Tag: Blogging
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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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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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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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Six Irresistible Web Design Tricks Your Visitors Will Devour
“We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them.”, Steve Jobs You wrote the words. Good words. Words that teach and persuade and build trust over time. And then someone lands on your page, sees a wall of text floating in a sea of visual nothingness, and bounces. Your…
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Scale Your Traffic With a Scalable Blogging Approach
Here’s a question that nobody in the history of the internet has answered honestly: “Do you get all the traffic you’d like?” The answer is always no. The person with 300 monthly visitors wants 3,000. The person with 30,000 wants 300,000. The person with 3 million wants the NYT homepage. Traffic hunger is the one…
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Proven Guidelines for Contributed Posts That Actually Get Published
The first guest post I ever submitted was rejected. Not gently. Not with feedback. Just silence, the kind that stretches from days into weeks until you realize silence is the answer. Five years later, the same publication asked me to write for them. That gap between rejection and invitation wasn’t luck. It was the most…
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Professional Blogging for Real Results, Not Flawless Ones
I wrote an entire ebook to avoid starting a blog. That’s not a joke. That’s a confession from someone who once believed that a finished, bound, never-to-be-touched-again document was safer than an open-ended commitment to publish regularly. The blog felt like exposure. The ebook felt like control. Here’s what I know now that I didn’t…
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Getting Your Writing Noticed by the Right Audience
If you want to get discovered as a writer, there’s an elephant in the room. Its name is SEO, and if you’re anything like I was, your immediate reaction is somewhere between a yawn and a groan. I wasn’t into it either. For a long time, SEO looked to me like sketchy tricks designed to…
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Four Surprising Ways to Establish Expertise in Almost Any Topic
When I started writing about marketing, I had a terrible secret: I wasn’t sure I knew enough. I’d read the books. I’d done the work. I’d gotten the results. But somewhere in the back of my mind, a voice kept whispering that I was one tough question away from being exposed as a fraud, that…
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Five Reader Personalities You Should Feel Free to Disregard
I once received two emails within the same hour. One said I was publishing too often. The other said I wasn’t publishing enough. I stared at both, wondering if I’d accidentally built a audience of exact opposites. Here’s the emotional truth most writing advice won’t name: wanting to please everyone isn’t generosity. It’s fear dressed…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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A Streamlined System for Promoting Your Brand Through Content Creation
I’m going to tell you something that sounds like a lie but isn’t: content creation can become as automatic as brushing your teeth. I know. You’re rolling your eyes. You’re thinking about the blank page and the blinking cursor and the way your brain suddenly remembers every urgent task the moment you sit down to…