THINKing

Top 11 Free Resources To Improve Your Blog’s Content

As part of our continuing series to help you in developing compelling content, today we provide you a list of the top 11 online resources to help you improve your writing skills.

The Elements of Style – there is no better resource for writers than William Strunk’s classic. I have a well-thumbed hard copy, but this online version covers the writing bases.

100 Useful Web Tools For Writers – Whether poet, biographer, journalist, blogger or technical writer, you’ll find a helpful tool in this list.

Problogger – Darren Rowse is one of the best, most successful bloggers on the planet. Problogger provides advice on everything from writing good headlines to how to come up with story ideas.

Poynter’s Fifty Writing Tools – For the auditory learner, there is Poynter’s index of podcasts that cover the nuts and bolts of writing.

Lifehack on Communications – I love Lifehack for its tips on a range of topics like productivity, technology and of course, communications.

Grammar Girl – Mignon Fogarty is Grammar Girl and she can explain split infinitives so simply that a Neanderthal could understand it.

Time To Write – Need inspiration? Well, here you go. This site is full of inspiration as well as tips to help writers along their way.

OWL – The OWL is Purdue University’s online writing lab that features free writing resources and instructional material.

Common Errors In English Usage – If you don’t know the difference between peak, peek and pique, then you need this site.

Grammar Slammer – Need help with capitalization, abbreviations or maybe your participle is dangling! Here it is.

Writing: The Online Community For Writers – Need to get advice from other writers? There are 819,000 members of this active forum.

In case you missed our initial posts on content development:

Five Key Elements To Creating Compelling Blog Content – I have been thinking a lot recently about creating compelling blog content, and at first blush, there seem to be a lot of barriers. But like getting over a barbed wire fence, you just have to step back for a minute and think through your approach so that you don’t catch something important on a barb.

How To Be A More Compelling Writer – If you can afford it, hiring a good writer for your blog is solid advice. If you can’t, then you need to become a better writer. A few simple things can help take your writing to the next level.

Great Images Make Content More Compelling – Good pictures alone are not enough. Photos can help draw attention to a post, keeping it from looking like a huge gray mass of words. But – to be most effective – the image must complement, or support the the story in some way.

WIIFM? - Today we’re going to take a look at WIIFM, or What’s In It For Me. You must answer some questions and perform a little research to find out what your readers or prospective readers truly want from your blog.

bookmark to:

Social Media Burnout

Whether you are using social media personally or for business, it can wear you out.  I don’t know if you have noticed it, but I’m detecting an upswing in social media fatigue (SMF) these days. Is it happening to you? Georgina Laidlaw at Gigaom has picked up on it.

From a personal perspective, social media is wearing on me because there seems to be an explosion in the number of networks available. Seems like every day someone is inviting me to join yet another one.  I’m involved in enough thank you very much, and I really don’t need more.

On the business side of the equation, I think organizations are beginning to realize that engagement is a lot harder than just placing an ad and responding to inquiries.

It’s a little slower way to build your business, too. Not that I think this is a bad thing. The business you get through social media is more likely to be the kind that lasts. Engagement forces you and the customer to determine ahead of time if your cultures are compatible. When I worked for a mid-sized ad agency, we knew that the relationship had about a two year window. Then, the honeymoon was over and it was time to date someone else.

No matter why you might find yourself suffering from SMF, there is one word you should remember: focus.

Select – and commit to – a handful of social media networks that work strategically for you and your organization. Don’t just add a network for a specific tactical function.  Then, work those strategically selected networks like a government mule and you will have success.

Are you suffering from SMF? Tell us about it, or check these related articles.

10 Tips For Managing Social Media Burnout

6 Ways To Overcome Social Media Burnout

Is Social Media Burnout Imminent? (video)

Why Social Media Is Like Going To The Gym

bookmark to:

Creativity 2010 – Week #35

Hello, thinker. We found some good creativity links for you this week. So, activate those little gray cells.

The Creativity Crisis? What Creativity Crisis?

Balance Spawns Creativity

Creativity & Play (video)

The Brain As A System & Creative Tool

Mindmapping Tool (free option available)

bookmark to:

Social Media Hub

We’re flattered to have been included as a featured blogger in the new social media hub, Social Media Informer. The site has just launched this week, and there is great content there from a diverse group of social media thought leaders.

Here’s what my pal, Tom Pick, at Webbiquity says about SMI,

SMI was developed by some of the same people as the popular B2B Marketing Zone b2b marketing portal. It also uses the same underlying Browse My Stuff technology, which enables publishers, PR agencies, corporations and other enterprises to build branded content aggregation hubs. For readers, SMI will aggregate high quality content; make it easy to navigate based on topic, source or date; and expose valuable niche content that might otherwise be overlooked.

This is going to be a great destination for people interested in high level social media thinking. So, check it out, soon.

Oh, and here are some of the other featured bloggers:

• Alex Blom
• Buzz Marketing for Technology
• Conversionation
• ConverStations
• Direct Marketing Observations
• FreshNetworks
• Idaconcpts
• Janet Fouts
• Kyle Lacy
• One Social Media
• Scott Gould
• Simon Mainwaring
• Socialized
• The Relationship Economy
• Webbiquity SMM
• WindMill Networking

bookmark to:

Social Media Relationships: Are They Real?

Just saw Suzanne Vara’s excellent piece on building social media relationships. Let’s listen to Ms. Vara for a moment:

Social media has afforded us the opportunity to meet a lot of people. We gain insight as to who they are through their profiles, blogs, with whom they associate and our interactions with them…we find an entirely new world and start building relationships. There are some people we just click with and feel like we have known them forever.  We like them and look forward to seeing them each day on their blog, on our blog and in our platform streams.

There are a number of people – those whom I call DCs or “digital colleagues” – I look forward to each day as well. But are these relationships real and actionable from a business standpoint? Most are not. But some of those online relationships – as Ms. Vara points out – may blossom into something deeper.

As we have discussed before, the value of connections in business cannot be underestimated. I’m talking primarily about tight connections that you use to help you achieve your personal and professional goals. Friend and business coach Brent Dees of Focus Four tells us that you if want a $1 million business, you should have 40 contacts (your Focus 40) each of whom can bring you $25,000 in business. Your job is to help each of these contacts achieve their goals and they, in turn, will help you reach yours. This is a spin on the method that made Andrew Carnegie a millionaire many times over.

Now, Brent says that a human can’t truly support more than 40 contacts of this nature, and I agree.

However, with the advent of social networks like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, you can have access to hundreds of contact to help you connect with others who may be able to help you.  Social media means your close relationships are no longer bound by geography – and that is a beautiful thing. For instance, there is Bob Taylor from Grand Rapids, Michigan who I talk with about wine, bacon, guitar playing and social media. Jay Ehret in Waco, Texas, has become someone I read and listen to via podcast. Says Jay in a piece called Welcome To Social Town,

The amazing thing is I didn’t know any of these people three years ago. This is what social media has done for my professional, and personal, life. To me, it’s not a marketing channel, it’s a community of my favorite people who don’t happen to live in the same city I do. I wish we all did live in the same place because we would have some killer happy hours! But we don’t, so we just hang out together online, in Social Town.

What do you think?

bookmark to:

Top 19 Free Photo Sites For Bloggers

Our list of free photo resources has been a popular post since 2007. I noticed that one on the list had gone out of business and have found a few new ones. So, I wanted to bring you a new, improved list for 2010. Morguefile and Flickr Creative Commons are my favorites for truly free, not just royalty-free, images.

Please let me know if there are others you use that aren’t on our list.

MorgueFile

Flickr Creative Commons Service

Stock.Xchang

Image Base

Open Photo

FreeFoto

EveryStockPhoto

FreePhotosBank

Image After

Studio 25

Free Stock Photos

PD Photo

Free Images

Stock Vault

Free Digital Photos

Free Range Stock

Unprofound

Photo Rogue

Free Pixels

bookmark to:

Creativity 2010 – Week #34

Here’s another dose of creativity inducing links for you:

The Power Of Daydreaming

26 Ways To Beat Creative Block

7 Ways To Smash Procrastination

5 Ways To Foster Your Creativity

The Cure For Boring Meetings

bookmark to:

2010′s Top Five Creativity Links

Our weekly series of creativity links has uncovered some very good tools for you thinkers. What have been the most popular links so far this year? I’m glad you asked.

100 Online Creativity Tools – From tools that help you organize, plan, and brainstorm to tools that inspire through writing prompts and creative photos to tools that work to develop the creative mind, you will find plenty of inspiration in this list.

10 Essential Blogs For Creative Entrepreneurs – Here are 10 blogs that are essential reading for creative entrepreneurs – they will fuel your creativity, sharpen your business skills, connect you with others on the same path, and sustain you through the ups and downs of your entrepreneurial journey.

50 Tools To Improve Your Writing – This extensive list of writing tools can help you improve your writing skills.

Visual Thesaurus – This is an interactive dictionary and thesaurus which creates word maps that blossom with meanings and branch to related words.

Bad Billboards – Sometimes you just need to see creativity gone wrong.

bookmark to:

Forgotten Gems

Through no fault of their own, sometimes really good posts just get overlooked. Here are a few forgotten gems you may have missed.

Grandma Says -  Southern grandmothers have often said, “there are only three times a respectable person’s name should be in the paper: when you are born, when you are married, and when you die.” This is the one area in which I part company with my grandmothers.

Brand Euthanasia -  Some brands should be allowed to die, or if that fails, then we owe it to them to kill them.

New Business Tip: Do Great Work For Current Clients -My marketing mentor, Bill Loeffler, once said the the best new business program is doing great work for current clients. He was right.

The Value Of Connections – As we have discussed before, the value of connections in business cannot be underestimated. I’m talking primarily about tight connections that you use ruthlessly to help you achieve your personal and professional goals.

To Market, To Market… -  What does buying a fat pig have to do with your business? Stick with me and all will be revealed.

bookmark to:

Creativity 2010 – Week #33

Without further ado, here are your creativity links for week #33 of 2010:

Doing nothing to enhance creativity

Creative bus ads

Where Do You Draw Your Design Inspiration?

What to blog about when you are stuck creatively

25 Real world creative work spaces

bookmark to: