Content Strategy

Creating content for a website isn't enough - making your ongoing content development work requires strategy. From editorial calendars to information architecture, strategic content creation increases the power of websites.

Top 6 Best Ways How To Write Awful Headlines

March 22, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

Writing great headlines is one of the key elements of good blogging practices – everyone says so, right?

There are dozens of tutorials out there explaining what makes a good headline; numbered lists, using the words How to in the title, addressing a key fear a large group of people have…

That’s fine, but what happens when you write what you think is a great headline and it doesn’t seem to be doing it’s job? Feels like a complex problem. Feeling like you need to do some analysis, get some feedback?

This is one of those things where I know – I know – you’ll be mad at me for how simple this is.

It turns out there are some really simple ways to tell if you’ve written a bad headline, no matter how good you think it is.

If you;

make a joke your post doesn’t follow-up on
make it the wrong length (too long or too short)
don’t check the title to see if it fits once the post is written
include an inaccuracy in the headline as relates to the post, but not on purpose
imply something is new/old when it’s not (Even if it may be so for your intended audience)
give away the entire post in the headline

… You might have written an awful headline. And when you have a bad headline, it doesn’t matter how good the post is. No one will read it.

Just like when you have a great headline, if the post sucks, you’ve jumped the shark. No one cares about the great headline, unless it’s tweetbait, in which case if they have share remorse, they’ll be even more ticked.

Law Seven – There is no more obvious way to kill your blog than inconsistency of form.

It could be consistency of message, consistency of schedule, or any number of other things, but when you break consistency, you’re making people think for the wrong reasons and making a withdrawal from the bank of social capital.

Unless you’re writing research papers or case studies, you want people to expend their energy considering that you publish, not examining it for lumpy bits like titles that don’t fit, or bad grammar.

Reducing the emotional overhead on your work helps keep the investment people make in your work valid.

Writing better headlines – as relate to the writing they represent – is a good start.

Journalists vs News Items – The Twofold Law of Blogging

March 14, 2011 by Ian 1 Comment

Some people know what’s going on. Everywhere. All the time.

We call these people journalists. They’re the gatherers, the curators. Journalists present the facts, add value and perspective, conduct analysis.

Some people are what’s going on. We see them everywhere. All the time.

Most of the time, when considering these people, we call them celebrities. However, in the blogosphere, we call them link bait. Reference points. News items.

Which one are you?

And do you know which one is better for you? Which one is better for your blog? Not everyone who’s great at delivering information is good at delivering news for others. Not everyone who delivers news and commentary in a value-added, impossible to replicate way is worthy of news themselves.

This isn’t a bad thing. In fact, it’s an opportunity to differentiate yourself. If everyone in your industry is trying to be well known – to be the news – you’ve got a clear opening to be the journalist, and report the news. If you can learn to do the analysis, add value, and build a consistent perspective on what’s going on in your industry – and, more importantly, deliver that news to outsiders in a voice and language they’ll understand – then you’re setting yourself up to win.

It doesn’t matter if El Bigname knows who I am.

It matters even less to anyone who doesn’t know who El Bigname is. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter who in your industry knows how awesome you are – success comes from outside your fishbowl.

If you’re making yourself a news item, is anyone outside your fishbowl going to care?

And, if you’re reporting the news, are you reporting it to te echo chamber, or into the vastness of the outside world?

Genre Dodging (or) the Curse of the Self-Proclaimed Anything

March 12, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

One of the most insidious problems fiction has to deal with is the issue of Genre Dodging.

Simply put, Genre Dodging is what happens when authors ignore an element necessary for their stated genre to function. Like missing an opportunity for the first female victim in a horror movie to run in obviously the wrong direction.

When you remove a key element of a genre, even with good intention, the entire narrative suffers.

This happens all the time. We’ve got lots of examples. Whether it’s having vampires that can survive sunlight, or another form of applied phlebotinum – it breaks the rule of cool pretty thoroughly.

What you get, when you try to dodge your own genre too thoroughly, is something too far from the box. The quality of any genre-based work lies heavily on interpretation of that genre, not necessarily in making if better, worse, or pear-shaped.

I have to deal with this working on the Dowager Shadow.

When I built the world that the story takes place on, I very intentionally turned a few elements of the fantasy genre on their sides. I didn’t remove them (which is a key element in genre dodging), but I did twist them a bit. When you think fantasy, you’re liable to think warriors and magic users, dwarves and elves. If the book doesn’t have any of these, is it fantasy? Maybe. Or maybe it’s strategic. The trick is that those four things, while recognizable, are not pillars of the genre. Not all fantasy has elves. Not all fantasy has magic.

But all vampires ought to be unable to walk in the sunlight, right? And, while we’re at it, if science fiction doesn’t have awesome tech, is it actually science fiction or just fiction?

Where else does this apply?

Blogging? If you’re a blogger without comments on your site, are you just publishing?

Twitter? If you don’t discuss anything with anyone, or lock your tweets, what happens to the chances of gaining a following?

If you’re a business person, and don’t actively build your network and create relationships, where’s the longevity of your business?

Building a world – whether it’s fictional planets, a business community, or a personal network – requires addressing the pillars that hold up the kind of world you’re building needs to function as a well-oiled, recognizable machine.

Are you missing any key elements in a non-strategic way? You might be Genre Dodging. And it’s not usually a good thing.

Photo by Shane Adams.

The Future of Media – Dowager Shadow

February 21, 2011 by Ian 2 Comments

I’m writing a novel. But it won’t be Tor, Orion, or Bantam Press publishing my work; it’ll be me.

Chris Brogan just dropped a perfect opportunity for me to hold myself to account here. You see, I’ve missed my deadline for having the promotional site for the book up. It was supposed to be finished on February 2nd, with some content available to act as a teaser for the actual volume coming in summer. Nearly a month late, I still have 10 hours of work to do on the promo site, and no time budgeted to it.

Before you finish reading this, jump out and read/ watch Chris’ video post, The Future of Media.

Back? Good. Now I’ll explain.

The Dowager Shadow, which I’ve spoken of before here, is a fantasy fiction parallax that has been where I’ve put most of my energy for the last four years. It started making its way from ongoing roleplay to novel with 2008’s National Novel Writing Month – my co-author Leila and I smashed the 50k word barrier easily, and immediately had what amounts to a full first volume of book.

Last year, I began publishing the novel as a serial – you can still read some of it on dowagershadow.com until I get the new site up, but I warn you, the manuscript has seen a lot of editing since then.

Here’s what you’ll see once the new site is actually up, and I’ve got the manuscript finished and produced:

The first volume will be available for purchase as an eBook, with built in interactivity like an appendix, maps, and other information.
In addition to each volume, there will be a few rounds of shorter stories available for free through Pay With a Tweet. This will take care of some of the promotion of the book.
Each subsequent volume will be released in two ways: stand-alone purchase, or bundled with the previous volumes, each of which will have been updated with information pertinent to the new volume.
There will be a print version, produced through a self-publisher, which can be ordered alongside the eBook. I’m aiming to have two production runs per year for the physical artifact.

It sounds like a lot, but it’s really no more work than this blog.

Building interactivity into a book is a very new media thing. It’s the kind of thing that’s going on all over the place. Usually, though, it’s products like Digging Into WordPress. However, given the success of products like DigWP, and the many thousands of well produced eBooks out there, I can’t help but see this kind of thing as the future of media.

We’re going far beyond the entrepreneurial journalism that blogging has been for the last decade, and moving into an era of entrepreneurial publishing of all flavours. That, I believe, is the future of media.

Content Strategy

Got it? Good. Now go publish something.