tidy and familiar: lower your expectations so you won’t be disappointed. Detach from outcomes. Want less, suffer less. It’s not wrong, exactly. But it’s incomplete. Because while you’re busy letting go of expectations, you might also be letting go of the very energy that drives excellent work. The emotional truth is…
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The Case for Having a Dedicated Editor on Your Marketing Team
If you saw my standardized test scores from high school, you’d notice something odd: very high in math, very low in verbal. Not exactly the profile you’d expect from someone who became one of the web’s most seasoned content editors. It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world. Sort of. Content needs to communicate quickly and…
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Is Professional Editing and Proofreading Really Necessary for Your Blog?
You might expect me, a career content editor, to recommend thorough proofreading and editing for every blog on the internet. I don’t. I don’t know enough about your blog to make that blanket recommendation. What I can do is give you a framework for evaluating your own publication and deciding whether more rigorous editing would…
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Ten Strategies for Turning Far-Off Dreams Into Actionable Plans
There’s a particular kind of sadness that arrives when you realize you’ve spent another year helping other people hit their deadlines while your own projects gathered dust. Not the dramatic, cinematic kind of sadness. The quiet kind. The kind that shows up when you close your laptop on a Thursday night and think, I really…
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How Regular Writing Practice Creates Rich, Layered Content
We all recognize junk content the way we recognize junk food, instantly, viscerally, with a slight grimace. But “high-quality” content? That’s harder to define. Here’s my best shot: it’s content that helps your audience in ways they can’t find anywhere else. Simple to say. Not so simple to produce. Because the content that actually moves…
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Harness Figurative Language to Supercharge Your Promotional Impact
In 1980, a man walked into Congress asking for $1.2 billion. He was the CEO of a failing automaker. The word everyone was using for what he wanted was bailout, and “bailout” was polling somewhere between “tooth extraction” and “root canal” in the court of public opinion. He didn’t get the money by asking for…