Who better?
Many business people faced with the task of writing for marketing purposes are quick to say:
Hey, I’m no Hemingway!
But really, who better than Hemingway to emulate? Rather than embracing the flowery prose of the literati, he chose to eschew obfuscation at every turn and write simply and clearly.
Once you’ve sucked people in with your headline, entranced them with your opening, and sent them down the slippery slide with each sentence until the conclusion, you may find yourself wondering…
How do I wrap this thing up?
How you start will determine if you get read, but how you end will determine how people feel about the experience. And, depending on your goals, your ending will determine the success of the piece as a whole.
One key to a successful ending is to understand exactly where you are trying to take the reader before you ever write a word. I tend to do this all in my head before I write an article, but if that doesn’t work for you, do a quick outline and state exactly what the point of the piece is.
Oh, those magical bullet points.
What would articles, blog posts, sales letters and bad PowerPoint presentations be without them?
Bullet points are so common because they work, and readers like them.
But bullet points also often fail by letting the reader down in one way or another.
What’s the secret to finding the remarkable reader benefit that leads to sales, publicity, links or attention?
It’s keying in on the right element of the story.
Recently, blog network b5 Media accepted venture capital in the amount of $2 million to further grow their business.
Certainly, a collection of blogs as a real business is interesting, especially to those outside of the blogosphere.
And a business built around a collection of blogs landing $2 million bucks is certainly interesting as well.
But what’s the angle that’s hooking the mainstream media? Let’s take a listen to b5 Media partner Darren Rowse on that:
I had interviews this week with two journalists about b5media and it was interesting to see that in both cases the story that they latched onto was that we’d built a company without having met each other.
Being interesting is just the baseline requirement.
The real hook is the part that’s fascinating.
Here’s ace copywriter John Carlton’s take on fishing for hooks.
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Woe is me…
A reader contacted me after my last post and called me out for using the term “link bait” in it.
While he was nice enough, the objection seemed to be that only a sleazy marketer would try to “bait” someone to visit, or link to, a web site.
Never mind that I’ve called the term inelegant several times myself.
Or that “link bait” is just a sexy term for high-quality content that benefits the reader.
I can certainly see that the word “bait” has potentially negative connotations even beyond the fishy subtext. Bait and switch comes to mind.
And I also realize that in the early days of blogging, the only creative bait that was utilized by the pioneers amounted to attacks and insults.
But let’s look at the history of the word “bait” as it relates to content, and see if the original connotation is negative or not.
