Ian M Rountree

Copywriter, Project Manager, Digital Marketing

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No More Drafts

June 1, 2011 by Ian 4 Comments

I deleted fifteen drafts from my blog this morning. Some of them, I’ve been keeping around for nearly six months. Clearly, I would never write them.

Compact Calendar - Joe Lanman | FlickrIt’s liberating, every now and then, to ditch the expectational debt of having too many unfinished drafts and move on. I don’t think we give ourselves enough chances to do that.

Drafts have their place, certainly. Setting things in motion, marking down ideas – these are good practices. However, living perpetually from drafts seems to make reacting to live events hard. How can we talk about news, if our post for today is already in the queue, and we’re unwilling to shuffle the queue back because we have a schedule?

In doing the editorial and SEO work for Hard Refresh, I’m now finding that working a draft from start to finish effectively takes practice. Nic and I are getting a decent queue of articles there, but we do still have some drafts – they’re not bad things by nature, but they do suck up a lot of cycles unintentionally. Being able to call something finished shortly after starting it is important; letting your brain stew on a half-formed idea while at the same time trying to keep the original idea’s form is not.

When considering your editorial calendar, drafts can save your life. Or, they can make you completely bonkers because your half-finished ideas starve the rest of your creative process.

Some practices I’ve found to help when dealing with drafts:

  • Keep a list of topic ideas separate from your in-blog drafts.
  • Only create drafts when you have well-formed ideas, but don’t have time to write.
  • Write the finished article within a set period of time, or delete the draft itself.
  • Be willing to push the schedule of drafted posts for reactive blogging.
  • Mark posts in a series where appropriate, especially if you can title them as such.

Doing this for my project blogs has helped keep me significantly less stressed over publishing. While it’s led to less writing here, it’s certainly led to better writing there – and better writing is what the job’s all about.

How do you keep your sanity without completely ignoring the idea of a draft?

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Blogging, blogs, hard refresh, seo, seo for bloggers, social media, writing

4 Important Blogging Voices (And When to Use Them)

May 2, 2011 by Ian 1 Comment

Bearded Lady by Steve Jurvetson | FlickrOne of the debates bloggers suffer under is the debate over Voice.

If you work for a company, do you act the company puppet, and portray yourself as all business, all the time? Do you go rogue and make yourself heard as a source on the inside lines?

What we forget is that each blog post is its own entity – less like chapters in a book, and more like articles in a magazine.

Whether we think of ourselves as journalists (and have/have not the training to back such claims up), we’re writing serialized, informative, timely content. Whether it’s journalism or not makes no difference; we’re serializing our information. Serialization means we have an opportunity for granularity that authors of books do not.

We can make our voice anything we want, every time we hit publish.

What’s important is not just the overall purpose of your blog – as a corporate tool, as a customer service or announcement vehicle, as an industry-improvement vector… All of these are important and valid purposes to have a blog, and all of them have best-practice voices to go along with them. However, that doesn’t mean every blog post must read the same as the last. We, unlike reporters and classical journalists, aren’t tied to the AP Guide (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

What’s more important is knowing the varieties of voice available to you, and choosing the ones that work for each post – and for each author’s writing style.

Not every blogger has the stunning clarity to write the Voice of Record the way a historian would. Creating a Voice of Record article takes fact-checking, research, attention to detail, and a declarative bent to your prose that we’re not all comfortable with. However, sometimes it’s necessary. If you’re announcing a change in pace for your blog, a new product or service, or otherwise managing expectations, the Voice of Record is an important skill to own. However, it’s also the most misused; bloggers attempt to be authoritative by writing in the declarative voice, often making statements unsuited to being taken as fact. While this isn’t a sin, per se, it’s a bit like using a hammer to put a screw in place; it’s a misuse of a powerful tool, and might cause damage if not finessed just the right way.

Similar to the Voice of Record is the Voice of Opinion – which is what most bloggers default to, if they’re conscious of their place as knowledge leaders in their fields. Even if they’re not on a leadership track, the use of Voice of Opinion is a good way to make it known where you stand on an issue. When used well, it allows you to connect with your reader, to encourage agreement and subdue dissent – and, over all, displays your informed bias towards a practice, product, or platform. Opinion is powerful, but when expressed too strongly, or without a disclaimer of bias, can be mistaken for the Voice of Record. The challenge is not to confuse the two, or to allow one to sound as if it’s masquerading as the other.

Making statements in an authoritative voice isn’t the only way a blogger can become an authority.

One of the less-used styles, the Voice of Instruction can take your readers on a journey to better knowledge, while declining to make statements over preference or declaring value. By acting in the teacher’s role, a blogger has an opportunity to foster innovation and interest in a subject, passing on enthusiasm as much as knowledge. One side-effect of this is unconscious acceptance of the blogger’s word as authoritative; while learning, a reader must accept the teacher’s statements, even temporarily, as writ in stone. The unfortunate counter to this is that if a reader is inherently critical, all instruction will be lost, and skepticism can turn public very quickly. Instructive Voice can be a great boon, but it can be hard to recognize. Look to tutorial blogs for this; the writers in spaces where instruction is necessary almost all become successful because of their passionate, yet non-biased portrayal of hard-won knowledge.

The last bastion of the blogger should be the Personal Voice. Not just because no one needs to hear what your dog had for supper, but because if you write in appropriate voice most of the time, your own personality will come through. People will get to know you based on the information you share, and the way in which you share it. If you’re an extroverted, dynamic person – write like your hair is on fire if you don’t get people excited. If you’re an introverted, introspective person – rely on fact and detail as your greatest road to achievement. Not everyone has to be excitable.

Personality is more than writing structure.

Changing things up is good. If you catch yourself in one-too-many catch phrases per week, or even per month, it’s probably time to change up your voice. We can’t all become a blogging Muad’Dib overnight, but with practice, you’ll get the hang of intentionally wrapping a voice around any subject you choose to write about.

Filed Under: Content Strategy Tagged With: Blogging, blogs, practice, the voice must flow, voice, writing styles, writing voice

Oh, for the Love of Obscure Services!

April 18, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

We love to complicate things – we use services like Flickr’s Creative Commons search to fill our sites with awesome pictures, like laughing mantises or rock platforms.

Sometimes, it’s awesome to find the simple things; like Placekitten. Drop by and check them out – it’s handy to have tricks like this up your sleeve when you’re working on things like blog posts, and need something simple and fast. Like a kitten. Or, in the case of placehold.it, the service which PlaceKitten was inspired by, empty boxes like the one below.

placehold.it - 550px X 150px, instantly.

Is it subject-appropriate visual interest for a blog post? Not necessarily.Handy for tossing something together quickly, for example, when you need to preview a blog post or ebook for layout? You bet.

It’s little things like these that can help speed up your production time and reduce the hang-ups in mid-action that so often cause procrastination.

… And here’s another placekitten!

Stop procrastinating! Place a kitten, save a blog post!

[Hat tip to Chris Coyier at CSS Tricks for the unintentional new tool, via: “Faking ‘float: center’ with pseudo-elements.”]

Filed Under: Content Strategy Tagged With: Blogging, blogs, placeholder, placekitten, productivity, stop procrastinating, tools

5 Questions You Need to Answer to Prove You’re Not an Imposter

April 10, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

Imposter - Minimoog - FlickrThe social media world is filled with imposters.

I don’t mean body snatchers or Capgras-style imposters – I mean real honest to goodness imposter syndrome candidates. People who call themselves successful, or have been called successful, but cannot line their accolades up with real business effectiveness or predetermined results. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of blogs, consultants, and other knowledge workers who profess and opine and editorialize while lacking hard and fast numbers to back up their success.

I’m not even talking about ROI – not directly. While ROI is necessary to businesses, it’s hard for individuals not intentionally engaging in business to process, especially as a retroactive ideal.

Without predetermined, idealized scenarios for success, we’re all subject to cognitive bias in our work.

We all know people who are visibly stuck believing their failings matter less than they actually might – and if we’re honest with ourselves, we can all recognize that the potential for that behaviour in ourselves. We’re wired to act as though everything we do is successful, because working under the opposite believe is soul-crushingly banal.
We all want to be successful – and yes, it’s possible to consider some ventures successful at far lower levels of performance than others. Not everyone needs 10,000 visitors to their blog per day. Some get by with 10,000 visitors per year and don’t complain. However, don’t call the latter success if you’re shooting for the former – that way lies madness.

To avoid being an imposter, you need to set goals.

If you’re in the middle of a venture – such as building a website or planning a blog – consider whether or not you can give business-grade answers to the following questions:

  1. How would you (personally) make money from your work?
  2. At what level, either of revenue or other static metric, do you call your individual tasks successful?
  3. At what level, either of revenue or other static metric, do you call your individual tasks failures?
  4. What price would you put on what you’re building if someone asked to buy it?
  5. What would need to happen in order to make you stop doing the work you’re doing now?

All of these questions seem simple, on their faces.

And all of them are intensely complicated if you’re looking at them from the middle of a project, rather than the planning phase. If you’re in the middle of a venture and can’t answer any of these questions firmly, I’d suggest taking a long hard look at what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and decide whether what you’re doing is a commerce-grade venture or not. Not everything is, and not everything has to be.

There are a lot of ways to use online platforms to directly generate revenue.

Thankfully, there are a lot of tried and true methods for creating clear business success with online content creation – many of which rely almost entirely on the backing of the sexy metrics like pageviews, subscriber numbers, and publishing consistency and practices. This is where life gets a bit easier, because all you have to do is decide on a model to follow, and begin changing your course toward behaviors which support those models. Monetizing a blog, while not easy, is relatively straightforward.

A person could, for example;

  • Set up a blog to make money through affiliate marketing or advertising.
  • Sell products, such as ebooks or seminars, or even physical merchandise.
  • Create a revenue-generating platform with the intent of selling it to a worthy buyer down the road at a further profit.

All of these are great business goals, and all of them can become long-term strategies for success. However, since some businesses rely on blogs for revenue generation not directly related to the blog itself, other varieties of success directly related to revenue could be;

  • Maintaining a blog for the sake of customer service and question-and-answer rather than a static FAQ,
  • Creating a blog as an SEO play to drive more traffic to your business website,
  • Using a blog as a referral tool, to direct more of that traffic to a company newsletter or into a sales funnel
  • Parlaying the success and social proof from the blog into a book deal for its author,
  • Parlaying the success of the blog into a speaking career

… Or any of the other plethora of strategies out there people have used to directly or indirectly create firm, financial benefit for themselves or their business from the creation of online content.

So how do you know if the work you’re doing is generating real success, or satisfying your want for the illusion of success?

It’s easy to believe that publishing your blog on a schedule, answering each comment as it comes in, or growing your Twitter following and subscriber count is success. After all, putting the numbers for any of these activities on a graph and seeing them moving the right way is satisfying. In the end, however, these are signs of action, not signs of success – the same way achieving the speed limit on a freeway isn’t the same as reaching the destination you’re aimed at.

What do you think?

Image by Oliver Chesler.

Filed Under: Marketing Strategy Tagged With: blogs, business, content creation, ebooks, imposters, list, products, success

Top 6 Best Ways How To Write Awful Headlines

March 22, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

At Rest
The Elephant in This Room

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;

  1. make a joke your post doesn’t follow-up on
  2. make it the wrong length (too long or too short)
  3. don’t check the title to see if it fits once the post is written
  4. include an inaccuracy in the headline as relates to the post, but not on purpose
  5. imply something is new/old when it’s not (Even if it may be so for your intended audience)
  6. 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.

Filed Under: Content Strategy Tagged With: Blogging, blogs, headlines, learning, platforms, social-capital, success, twitter, writing

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