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.

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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?

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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

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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.

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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

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Creativity 2010 – Week #32

Here’s your weekly dose of creativity links:

Creativity Tips: Stoke Your Creativity

55 Quotes To Spur Creativity

Time Management For Creatives

Downtime: The Key To Creativity

20 Reasons You Get Your Best Ideas In The Shower

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WIIFM?

The young lady pictured above is skeptical, and rightly so. So many blogs are posting content that doesn’t really relate to her. Will your blog be any different? She thinks not.

We’ve been taking a look over the last couple of weeks at developing compelling blog content. (links to the previous installments are at the bottom of this post) Today we’re going to take a look at WIIFM, or What’s In It For Me so we can erase that look of skepticism and turn your blog visitors into regulars.

You must answer some questions and perform a little research to find out what your readers or prospective readers truly want from your blog. This blog covers advertising, creativity, PR, marketing and social media topics – a pretty broad spectrum.

First, we keep an eye on our blog stats to see what are the top keywords bringing people to our blog.

We have written a series called “New Business Primer”, which has been very popular.  The term “new business” brings in a lot of traffic for us. Phrases containing the words “creative” and “creativity” show up often in our top keywords, as do phrases containing “journalism” or “journalists.” Are you using your blog stats to review keywords?

Another thing we do is review our stats to determine which posts get the most traffic, both initially and over time.

Our posts on media relations always seem to be a hit, as do our creativity posts. Writing-related and social media posts do well, too. Advertising posts are not doing as well and we don’t post much on that topic any more.

But it is not enough just to post on those topics. Just as we do in advertising copywriting, we need to think about the reasons people “buy” something. In a blog’s case, visitors are “buying” your writing.Geoff Ayling writes about the reasons people buy in his book Rapid Response Advertising. The 51 reasons people buy include,

• to make more money
• to attract praise
• to avoid criticism
• to make their work easier
• to speed up their work

So, how does that apply to the blogger? Let’s take the first one and come up with a post title that fits into THINKing‘s list of topics. We know that people like our writing-related posts and Ayling tells us they want to make more money at it. So, how about: Copywriting Tips To Help Build Your Direct Marketing BusinessSo, just remember, give the readers what they are looking for and they will come back. We’d love your thoughts on this topic.

#1 – Five Key Elements To Creating Compelling Blog Content

#2 – How To Be A More Compelling Writer

#3 -  Great Images Make Content More Compelling

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Sharing

It’s funny how when you start thinking about a certain topic – like content development or web design – that you start seeing more and more references to it. I guess it is because you are attuned to it. Anyway, I’ve been running across some excellent articles on content development, as well as web design and thought I’d share with the class.

5 Ways To Create Fresh Content For Your Blog – One of the toughest parts of running a blog is coming up with fresh content. Fortunately, there are a few tricks you can pull out when you’re tapped out and in need of some new blog content.

10 Ways To Use Recycled Content – Make sure you’re getting as much mileage out of your best content as you can. That means finding ways to repurpose it. I mean, you wouldn’t throw an ice cream carton away until you had scooped out every last bit, right?

50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers – This list will help you find some nuggets of information that will help you avoid headaches and stress by saving you time.

Color Theory Reference Sheet For Designers -This cool infographic lays out a lot of data about color theory in a visual manner that is easy to comprehend.

40+ Web Design and Development Resources for Beginners – Just getting started in web design? Here are some valuable resources to get your career kickstarted.

30 Essential iPad Apps For Developers & Creatives -  Here are 30 different apps spanning several categories that can help designers and creatives out with everything from jotting down notes and wireframing to staying on task.

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Creativity 2010 – Week #31

Here’s another dash of creativity links to spice up your thinking.

7 Principles Of Creative Problem Solving

Turn Your Idea Into Reality

The History Of Creativity

Color Palette Generator

Eat More Innovation

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Great Images Make Content More Compelling

You are probably wondering what this photo has to do with this post. Well, in part one of this series, Five Key Elements To Creating Compelling Content, our friend, Rubbermaid blogger  Jim Dietzel, laid out his five key elements for creating compelling content. Number 3 was “pictures are good.”

Our digital colleague, Rodger Johnson from GetSocialPR, also thinks that imagery can kick your content up a notch. He says use compelling images to support the story, a lesson he learned from his journalism days that still works today.

The photo above may be interesting, but it doesn’t really go with this post. So, good pictures 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.

If you are going to use photos, you also must respect copyright law. Don’t just do a Google search and use the images. They may be copyright protected. We did a piece sometime back about some free photo resources that you may want to revisit.

Below are a few more related posts on the use of images in your blog.

An Introduction To Using Images On Blogs

Finding Compelling Flickr Images

Using Images Legally On Your Blog

Using Images To Take Your Posts To A New Level

Why Images Are Vital To Modern Blogs

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